Ryan Comins

Ryan Comins graduated with a BA in Theology and Religion from the University of Cambridge in 2019. Since he was an undergraduate, his main research areas have been the languages and literature of Hellenistic Judaism, in particular the Septuagint translations and the biblical apocrypha. His undergraduate dissertation analysed the style of the Wisdom of Solomon; this research was later published in XVII Congress of the IOSCS (SBL Press, 2022). After graduating, Ryan completed a PGCE at the Faculty of Education, specialising in Religious Studies. He conducted action research on improving biblical literacy which was published in the Journal of Trainee Teacher Education Research. After two years working as a schoolteacher in Surrey, Ryan returned to Cambridge in 2022. His MPhil dissertation provided a sociolinguistic study of 3 Maccabees, an apocryphal text, and examined the implications of the language for understanding the text’s sociocultural background.

Ryan’s doctoral project, which is co-funded by the Harding Programme under the joint supervision of Dr Marieke Dhont and Professor Katharine Dell, investigates the varieties of Greek encountered in two ancient biblical translations which share a distinctively isomorphic, or extremely ‘literal,’ method of translating. The style of Greek found in these translations has been decried by some modern readers as awkward, calqued, poor, unidiomatic, and even unintelligible. By situating the specific linguistic features of these translations within their contemporary language context and integrating modern research on textual cohesion, Ryan’s research seeks to articulate a more detailed and nuanced description of their social origins and possible functions.