Professor Hugh Houghton FHEA

My office is Room 359 in the ERI Building.

All post should be addressed to me at ITSEE, Department of Theology and Religion, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT.

Appointments for office hours should be made via email.

• PhD (Birmingham)
• MPhil (Cantab.)
• MA (Cantab.)
• BA (Leeds)

Hugh Houghton is Professor of New Testament Textual Scholarship and Director of the Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing. He holds two degrees in Classics from Cambridge, specialising in the linguistics of early Christian texts, and degrees in Theology from Leeds and Birmingham. His first appointment at the University of Birmingham was in 2003 as a Teaching Fellow in the Institute for Archaeology and Antiquity, writing and delivering courses on Greek and Latin language and literature. He has been involved with ITSEE since its inception, working as a Research Fellow on the Vetus Latina Iohannes and Codex Sinaiticus projects. He was Principal Investigator on the COMPAUL project funded by the European Research Council from 2011 to 2016; from 2010 to 2013, he was also Principal Investigator on the “Workspace for Collaborative Editing”, a collaborative endeavour between the universities of Birmingham, Münster and Trier funded by the AHRC/DFG.

From 2018-24, he was principal investigator on the European Research Council CATENA project, as well as co-investigator on the AHRC Codex Zacynthius project from 2018–20 and principal investigator on the AHRC/DFG GALaCSy project (2022–25). His research has included identifying new witnesses to the earliest Latin translations of the Gospels, working on the online Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Bezae and publishing a study of the evidence for the gospel text used by Augustine. His monographs include The Latin New Testament with Oxford University Press, an English translation of the rediscovered fourth-century Commentary on the Gospels by Fortunatianus of Aquileia, and A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament commissioned by the German Bible Society, which discusses all variation units in the most recent hand edition (UBS6). He also edited The Oxford Handbook of the Latin Bible. 

He was appointed Director of ITSEE and Director of Research for the Department of Theology and Religion in 2017. He is one of the convenors of the Birmingham Colloquium on the Textual Criticism of the New Testament and was a Director of the International Patristics Conference from 2015–20. He serves as executive editor of the Texts and Studies book series and has been on various editorial boards including New Testament Studies and the Corpus Christianorum series latina (Brepols). Since 2025, he has been editor of The Journal of Theological Studies. He is on the editorial committee of the United Bible Societies' Greek New Testament and the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece.

Professor Houghton has taught modules on New Testament Greek and the Pauline Epistles, as well as the Special Study Module and Undergraduate Dissertation. He lectures on the History of Christianity in Birmingham for the first-year module Lived Religions in Birmingham and Beyond.

The textual history of the New Testament; Greek and Latin manuscripts; Biblical quotations

Find out more - our PhD Theology and Religion  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

I work on the text of the New Testament in Latin and Greek, using and developing electronic tools to create digital editions of individual manuscripts and biblical books which will provide the basis for future generations of scholarship. My long-term research is overseeing a new edition of the Pauline Epistles in Greek as Executive Editor for the International Greek New Testament Project. I have also published extensively on the manuscripts and text of the Latin New Testament and the use of quotations in early Christian writers.

• CATENA - a six-year project on Greek New Testament commentary manuscripts funded by the European Research Council.
• COMPAUL - a five-year project investigating the earliest Latin and Greek commentaries on the Pauline Epistles as sources for the biblical text funded by the European Research Council. The project examined the commentators' treatment of the biblical text, the manuscript transmission of these works and the re-use of these texts in later writings.
• Vetus Latina Iohannes - an edition of the earliest Latin translations of the Gospel according to John, based on surviving manuscripts and quotations in Christian authors.
• GALaCSY project - an Anglo-German Collaboration studying the earliest translations of the Pauline Epistles
• Workspace for Collaborative Editing - an online environment for editing evidence for the text of the New Testament,  developed in Birmingham and Germany.
• International Greek New Testament Project - working towards the Editio Critica Maior, the fullest presentation of the evidence for the Greek New Testament.
• Insular Latin Gospel Books - a project to transcribe and examine their text.
• Codex Zacynthius Project - a new edition, transcription and translation of the earliest New Testament catena manuscript using multispectral images.

• School of Philosophy, Theology and Religion, Head of Postgraduate Research
• Department of Theology and Religion, Collaborative Programmes Officer (St Mary's College, Oscott)
• Departmental Representative, Anglican Chaplaincy Trust
• Executive Editor (Pauline Epistles) and Treasurer for the International Greek New Testament Project (www.igntp.org)
• Executive Editor of the book series Texts and Studies (Gorgias Press)
• Academic Board of Corpus Christianorum
• Co-organiser, Birmingham Colloquium
• Member of the Society of Biblical Literature, Studiorum Noui Testamenti Societas (SNTS), International Association of Patristic Studies, Association of Manuscripts and Archives in Research Collections, European Association of Digital Humanities