Francesca Stavrakopoulou

Early life and education

Francesca Stavrakopoulou was born on 3 October 1975 in suburban Bromley, in greater London, to an English mother and a Greek father. Stavrakopoulou was brought up in no particular religion and is an atheist.

Career

Stavrakopoulou was awarded a D. Phil. in theology by the University of Oxford. Her dissertation, which examined the creation of an imagined past within the Hebrew Bible, was subsequently published as King Manasseh and Child Sacrifice: Biblical Distortions of Historical Realities.

Stavrakopoulou filled subsequent teaching and research positions at Oxford at Worcester College, as a Junior Research Fellow and as a Career Development Fellow in the Faculty of Theology, departing Oxford in 2005.

Stavrakopoulou began a position in Hebrew Bible and Ancient Religion in the University of Exeter's Department of Theology and Religion in 2005, rising to the level of senior lecturer by March 2011. She currently serves as Head of Theology and Religion.

In 2011, Stavrakopoulou was secretary of the British-based Society for Old Testament Study in 2011, and member of the European Association of Biblical Studies and of the US-based Society of Biblical Literature.

Public appearances and presentations

Stavrakopoulou has appeared on several occasions in BBC One's programme featuring "moral, ethical and religious debates," The Big Questions hosted by Nicky Campbell; appearances include on the topics "Is the Bible still relevant?", "Is there a difference between a religion and a cult?", and "Are religions unfair to women?".

Stavrakopoulou has served as writer and presenter for a number of media productions relating to her scholarly interests. She contributed to Channel 4's series The Bible: A History (2010), regarding the historicity of Moses. Her first primetime presentation was a three-part television series for the BBC2 The Bible's Buried Secrets (2011; not to be confused with NOVA's 2008 programme of the same name).

These popular presentations, while being widely presented (e.g., the BBC2 production has been appearing in the U.S. as an offering of PBS stations), have met with mixed and some skeptical reviews, both in the U.K. popular press, and more broadly.

Fr. Alexander Lucie-Smith, consulting editor of The Catholic Herald and theologian, said that the BBC's …Buried Secrets series "is the sort of television programme that theologians ought to cherish…". He complained that in the second episode of the production, which addresses the origins of monotheism, that "…in [its] closing moments… scholarship seemed to be given up in favour of… mere opinion"; he took issue with Stavrakopoulou's suggestion that contemporary Christianity's views of Mary, saints, and angels were a holdover from the polytheistic religions, and that monotheism's presentation of God as exclusively male led to the marginalisation and repression of women. He argues that the polytheistic Greeks and Romans religions featured female deities, but the cultures themselves denied females all political rights.

Scholarly positions and responses

The main focus of Stavrakopoulou's research is on the Hebrew bible, and on Israelite and Judahite history and religion. She describes herself as "an atheist with huge respect for religion" and regards her work as "a branch of history like any other." Stavrakopoulou has argued in popular venues, based on her research, the current academic consensus that important figures in the Hebrew bible were not historical figures as represented in that text. She has further stated that she believes "very little, probably" of the Hebrew bible is historical fact, based on the arguments that ancient writers had an understanding of "fact" and "fiction" very different from a modern understanding, and that the Hebrew bible "wasn't written to be a factual account of the past"; she concludes, saying she does not believe accounts of Moses and King David in the Hebrew bible to be factual, and that "as an historian of the bible, I think there is very little that is factual."

John Barton, Oriel & Laing Professor of Interpretation [of biblical texts] at the University of Oxford, in his Ethics in Ancient Israel, comments thus on the conclusions and general disputes in one area that Stavrakopoulou is writing as theologian and historian:

[Stavrakopoulou] argues that the idea of the king and his entourage as worshipping in an official way—that is, in practice, in accordance with the kind of religious customs the prophets approved of—while the populace at large indulged in illicit cults, is wishful thinking. A particularly striking example is child sacrifice, which (she has argued) was regarded as normal by everyone in pre-exilic and exilic times, except prophets such as Jeremiah and Ezekial. And indeed the Old Testament itself, while strongly condemning such a practice, makes it abundantly clear that it was very common. The idea that it was popular rather than official reflects Old Testament condemnation, but probably not the reality on the ground at the time. Similarly, polytheism was fairly obviously common in pre-exilic Israel, but there is no particular reason to think it was more common among 'the people' than in the king's palace and, indeed, in the temple. / These matters are widely disputed, but so-called popular religion may well have been much nearer to official religion… [break in paragraph indicated, emphasis regarding disputed nature of views, added]

Christopher B. Hays notes that Stavrakopoulou doubts any reform to royal burial practices under Hezekiah, contrary to the view of Nadav Na'aman "that the place of the… kings' burials moved for religious reasons… as a part of Hezekiah's reform program…".

Thesis

Books

Stavrakopoulou's dissertation-based monograph, and her subsequent authored book-length publications are:

Edited

Journal articles and book chapters

Stavrakopoulou's major journal articles and her authored book chapters include: