Westar Institute

Mark G. Bilby is Senior Assistant Librarian of Scholarly Communication and Lecturer in Religious Studies at California State University, Fullerton. They completed a Ph.D. in Religious Studies (Judaism and Christianity in Antiquity) at the University of Virginia in 2012 and an MS in Library and Information Science at Drexel University in 2015. Their research interests encompass Classics, Religious/Myth Studies, and Information Science. They have authored a well-reviewed monograph on the early reception of the Lukan story of the good criminal and co-edited books on the Dutch Reformer Jacob Arminius and on Greco-Roman myths in the Gospels and Acts. They recently had an article accepted in Harvard Theological Review co-authored with Anna Lefteratou that shows how the Ephesian Riots in Acts are a miniature, creative retelling of Euripides’ Iphigenia among the Taurians. Over the past year Mark has pioneered a new Open Science format for academic publishing (the LODLIB or Linked Open Data Living Informational Book) that realizes a groundbreaking scientific solution to the Synoptic Problem and reconstruction of the original Gospel (Qn) by centering Marcion’s Gospel as the third gospel stratum and by making full use of Computational Linguistics to trace, triangulate, and cluster signature signals to identify and disambiguate a dozen distinct author voices (vocal strata) within and among the gospels: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3927056. These scientific methods and findings will be presented in the Digital Humanities section at SBL 2021.