Jan N. Bremmer

Jan Nicolaas Bremmer (born 18 December 1944) is a Dutch academic and historian. He served as a professor of Religious Studies and Theology at the University of Groningen. He specializes in history of ancient religion, especially ancient Greek religion and early Christianity. Though he became a liberal protestant later in life, he was brought up in an orthodox Calvinist family. His father Rolf Hendrik Bremmer was a Calvinist minister and a church historian, and his mother Lucy Lindeboom also came from a family of Calvinist ministers. His maternal great-grandfather Lucas Lindeboom (1845–1933) was a professor at the Kampen Theological College.

Bremmer studied Classics and Spanish at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (1962–1970) and the University of Bristol (1969–1970). From 1970 to 1972, Bremmer did military service with the Dutch Military Intelligence. Subsequently he taught ancient history at the University of Utrecht, as an Assistant Professor (1974–1978) and as an Associate Professor (1978–1990). In 1979, he obtained a Ph.D. from the Vrije Universiteit with a dissertation on The Early Greek Conception of the Soul (published by Princeton University Press in 1983).

In 1990, Bremmer joined the University of Groningen as the Chair of Religious Studies, in Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies. He served as the dean of the Faculty during 1996–2005. He was the inaugural Getty Villa Professor at Malibu during 2006–2007. He served as a visiting professor at several other places, including the University of Edinburgh (2007). He retired from teaching in December 2009. In his farewell lecture in January 2010, he discussed the rise of Christianity through the eyes of scholars Edward Gibbon, Adolf von Harnack and Rodney Stark.

Works Author 1983: The Early Greek Concept of the Soul, Princeton University Press 1994: Greek Religion, Oxford University Press 2002: The Rise and Fall of the Afterlife, Routledge 2008: Greek Religion & Culture, the Bible and the Ancient Near East, Brill 2010: The Rise of Christianity through the Eyes of Gibbon, Harnack and Rodney Stark, Barkhuis 2014: Initiation into the Mysteries of the Ancient World, De Gruyter

Editor 1987: Interpretations of Greek Mythology, Croom Helm 1989: From Sappho to De Sade, Routledge 1991: A Cultural History of Gesture, Polity (with Herman Roodenburg) 1992: Sacred History and Sacred Texts in Early Judaism, Kok Pharos (with F. García Martínez) 1995: Between Poverty and the Pyre. Moments in the History of Widowhood Routledge (with Lourens P. van den Bosch) 1996: The Apocryphal Acts of Paul and Thecla, Kok Pharos 1997: A Cultural History of Humour, Polity (with Herman Roodenburg) 1998: The Apocryphal Acts of Peter: Magic, Miracles and Gnosticism, Peeters 2000: The Apocryphal Acts of Andrew, Peeters 2001: The Apocryphal Acts of Thomas, Peeters 2003: The Metamorphosis of Magic from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, Peeters (with J. Veenstra) 2006: Cultures of Conversions, Peeters (with W.J. van Bekkum and A.L. Molendijk) 2006: Paradigms, Poetics and Politics of Conversion, Peeters (with W.J. van Bekkum and A.L. Molendijk) 2007: The Strange World of Human Sacrifice, Peeters 2007: The Visio Pauli and the Gnostic Apocalypse of Paul, Peeters (with I. Czachesz) 2010: The Gods of Ancient Greece, Edinburgh University Press (with Andrew Erskine) 2010: The Pseudo-Clementines, Peeters 2012: Perpetua's Passions, Oxford University Press (with Marco Formisano) 2015: The Materiality of Magic (Morphomata Vol. 20), Wilhelm Fink (with Dietrich Boschung)