The book is scheduled by the publisher for release on 30 November 2026 and is listed with a 2027 publication/copyright year. It will appear as Volume 15 of Fontes et Subsidia ad Bibliam pertinentes, a De Gruyter series devoted to scholarly reference tools for biblical research, including dictionaries, editions, concordances, synopses, and collections of sources.
For onomasticians, however, the importance of the new volume extends well beyond biblical lexicography.
More than a dictionary of name meanings
At first glance, the title might suggest a familiar type of reference book: a list of New Testament personal names followed by their linguistic origins and etymologies. Gradzikiewicz’s project is considerably more ambitious.
Its central premise is that a personal name in an ancient text can carry several kinds of information simultaneously. Besides its linguistic form and etymology, a name may provide indirect evidence concerning the social environment, religious affiliation, cultural background, geographical provenance, or even political associations of the people who used it.
The book therefore approaches meaning at several levels. According to the publisher, it considers not only grammatical or etymological meaning but also possible cultural, religious, and social meanings associated with a name.
This is an important distinction. Knowing what a name originally meant is not the same as knowing what that name may have communicated to a person living in the eastern Mediterranean or Rome during the first century AD.
A very common name and a very unusual one do not necessarily produce the same social associations. Likewise, a Greek-looking name cannot automatically be taken as proof that its bearer was ethnically Greek. Names travelled across languages, religions, regions, social classes, and communities.
The lexicon attempts to reconstruct some of this lost onomastic context.
Epigraphy as a key to New Testament names
One particularly promising feature is the systematic use of epigraphic evidence.
A name found in the New Testament can be compared with inscriptions from the relevant period and region. Such comparison may help establish whether the name was widespread or rare, where it was particularly common, and in which social, religious, or cultural environments it occurred.
This changes the question from simply:
What does this name mean?
to:
Who used this name, where, how often, and in what social circumstances?
The publisher explicitly emphasizes this approach: comparison with local epigraphic records can indicate whether a name was common or exceptional, while comparison with historical and cultural traditions can help reconstruct possible positive or negative associations attached to it.
For historical anthroponymy, this is perhaps the most attractive aspect of the project. Personal names become evidence situated within an onomastic landscape, rather than isolated lexical forms.
From Hebrew and Aramaic to Greek, Latin - and beyond
The linguistic range of the lexicon is unusually broad.
Gradzikiewicz draws on philological evidence from Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, Egyptian, Arabic, Nabataean, and Iranian, alongside archaeology, linguistics, onomastics, and biblical studies.
Such breadth is necessary because the New Testament anthroponymicon is itself the product of intense language contact.
The texts are predominantly Greek, but the names recorded in them belong to overlapping Jewish, Greek, Roman, Semitic, and wider eastern Mediterranean traditions. Some names are translated or adapted; others coexist in different linguistic forms. Individuals may also possess more than one name or be known under forms belonging to different naming systems.
From an onomastic perspective, the New Testament is therefore not simply a collection of “biblical names.” It is a multilingual historical corpus reflecting migration, empire, religious identity, language contact, and cultural accommodation.
Names as social evidence
Gradzikiewicz’s earlier research gives a useful indication of how this method can work.
His research project New Testament Onomastics, conducted within the Ancient Languages and Texts doctoral programme at Humboldt University and the Berlin Graduate School of Ancient Studies between 2016 and 2021, was explicitly conceived as a combination of prosopography and onomasticon. Its objective was to collect the “metadata” supplied by naming practices in Late Antiquity, including provenance, social status, religion, regional distribution, and literary context.
An earlier study of the people greeted by Paul in Romans 16 illustrates the potential of such an approach. Gradzikiewicz compared the personal names appearing in the chapter with wider onomastic evidence in order to investigate the social and Jewish background of members of the early Roman Christian community. His work demonstrates why apparently Greek names alone cannot provide a straightforward answer to questions of ethnic or religious identity.
This is precisely where onomastics becomes especially valuable to historians: names rarely provide simple identity labels, but their statistical and contextual distributions can substantially refine historical interpretation.
Can names contribute to the narrative?
The lexicon also ventures into an area sometimes neglected by purely historical dictionaries: the narrative function of personal names.
Names can interact with the story in which their bearers appear. Their lexical meaning may create associations, contrasts, or even irony. At the same time, contemporary readers may have responded differently to a familiar name and to an unusual or socially marked one.
This introduces an important distinction between etymological meaning and meaning in use.
A name's ancient lexical origin may have ceased to be transparent to contemporary speakers. Conversely, a name without an obvious transparent etymology may still have carried strong cultural, religious, geographical, or social associations.
The publisher's description accordingly speaks of several “ascertainable meanings” - grammatical, cultural, religious, and social - rather than reducing each name to a single etymological gloss.
That approach should make the volume relevant not only for biblical scholars but also for researchers interested in onomastic semantics and the broader question of what personal names communicate beyond reference.
The author
Andrzej Janusz Gradzikiewicz is associated with Humboldt University in Berlin. His academic background is notably multilingual and interdisciplinary. Before his doctoral work in Berlin, he completed degrees in languages and German at Rand Afrikaans University in Johannesburg and a Master of Divinity at Andrews University in the United States. He subsequently worked in theology in the United States and Mexico before joining the Ancient Languages and Texts programme in Berlin.
This combination of linguistic and theological training is particularly appropriate for a project in which philology, ancient history, religion, and personal-name research continually intersect.
Why this lexicon matters for onomastics
The publication is noteworthy for several reasons.
First, it treats the names of the New Testament not merely as items requiring translation or etymological explanation, but as a historical anthroponymic system.
Second, it brings together literary texts and external epigraphic evidence. This is crucial: the meaning of a historical name cannot always be reconstructed from the literary text in which it happens to survive.
Third, the project explicitly incorporates frequency and geographical distribution into interpretation. Whether a name was common, rare, locally concentrated, socially marked, or shared across religious communities can be just as informative as its original lexical meaning.
Fourth, its multilingual philological basis reflects the reality of naming in the ancient Mediterranean world, where Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin and other linguistic traditions continually interacted.
And finally, it illustrates a broader development within contemporary onomastics: dictionaries of names are increasingly becoming more than repositories of etymologies. They can function as structured resources for reconstructing social networks, cultural contact, religious identities, migration, linguistic adaptation, and historical perceptions of names.
That makes the Lexicon of Personal Names in the New Testament particularly interesting even for onomasticians whose primary field is not biblical studies.
Publication details
Andrzej Janusz Gradzikiewicz
Lexicon of Personal Names in the New Testament: Origin, Etymology and Meanings Conveyed Through Personal Names
Fontes et Subsidia ad Bibliam pertinentes, Vol. 15
Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter
Language: English
Planned publication: 30 November 2026
Copyright/publication year in the publisher catalogue: 2027
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-11-223095-4
eBook ISBN: 978-3-11-223096-1
The publisher currently describes the volume as intended for researchers, but its declared aim is broader: to provide both scholars and non-specialists with reliable material for studying personal names in the New Testament.
For anyone interested in historical anthroponymy, ancient naming practices, biblical names, the sociology of personal names, or the relationship between etymology and onomastic meaning, this promises to be a reference work worth watching.
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