Leonard Victor Rutgers

Leonard Rutgers is a historian of religion and an archaeologist. He is a full professor in the History and Art History Department at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. There he holds a chair in Late Antiquity—the only of its kind in the Netherlands. Rutgers has a PhD. in Religious Studies (Duke University 1993) and a M.A. in Classical Archaeology (Free University, Amsterdam 1988). He is particularly well-known for his work in the famous catacombs of ancient Rome. 

Rutgers' scholarly work focuses on the history of the Jewish community in Antiquity, the rise of monotheistic religion, and on issues relating to identity formation and intergroup relations. His publications include the award-winning The Jews in Late Ancient Rome, which is now also available as paperback in Brill's Scholars List, The Hidden Heritage of Diaspora Judaism and Subterranean Rome. His latest book is entitled Making Myths. Jews in Early Christian Identity Formation. For a newspaper interview on Making Myths, click here.

In addition, Rutgers is keen on using the latest techniques from the physical and life sciences in order to break new ground in the study of the ancient world. In 2005 he published a revolutionary collaborative study in Nature. In it Rutgers and his colleagues from the Department of Subatomic Physics of Utrecht University argued that the Jewish catacombs of ancient Rome predated and, therefore, conceivably inspired the better-known Christian catacombs in that same city.

More recently, in an article published in the The Journal of Archaeological Science, Rutgers and his co-workers revealed through stable-isotope analysis that the eating habits of Rome’s early Christians were largely consistent with their art: their diet consisted mainly of fish, suggesting that the origins of Christianity are to be sought among the poor and needy inhabitants of the Eternal City.

Over the years, Rutgers’ work has attracted world-wide attention in both printed and online media. His work is featured in a documentary film by Spiegel TV entitled In den Katakomben von Rom which was released in 2008 (in German). Rutgers’ research on the Jewish catacombs of Rome has also served as one of the sources of inspiration for Michael Byrnes' entertaining fictive thriller The Sacred Bones (2008). 

Currently, Rutgers is editing an encyclopaedia on Late Antique archaeology (along with Olof Brandt of the Pontificio Istituto di Archeologia Cristiana). If you are interested in publishing your own book in the series of the Interdisciplinary Studies in Ancient Culture and Religion, click here.