April D. DeConick, Ph.D. 1994 (University of Michigan) is the Isla Carroll and Percy E. Turner Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity and former Chair of the Department of Religion at Rice University.  She is the founder and executive editor of Gnosis: Journal of Gnostic Studies (Leiden: Brill) and a recruiting editor for the monograph series Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies (Leiden: Brill). 

DeConick’s work focuses on New Testament and pre-Nicene literature, canonical and non-canonical gospels, gnostic literature and movements, mysticism and esotericism in early Christianity, artifact migration, and the Interactivist approach to history.

Her revolutionary textbook, Comparing Christianities: An Introduction to Early Christianity, explores early Christian pluralism by organizing the first Christians into three families of Christian movements, each devoted to the worship of a different God.  Not all early Christians worshiped YHWH the biblical God. Some Christians were transcendentalists while others claimed to have discovered an unknown alien God of love and mercy. 

Her book, The Gnostic New Age: How a Countercultural Spirituality Revolutionized Religion from Antiquity to Today (Columbia University Press 2016) won the 2016 Figure Foundation Award for the best book published by a university press in philosophy and religion.  She is most well-known for her work on the Gospel of Judas, a Coptic Gnostic gospel rediscovered in 2006 which challenged the National Geographic "official" interpretation of a good Judas.  In her book, The Thirteenth Apostle: What the Gospel of Judas Really Says (Bloomsbury), she argues that the text is a gospel parody about a demonic Judas written by Gnostic Christians.  She starred in CNN’s documentary on the Gospel of Judas that premiered in 2015 on the TV series "Finding Jesus".