The Rev Dr John-Paul Harper

Subjects: New Testament, Greek

Qualifications: BComm Hons Math (Stellenbosch University), MComm Math (Stellenbosch University), BTh (George Whitefield College), PhD (Stellenbosch University)

John-Paul joined the GWC Faculty in a full-time capacity in 2023. Before this, he served for ten years as an assistant minister at Christ Church Stellenbosch.

He has a general interest in early Christianity with a special focus on Pauline studies, Hellenistic Judaism, and political theology. His recent research focus has been in the area of computational linguistics and utilising the most recent advances in AI to study the Ancient Greek language.

John Paul is married to Julia and they have three children: Emma, Adele, and Nathan. He and his family continue to serve at Christ Church Stellenbosch.

  • Harper, J.P. 2021. Paul and Philo on the Politics of the Land, Jerusalem, and Temple. WUNT II 562. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021.
  • Harper, J.P. & Rohwer, C.H. 2010. ‘On the Consistency of a Separator’, Quaestiones Mathematicae, vol. 33, no. 3, pp. 197-209
  • Harper, J.P. 2003. The Class Number One Problem in Function Fields, Masters Thesis, University of Stellenbosch.
  • Van Zijl, L. & Harper, J.P. & Olivier, F. 2001. ‘The MERLin Environment Applied to ⋆-NFAs’ in Yu S., Păun A. (eds) Implementation and Application of Automata. CIAA 2000. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 2088. Berlin: Springer.
    1. ‘Paul and authority in Galatians 4.’ Paper presented at the annual conference of the New Testament Society of South Africa (NTSSA)
    1. ‘Understanding and Using AI.’ Workshop presented at the annual conference of the Theological Education Association of Southern Africa (TEASA)
    1. 'A New Approach to Tokenization for Studying Ancient Greek with Contemporary Large Language Models' Paper presented at the annual Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) conference in Boston.
    1. 'Morphologically-aware Tokenization of Ancient Greek' Paper presented at a Partnership for applied biblical natural language processing (PAB-NLP) meeting.