CLAIM "Secondary Pseudepigraphy" | ERC CoG 2025

Samuel will be working on the Coptic corpus of the project. Welcome, Sam!

Samuel studied Egyptology and Ancient Languages at Macquarie University in Sydney, where he completed his PhD in 2020 with his thesis “Linguistic and legal continuity in 6th to 8th century Coptic documents: A comparative study of Greek and Coptic legal formulae in Byzantine and Early Islamic Egypt.” His research has primarily focused on Coptic papyrology, scribal practices, monastic book production, and multilingualism in Islamic Egypt.

He has previously worked as part of the ERC projects Storyworlds in Transition: Coptic Apocrypha in Changing Contexts in the Byzantine and Early Islamic Periods (APOCRYPHA) at the University of Oslo, studying the medieval Coptic manuscripts from the Monastery of Saint Macarius in Lower Egypt, and Education in Graeco-Roman Egypt: An Intercultural Approach at the University of Exeter, with a focus on bilingual education in early Islamic Egypt.

Samuel has also worked with digital humanities, developing a SQL database framework for the study of textual corpora as part of the ERC Proof of Concept project Tool for the Analysis of Information Transfer in Manuscript Cultures (TInTraMaC). You can read his work in the Journal of Coptic Studies, Communio Viatorum, and Vigiliae Christianae.

Martina is the first postdoc to join the Claim project, to be working on the Latin corpus. Welcome to Vienna, Martina!

Martina holds a degree in Classics from the Università degli Studi di Milano, where she began working on textual criticism and the Synoptic Gospels, and completed her PhD at the University of St Andrews (2022) under the supervision of Mark W. Elliott. Her doctoral research examined the text and interpretation of Revelation 19–21 in early North African Christian communities. In 2021, Martina moved to Glasgow to work on the ERC project Titles of the New Testament: A New Approach to Manuscripts and the History of Interpretation (TiNT), led by Garrick V. Allen, studying the paratextual traditions of the Gospels.

Since 2024, she has been a researcher at KU Leuven on the ERC project BICROSS: The Significance of Bilingual Manuscripts for Detecting Cross-Language Interaction in the New Testament Tradition, led by Christina M. Kreinecker. There, she works on bilingual Greek–Latin New Testament manuscripts, with a particular focus on “Western” readings.

Her research interests include New Testament manuscripts, textual criticism, biblical exegesis, the Latin New Testament, the Gospels, and the Book of Revelation. Her first book is Revelation 19-21 in the Exegesis of Early Christian Roman Africa, published with Mohr Siebeck in 2025.

Come work with our team in Vienna! Deadline 1 July 2026.

Apply here: https://jobs.univie.ac.at/job/Postdoctoral-Researcher-in-Coptic-Christianity/1399709733/

Here you can find a short presentation of the CLAIM project and the GenAut project Dan Batovici recently gave for AIEP/IAPS. Many thanks to Lavinia Cerioni for the kind invitation!

CLAIM Project tackles across five manuscript cultures the complex literature attributed to secondary figures of the earliest Christianity that are styled as companions, followers, or otherwise interlocutors of main apostolic figures.

CLAIM Project “Secondary Pseudepigraphy” is funded through an Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council awarded to Dan Batovici. It will be developed over five years (2026-2031), hosted at the University of Vienna, within the Institute for the History of Christianity. 

From early late antiquity through late middle ages, authors have published their works placing them under the name of such figures, in a variety of genres: epistolary works (Ignatius of Antioch, Dionysius the Areopagite, and also Seneca), full-scale theological tracts (famously, Dionysius the Areopagite), ecclesiastical canons (mainly Clement of Rome, but occasionally also Ignatius of Antioch), as well as important apocryphal works (under the pen-name of Clement of Rome, Prochorus, Onesimus of Byzantium, Evodius of Rome, or Linus of Rome).

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Bellow and in the background image: Clement of Rome in Cambridge, University Library MS Oo. 1.1,2 fol. 310v, pictured at the beginning of the “Six Books of Clement,” a complex collection of ecclesiastical canons copied as the third main part of a twelfth century Syriac biblical pandect.

Dan was awarded an ERC CoG for the project “Secondary Pseudepigraphy“.
He is also the PI of the FWF START “Generative Authority” project

Photo credit: Sameer Khan/Fotobuddy.

If the FWF GenAut project “Generative Authority” studies the complex literature where minor figures of early Christianity become main literary characters (in apocrypha or hagiography), the ERC CLAIM project “Secondary Pseudepigraphy” is investigating the literary phenomenon where these figures became authors (of letters, theological tracts, canons, or indeed apocrypha) in the context of ancient practices of authorship.

You can find the press release and the full list of winning projects here: The ERC selects 349 mid-career researchers for €728 million in Consolidator Grants.