David Brakke

David Bernhard Brakke (born 1961) is an American New Testament scholar and historian of Christianity. He is Professor and Engle Chair in the History of Christianity at the Ohio State University. His work focuses on the first five centuries of Christianity, with particular focus on Christian asceticism, monasticism, Gnosticism, and the development of Christianity in Egypt, including several works on the Church Father Athanasius of Alexandria. He was a visiting assistant professor at Concordia College from 1992 to 1993, and joined the faculty at Indiana University, Bloomington in 1993, where he was awarded a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities and recognized as Indiana University Outstanding Junior Faculty. His The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity (Harvard University Press, 2010) argues that the contested categories of "Gnosticism," "orthodoxy," and "heresy" in the era before Constantine the Great should be approached through a social and cultural lens.

In 2025, Brakke was elected into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Also in 2025, Brepols published Discipline, Authority, and Text in Late Ancient Religion, a festschrift on religious practice in the Mediterranean, Near East, and Middle East from the second through eighth centuries, published in honor of "the impact that Professor David Brakke has had on the study of late antique religious history."

Personal life Brakke was born on May 10, 1961, in Long Beach, California.