In Matthew’s passion narrative, the ethnoracial identity of Jesus comes into sharp focus. The repetition of the title “King of the Judeans” foregrounds the politics of race and ethnicity. Despite the explicit use of terminology, previous scholarship has understood the title curiously in non-ethnoracial ways. This book takes the peculiar omission in the history of interpretation as its point of departure. It provides an expanded ethnoracial reading of the text, and poses a fundamental ideological question that interrogates the pattern in the larger context of modern biblical scholarship. Wongi Park issues a critique of the dominant narrative and presents an alternative reading of Matthew’s passion narrative. He identifies a critical vocabulary and framework of analysis to decode the politics of race and ethnicity implicit in the history of interpretation. Ultimately, the book lends itself to a broader research agenda: the destabilization of the dominant narrative of early Christianity’s non-ethnoracial origins.

Nonwhite women primarily appear as marginalized voices, if at all, in volumes that address constructions of race/ethnicity and early Christian texts. Employing an intersectional approach, the contributors analyze historical, cultural, literary, and ideological constructions of racial/ethnic identities, which intersect with gender/sexuality class, religion, slavery, and/or power. Given their small numbers in academic biblical studies, this book represents a critical mass of nonwhite women scholars and offers a critique of dominant knowledge production. Filling a significant epistemological gap, this seminal text provides provocative, innovative, and critical insights into constructions of race/ethnicity in ancient and modern texts and contexts.

The annual Review of Biblical Literature presents a selection of reviews of the most recent books in biblical studies and related fields, including topical monographs, multi-author volumes, reference works, commentaries, and dictionaries. RBL reviews German, French, Italian, and English books and offers reviews in those languages.

Classrooms as communities are temporary, but the racial effects can be long term. The biblical studies classroom can be a site of personal and social transformation. To make it a space for positive change, the contributors to this volume question and reevaluate traditional teaching practices and assessment tools that foreground white, Western scholarship in order to offer practical guidance for an antiracist pedagogy. The introduction and fifteen essays provide tools for engaging issues of social context and scriptural authority, nationalism and religious identities, critical race theory, and how race, gender, and class can be addressed empathetically. Contributors Sonja Anderson, Randall C. Bailey, Eric D. Barreto, Denise Kimber Buell, Greg Carey, Haley Gabrielle, Wilda C. Gafney, Julián Andrés González Holguín, Sharon Jacob, Tat-siong Benny Liew, Francisco Lozada Jr., Shelly Matthews, Roger S. Nam, Wongi Park, Jean-Pierre Ruiz, Abraham Smith, and Kay Higuera Smith share their experience creating classrooms that are spaces that enable the production of new knowledge without reproducing a white subject of the geopolitical West.

Challenging Contextuality: Bibles and Biblical Scholarship in Context provides a new and innovative contribution to the study of biblical texts by bringing together current approaches to biblical interpretation. The volume sets the agenda for the future of the field and provides a synthesis of approaches to date. In doing so, it aligns itself with the broadly shared hermeneutical conviction that contextuality is a catalyst for interpretation. This applies in equal measure to approaches and methods that are often framed as 'traditional' or 'mainstream' (e.g. the methodological canon of the historical critical approach as the offspring of the European Enlightenment) and those that are often dubbed 'contextual' (e.g. forms of feminist or 'indigenous' interpretation). The volume grounds contextual biblical interpretation within the broader landscape of biblical studies, and the chapters are all interested in the contexts in which bibles are read. Rather than a series of examples of contextual biblical interpretation, this book is concerned with what it means to do contextual biblical interpretation, how contextual biblical interpretation challenges biblical scholarship, and what chances there are for this mode of inquiry. What contexts are engaged and elucidated when it comes to bible-use? What contexts are made visible and invisible? How can different contexts be theorized and understood? The volume argues that it is not context that matters, rather, contemporary contexts should be a challenge and a chance for biblical scholarship, its present and its future.

The impact of Gilles Deleuze on critical thought in the opening decades of the twenty-first century rivals that of Jacques Derrida or Michel Foucault on critical thought in the closing decades of the twentieth. The Deleuze and... industry is in overdrive in the humanities, the social sciences, and beyond, busily connecting Deleuzian philosophy to everything from literature to architecture, metaphysics to mathematics, ethics to physics, sexuality to technology, and ecology to theology. What of Deleuze and the Bible? What does the Bible become when it is plugged into the Deleuzian corpus? An immense affective assemblage, among other things. And what does biblical criticism become in the process? A practice of close reading that is other than interpretation and renounces the concept of representation. Not just for those already familiar with the work of Deleuze, the book begins with an extended introduction to Deleuzian thought. It then proceeds to unexegetical explorations of five successive themes: Text (how to make yourself a Bible without Organs, and why); Body (why there are no bodies in the Bible, and how to read them anyway); Sex (a thousand tiny sexes, a trillion tiny Jesuses); Race (Jesus and the white faciality machine); and Politics (democracy, despots, pandemics, ancient prophets). Cumulatively, these explorations limn the fluid contours of a Bible after Deleuze.

This authoritative volume brings together a team of world-class scholars to cover the full range of New Testament backgrounds studies in a concise, up-to-date, and comprehensive manner. Drawing on the expertise of specialists in the areas of archaeological, historical, and biblical studies, this book provides concise treatments of a wide breadth of topics related to the world of the early Christ followers. The book offers compact overviews of key historical issues, facilitating enriched understandings of the significance and force of the texts of the New Testament in their original contexts. Meant to be used alongside traditional literature-based canonical surveys, this one-stop introduction to New Testament backgrounds fills a gap in typical introduction to the Bible courses and is ideal for undergraduate or seminary classes. It is beautifully designed and includes photographs, line drawings, maps, charts, and tables, which will facilitate its use in the classroom.