About Leslie Baynes
Leslie Baynes is a scholar of the New Testament and Second Temple Judaism whose work ranges from the apocalyptic literature of the ancient world to the Christian imagination of the twentieth century. She is Professor of Religious Studies at Missouri State Universit.
Her most recent book, Between Interpretation and Imagination: C. S. Lewis and the Bible (Eerdmans, 2025), is the first full-length study of how Lewis read Scripture — drawing on previously unpublished marginalia from his personal library. Michael Ward of Oxford has called it “easily the best book yet written on Lewis and Scripture.”
Her first book, The Heavenly Book Motif in Judeo-Christian Apocalypses 200 BCE–200 CE (Brill, 2012), established her work in the field of ancient apocalyptic literature, where she continues to write on 1 Enoch, the Book of Revelation, and the reception history of biblical texts.
Leslie served as a translator for the New American Bible Revised Edition — the English translation used in Catholic liturgy across the United States. She contributed to the New Testament’s Johannine books: the Gospel, Epistles, and Revelation of John. The translation will be published as the Catholic American Bible in 2027.
A biblical scholar, in short
Leslie’s scholarly life began in an unlikely place. She didn’t own a Bible until she was fourteen. As a college student at the University of Dayton, she chose English for her major because her parents considered religious studies impractical — though she minored in it anyway, and read classical Greek on the side because she loved the language.
She earned her Ph.D. in Christianity and Judaism in Antiquity at the University of Notre Dame in 2005, taught at Notre Dame briefly, and joined the faculty at Missouri State the same year. She has been there ever since.
In 2014 she was named Scholar-in-Residence at The Kilns — C. S. Lewis’s home outside Oxford — a residency that seeded the book that would become Between Interpretation and Imagination a decade later. In 2023 she was selected for the inaugural cohort of Inklings Project Fellows at the University of Notre Dame’s McGrath Institute for Church Life. She was promoted to Professor of Religious Studies in 2026.
Research and professional service
Her ongoing research sits at the intersection of several fields: Second Temple Judaism, apocalyptic literature, the Book of Revelation, 1 Enoch, reception history, and C. S. Lewis. Her current projects include a chapter for The Fourth Gospel and Revelation as Johannine Literature (Bloomsbury T&T Clark) and the introduction and annotations to the Book of Revelation for The Ancient Christian Study Bible, forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
She serves on the advisory board of St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly and the editorial board of Texts and Studies in the Ethiopic Bible and Related Literature. She is co-chair of the Biblical Exegesis from Eastern Orthodox Perspectives section at the Society of Biblical Literature.
Courses taught
At Missouri State, Leslie teaches New Testament, Jesus of Nazareth, Apocalypses, C. S. Lewis, and Catholicism, along with graduate seminars on biblical interpretation, the Book of Revelation and its afterlives, and Genesis 1–3.
Full publication list and academic history
Complete CV coming soon.