Classics graduate student receives Distinguished Thesis Award from the Graduate College of Missouri State University

David Armstrong was named the recipient of the Distinguished Thesis Award in the Humanities category by the Graduate College of Missouri State University for his MA Thesis, “A Kingdom of Priests and Gods: Angelic and Participatory Deification in John’s Apocalypse.” The thesis traces one ancient Jewish textual tradition of deification whereby priests, and later righteous Israelites, may become angels through their participation, on earth or in heaven, in the celestial Temple and its cultic worship of God and how this tradition was reconfigured in the Apocalypse of John of Patmos, a Jewish Christian heir of apocalyptic Judaism who also adhered to the dominant Christian understanding of deification as communicatio idiomatum, an “exchange of attributions,” between Christ and the earthly saints. Through detailing the confluence of these traditions in John’s Apocalypse, the thesis contributes to ongoing scholarly discussions of the complex overlap of identities and beliefs among Jews, Christians, and pagans in the first few centuries of the Common Era.