Faculty Profile

Education: B.A., Miami University (OH), 1997; M.Div., Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, 2005; Ph.D., University of Durham, 2009. At SPU since 2010.

Nijay Gupta joined the faculty at SPU as an instructor of biblical studies, where he teaches University Foundations courses in Christian Formation and Christian Scripture as well as a New Testament course for the SOT graduate program. Dr. Gupta completed a year (2009-10) serving as visiting instructor in New Testament at Ashland Theological Seminary, Ashland, Ohio. He has also taught biblical studies courses at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, Massachusetts, and Cranmer Hall in northern England. He serves as the faculty advisor for SPU’s Theology Student Union.

He studied for his master of divinity and master of theology at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary where he concentrated on biblical studies and biblical languages. Before beginning his Ph.D., he worked for Hendrickson Publishers, a religious-studies press in Peabody, Massachusetts, as a specialist for academic sales and marketing. He completed his doctorate at the University of Durham in theology under the supervision of Stephen C. Barton and John M.G. Barclay. His doctoral thesis examines how the Apostle Paul used temple, sacrificial, and priestly metaphors to shape the identity and ethos of his communities of faith. This work, in a slightly revised form, has been published by the German press Walter de Gruyter under the title Worship That Makes Sense to Paul: A New Approach to the Theology and Ethics of Paul’s Cultic Metaphors (2010). He has another book that offers a guide to doing a doctorate in biblical studies called Prepare, Succeed, Advance, Pickwick Publications, 2010. 

In his free time, Dr. Gupta spends time with his family, travelling, and eating good food.

Selected Publications

• "An Apocalyptic Reading of Psalm 78 in 2 Thessalonians 3," Journal for the Study of the New Testament 31.2 (2008): 179-94.
• "The Theo-Logic of Paul's Ethics in Recent Research," Currents in Biblical Research 7.3 (2009): 336-61.
• "Which 'Body' Is a Temple (1 Cor. 6:19)? Paul Beyond the Individual/Communal Divide," The Catholic Biblical Quarterly 72 (2010): 518-36.
• "To Whom Was Christ a Slave (Phil 2:7)? Double Agency and the Specters of Sin and Death in Philippians," Horizons in Biblical Theology 32 (2010): 1-16.