Judith Lee Kovacs

Judith Lee Kovacs

December 28, 2020

Judith Lee Kovacs (née Tustison) departed this life on Monday, December 28, 2020, at the age of 75 from pancreatic cancer.

She was born and raised in Defiance, Ohio, where she attended the public schools and was high-school valedictorian. After graduating from the College of Wooster in 1967, she was accepted for the Ph.D. program at Columbia University and Union Theological Seminary. In 1969, she married her Wooster classmate David Kovacs. They lived in New York for three years and then moved to Massachusetts so that her husband could finish his Ph.D. at Harvard.

In 1976, David was hired by the UVa Classics Department, and the couple moved to Charlottesville, where Judith also taught at the University, part-time until her colleagues in Religious Studies, realizing that she was producing good scholarly work, gave her a tenure-track position. She was a lively and much-loved teacher of the New Testament (in Greek and in English) and of those Christian authors who wrote in the early Christian centuries. A particular specialty was the way the New Testament books were understood in later centuries down to the twentieth century. Her scholarship won many admirers both in the US and abroad. She took particular satisfaction in having mentored young scholars working in the former East Bloc, whose interest in Christianity had been officially disaproved of.

She is survived by her husband; sisters, Sally Myers of Defiance and Kathy Tustison of Westerville, Ohio; a son, Mark of Mt. Pleasant, S.C., his wife, Kangkang and their two children; a daughter, Ellen Spangler of Crozet, Va., and her husband, Brad and their two children.

She will be long remembered as a lively interlocutor who valued everyone she talked to, a teacher with a gift for teaching critical scholarship without destroying faith, an intrepid traveler with a gift for foreign languages, a stalwart friend to countless people, and a devoted and loving wife, mother, sister, and grandmother.

There will be a private committal of her ashes at St. Paul's Memorial Church followed at a later date by a memorial service. The family request that in lieu of flowers donations be made to Hospice of the Piedmont.