Yii-Jan Lin

Yii-Jan Lin is associate professor of New Testament at Yale Divinity School, where she teaches the critical study of ancient texts and their interpretation, especially in relation to race and gender. As a historian of ideas and metaphors, she focuses on the use of biblical imagery and concepts in the modern world and the ways scholars have used scientific methods and metaphors to analyze the biblical text.

Her latest book, Immigration and Apocalypse: How the Book of Revelation Shaped American Immigration (Yale 2024), traces Christian apocalyptic thinking from Columbus to the second Trump administration to show how the images, vocabulary, and ideas of Revelation have fueled anti-immigrant movements throughout American history. Lin demonstrates how American exceptionalism and identification with God’s shining city on a hill also facilitate the identification of unwanted peoples as God’s enemies—the plagued, idolatrous, sexually impure, and violent.

Lin traces a different set of metaphors in her first book, The Erotic Life of Manuscripts: New Testament Textual Criticism and the Biological Sciences (Oxford 2016). The book examines the use of scientific methods and metaphors in philology and biblical textual criticism from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first. Her analysis of philology’s language of family, evolution, genetic inheritance, and racial theories of corruption and degeneration shows how these have driven the goals and assumptions of New Testament textual criticism, centered around purity and origins.

Her current book project focuses on issues of textuality and scripturalization vis-à-vis the New Testament: its personification, dissection, and performance. She is also continuing her work on migration and religion in a project focused on the proliferation of militarized borders and walls globally.