Johannes (Hans) van Oort

Johannes (Hans) van Oort (4 September 1949) is Professor of Patristics and Gnostic Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen, and at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. He is best known for his specialty in the study of the Church Father Augustine, the gnostic world religion of Mani (Manicheism), and the Gospel of Judas. In 2006 he presented, with National Geographic, the discovery of this gnostic “gospel” to the Dutch speaking world.

Biography

Van Oort studied Latin and Greek, and subsequently theology, at the University of Utrecht. Here he received his Doctorate with highest distinction for “Jeruzalem en Babylon: Een onderzoek van Augustinus’ De stad van God en de bronnen van zijn leer van de twee steden (rijken)” (1986), a thesis that saw its fourth Dutch edition published in 1995. The English edition was published in 1991 as Jerusalem and Babylon: A Study of Augustine’s City of God and the Sources of his Doctrine of the Two Cities and was reprinted in paperback by Brill Academic Publishers, Leiden-Boston in 2013.

Van Oort has been involved in higher education since 1972, from 1980-1983 as scientific associate in Church History at Utrecht University and from 1983-1987 as university lecturer in Religious Pedagogy and Didactics at the same university. During this time, he was also scientific researcher of the Dutch Research Organization ZWO (now NWO), and editor of an educational review. In 1987 he was appointed as Senior Research Fellow of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences (KNAW) for research into Augustine and the sources of his theology. The year 1992 saw his appointment as senior lecturer in Church History and History of Christian Doctrine at Utrecht University, followed in 1999 with his appointment as extraordinary professor in Gnostic Studies at Nijmegen, where he became ordinary professor in 2000.

Gnostic Studies and Augustine

Van Oort’s study of Augustine and the sources for his theology has made him a specialist in Gnostic Studies as well, particularly in the gnostic-Christian world church of Mani (216-276/7). He has served as member of the International Association of Manichaean Studies first as secretary (1993-2001) and subsequently as president (2001-2009). In this capacity he was one of the scholars who took initiative to publish the many Manichaean sources that were at the time scattered throughout the world, in the Corpus Fontium Manichaeorum, a project that gained wide support among academies of science and UNESCO.

Van Oort is member of diverse international organisations and academies of science, and was Visiting Professor in Oxford, London and Warwick in service to the British Academy from 1998-1999.

Johannes van Oort has published some 25 monographs, mainly on the topics of Augustine and the gnostic world church of Mani. A selected bibliography has appeared in a 2011 Festschrift of 800 pages: In Search of Truth: Augustine, Manichaeism and other Gnosticism: Studies for Johannes van Oort at Sixty (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2011).

Currently, he serves, among others, as managing editor of Brill’s Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies, as co-editor (and book review editor) of the patristic journal Vigiliae Christianae: A Review of Early Christian Life and Language, as co-editor of the Corpus Fontium Manichaeorum (Brepols, Turnhout), and as editor of the series Studies of the [German] Patristic Association / Studien der Patristischen Arbeitsgemeinschaft (Peeters, Leuven).

His translation in poetic verse of fragments from Augustine’s Confessions (Bij God lééft ons goed: Bidden met Augustinus [Leiden: Groen, 1993]) has been put to music by the Utrecht composer Theo Teunissen, and has been performed by associates of the Utrecht Convervatorium. The church musician Leo Köhlenberg has reworked Van Oort’s translation of the Gospel of Judas as the Oratorium Iskarioth.

Van Oort’s most recent publication has been his edited volume, Augustine and Manichaean Christianity. Selected Papers from the First South African Conference on Augustine of Hippo, University of Pretoria, 24–26 April 2012 (Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies 83; Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2013).