Outi Lehtipuu works as Senior Lecturer at the Department of Biblical Studies at the University of Helsinki. She is also the leader of the Academy of Finland funded research project Lived Scriptures in Late Antiquity (2017-). Previously (2012–2017) she held a research position as Academy Research Fellow at the same university and served as a team leader at the Centre of Excellence Reason and Religious Recognition, funded by the Academy of Finland.  She belongs to the board of the doctoral programme Gender, Culture, and Society at the University of Helsinki, to the executive group of the Master’s degree programme at the Faculty of Theology and to the steering committee of the Nordic Network for the Study of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the First Millennium.  She served as President of the European Association of Biblical Studies (EABS, 2018–2021) and was the Chair of the local organizing committee of the International Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature held jointly with the Annual Conference of EABS at the University of Helsinki in August 2018.   

Lehtipuu has published widely in the fields of New Testament studies and Early Christianity. In her work, she emphasizes the diversity of the early Christian movement and its embeddedness in the wider Late Ancient world. Her first book, based on her dissertation and entitled The Afterlife Imagery in Luke’s Story of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Brill, 2005) examines ancient representations of the afterlife. Her second book, Debates over the Resurrection of the Dead: Constructing Early Christian Identity (OUP, 2015) focuses on competing readings of key biblical passages that were used in early Christian discourses on the resurrection of the dead. She is editor of several collections of essays on a variety of topics, including ancient anthropology, early Jewish and Christian responses to the Roman Empire, women and knowledge in ancient Christianity,  female figures in ancient Christian apocryphal texts (as part of the multilingual project The Bible and Women: An Encyclopaedia of Exegesis and Cultural History), tolerance and intolerance in ancient Judaism and Christianity, and Bible reception in the contemporary Nordic societies.

Lehtipuu’s current research addresses questions pertaining to the use of biblical texts in multiple contexts. She is particularly interested in the reciprocal relations between texts and their early readers: how, on the one hand, authoritative texts are invoked and interpreted to transfer their authority to their users, and, on the other hand, how the use of these texts enhance the authority of the texts.