This volume brings together scholars from New Testament studies and classics, whose fields of study have much in common but are not often in conversation. The contributors explore how the ancient works they study can be resources for thinking critically and creatively about issues that matter today. The essays address our obligation to take positive moral stands on divisive issues of both the past and the present, including empire, racial/ethnic and religious difference, economic inequality, gender and sexuality, slavery, and disability.

This volume brings together scholars from New Testament studies and classics, whose fields of study have much in common but are not often in in conversation. The contributors explore how the ancient works they study can be resources for thinking critically and creatively about issues that matter today. The essays address our obligation to take positive moral stands on divisive issues of both the past and the present, including empire, racial/ethnic and religious difference, economic inequality, gender and sexuality, slavery, and disability. Contributors include Douglas Boin, Denise Kimber Buell, Gay L. Byron, Allen Dwight Callahan, Joy Connolly, Jennifer A. Glancy, Shelley P. Haley, Caroline Johnson Hodge, Katherine Lu Hsu, Timothy Joseph, Tat-siong Benny Liew, Yii-Jan Lin, Dominic Machado, Joseph A. Marchal, Thomas R. Martin, Candida R. Moss, Laura Salah Nasrallah, Jorunn Økland, and Abraham Smith.

In interdisciplinary projects and research collaborations, participants face multiple demands. However, these expectations encounter a reality that is characterized by time pressure, high demands in one's own discipline, and often increasingly administrative tasks. What can meaningful interdisciplinary work look like in an academic environment? What tasks and constraints do researchers face? And, considering the range of disciplines involved, how can interdisciplinary research projects be designed in a successful way? How does one meaningfully bring different disciplines, their methods, and theories into conversation with each other across the spatial and temporal distance of their subjects? And all that in a way in which the yield is effective and visible in all subprojects? This publication sheds light on this issue by way of example. It reflects on and formulates the experiences and outcomes of interdisciplinary work of a humanities and social science research training group with disciplinary breadth as well as historical depth. The disciplines involved are ancient history, archaeology, art history, music didactics, North American history, patristics, philology (Latin/Greek studies), religious studies, sociology, and theology with the subjects Old and New Testament. In pairs of advanced and young scholars, individual experiences and identifiable results of interdisciplinary work in the respective contributions or research projects are recorded; on a next level, discipline-specific outcomes, but also problems are pinpointed; on a third level, collective experiences with interdisciplinary research displayed. The contributions take a variety of forms: reflections, dialogues, experience reports as well as perspective observations. Rafael Barroso Romero, Complutense University of Madrid, Spain, Elisabeth Begemann, Max-Weber-Kolleg Erfurt, Germany, Enno Friedrich, University of Rostock, Germany, Elena Malagoli, Max-Weber-Kolleg Erfurt, Germany, Anna-Katharina Rieger, University of Graz, Austria, Jörg Rüpke, Max-Weber-Kolleg Erfurt, Germany, Ramón Soneira Martínez, Austrian Archaeological Institute Vienna, Austria, Markus Vinzent, Max-Weber-Kolleg Erfurt, Germany.

Tracing the metaphor of America as the Book of Revelation’s New Jerusalem, Yii-Jan Lin shows how apocalyptic narratives have been used to exclude unwanted immigrants America appeared on the European horizon at a moment of apocalyptic expectation and ambition. Explorers and colonizers imagined the land to be paradise, the New Jerusalem of the Bible’s Book of Revelation. This groundbreaking volume explores the conceptualization of America as the New Jerusalem from the time of Columbus to the Puritan colonists, through U.S. expansion, and from the eras of Reagan to Trump. While the metaphor of the New Jerusalem has been useful in portraying a shining, God-blessed refuge with open gates, it has also been used to exclude, attack, and criminalize unwanted peoples. Yii-Jan Lin shows how newspapers, political speeches, sermons, cartoons, and novels throughout American history have used the language of Revelation to define immigrants as God’s enemies who must be shut out of the gates. This book exposes Revelation’s apocalyptic logic at work in the history of Chinese exclusion, the association of the unwanted with disease, the contradictions of citizenship laws, and the justification for building a U.S.-Mexico wall like the wall around the New Jerusalem. This book is a fascinating analysis of the religious, biblical, and apocalyptic in American immigration history and a damning narrative that weaves together American religious history, immigration and ethnic studies, and the use of biblical texts and imagery.

A classic work that exposed the centrality of enslaved people and slaveholders in early Christian circles. In this expanded edition, the distinguished scholar Jennifer A. Glancy reflects upon recent discoveries and future trajectories related to the study of ancient slavery's impact on Christianity's development. What if the stories traditionally told about slavery, as something peripheral or contradictory to Christianity's emergence, are wrong? This book contends that some of the most cherished Christian texts from Jesus and the apostle Paul prioritized the perspectives of slaveholders. Jennifer A. Glancy highlights how the strong metaphorical uses of slavery in early Christian discourse can't be disconnected from the reality of enslaved people and their bodies. Deftly maneuvering among biblical texts, material evidence, and the literary and philosophical currents of the Greco-Roman world, she situates early Christian slavery in its broader cultural setting. Glancy's penetrating study into slavery's impact on early Christianity, from the pages of the New Testament to the branded collars used by Christians who held people in bondage, will be of interest to those asking questions about slavery, power, and freedom in the long arc of history.

Christianity is widely understood to be a "universal" religion that transcends the particularities of history and culture, including differences related to kinship and ethnicity. In traditional Pauline scholarship, this portrait of Christianity has been justified by the letters of Paul. Interpreters claim that Paul eliminates ethnicity, or at least separates it from what is important about Christianity. This study challenges that perception. Through a detailed examination of kinship and ethnic language in Paul's letters, Johnson Hodge argues that notions of peoplehood and lineage are not rejected or downplayed by Paul; instead they are central to his gospel. Paul's chief concern is the status of the gentile peoples who are alienated from the God of Israel. Ethnicity defines this theological problem, just as it shapes his own evangelizing of the ethnic and religious "other." According to Paul, God has responded to the gentile predicament through Christ. Johnson Hodge details how Paul uses the logic of patrilineal descent to construct a myth of origins for gentiles: through baptism into Christ the gentiles become descendants of Abraham, adopted sons of God and coheirs with Christ. Although Jews and gentiles now share a common ancestor, they are not collapsed into one group (of "Christians," for example). They are separate but related lineages of Abraham. Through comparisons with other ancient authors, Johnson Hodge shows that Paul is not alone in his strategic use of kinship and ethnic language. Because kinship and ethnicity present themselves as natural and fixed, yet are also open to negotiation and reworking, they are effective tools in organizing people and power, shaping self-understanding and defining membership. If Sons, Then Heirs demonstrates that Paul's thinking is immersed in the story of Israel. He speaks not as a Christian theologian, but as a first-century Jewish teacher of gentiles responding to concrete situations in these early communities of Christ-followers. As such Paul does not reject or critique Judaism, but responds to God's call to be a "light to the nations."