New Books in Biblical Studies

Powerful religious elements for living in the aftermath of trauma are embedded within North African Christian hagiographies. The texts of (1) The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, (2) The Account of Montanus, Lucius, and their Companions, and (3) The Life of Cyprian of Carthage are stories that offered post traumatic pathways to recovery for its historical readership. These recovery-oriented beliefs and behaviors promoted positive religious coping strategies that revolved around a sense of safety, re-establishing community relationships, an integrated sense of self, and a hopeful story beyond trauma. This book vividly demonstrates that hagiographies played a vital therapeutic role in helping early Christian trauma survivors recover and flourish in the aftermath of disastrous persecutions.

Scott Harrower (PhD, Systematic Theology) is Associate Professor of Theology, Church History, and Philosophy of Religion at Ridley College (Melbourne, Australia). He is also an ordained Anglican minister and has wide-ranging ministry experience in several countries. Dr. Harrower has published and regularly presents papers on topics such as early Christianity in Roman contexts, and philosophical responses to the problem of evil. In addition to Trauma and Recovery in North African Christianity (Medieval Institute Publications, 2024), his books include Trinitarian Self and Salvation and God of All Comfort: A Trinitarian Response to the Horrors of This World.

Jonathon Lookadoo is Associate Professor at the Presbyterian University and Theological Seminary in Seoul, South Korea. While his interests range widely over the world of early Christianity, he is the author of books on the Epistle of Barnabas, Ignatius of Antioch, and the Shepherd of Hermas, including The Christology of Ignatius of Antioch (Cascade, 2023).

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The book of Job is challenging. Its Hebrew is often obscure, its length and subject matter are intimidating, and its meaning has been debated throughout the history of biblical interpretation. Thankfully, in Job: Evangelical Exegetical Commentary (Lexham Academic, 2024), Duane A. Garrett presents a fresh argument for the book's meaning. Job demonstrates the inability of Wisdom, as a theological tradition, to solve the problem of evil.

Tune in as we speak with Duane Garrett about the book of Job!

Duane Garrett is the John R. Sampey Professor of Old Testament Interpretation and Professor of biblical theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus (Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020), and a recent 2 volume commentary on Numbers. He can be reached at [email protected]

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The Old Testament Hebrew Scriptures in 5 Minutes (Equinox Books, 2024), co-edited by Philippe Guillaume and Diana V. Edelman, is a digestible, concise, reader-friendly introduction to biblical scholarship for undergraduate students and lay readers alike. Written without technical language or jargon by diverse specialists in Hebrew Bible, its 83 chapters welcome readers into a range of topics, including the enduring questions of date, authorship, and source criticism for biblical books in addition to timely contributions of interest to 21st-century audiences, such as the Hebrew scriptures and archaeology, ecology, abortion, and sexual orientation/LGBTQIA issues. Meanwhile, although not a book-by-book or verse-by-verse commentary on the Hebrew Bible or Christian Old Testament, their volume introduces familiar prophets and figures from the scriptural collection in novel and enlightening ways. Dr. Edelman and Dr. Guillaume joined the New Books Network to discuss the development of this primer on the Hebrew Scriptures and to preview its wide-ranging contents.

Diana V. Edelman (Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1986) is Professor Emerita in Hebrew Bible at the Faculty of Theology of the University of Oslo, Norway. She has published widely on many aspects of the Hebrew Bible in its ancient Near Eastern context and has cultivated specialties in the Bible and cultural memory, southern Levantine history and archaeology, identity formation reflected in the Hebrew Bible, and emerging forms of Judaism in the Persian and Hellenistic periods. Among her recent scholarly contributions are chapters on “Deuteronomy as the Instructions of Moses and Yhwh vs. a Framed Legal Code” (in Deuteronomy in the Making: Studies in the Production of Debarim; de Gruyter, 2021) and “The Text-Dating Conundrum: Viewing the Hebrew Bible from an Achaemenid Framework” (in Stones, Tablets, and Scrolls: Periods of the Formation of the Bible; Mohr Siebeck, 2020), and she is also the author of The Origins of the ‘Second’ Temple: Persian Imperial Policy and the Rebuilding of Jerusalem (Routledge, 2005). In her recreational time, Diana is an avid amateur photographer and world traveler.

Philippe Guillaume (Th.D., University of Geneva, 2002) is Lecturer in the Faculty of Theology at the University of Berne. His research interests span the Hebrew Scriptures and include the use of prophetic scrolls in divination and rhetorical questions posed by these texts, both internally and in their historical reception. Philippe is author of Waiting for Josiah: The Judges (Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2004), Land and Calendar: The Priestly Document from Genesis 1 to Joshua 18 (Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2009), The Economy of Deuteronomy’s Core (Equinox, 2022) and numerous journal articles and chapter-length contributions on texts, aspects, and economic issues within the Hebrew Scriptures, including “Debunking the Latest Scenario on the Rise of the Pork Taboo” (Études et Travaux, 2018), “Wonder Woman’s Field in Proverbs 31: Taken, Not Bought!” (Ugarit-Forschungen, 2016), Naboth’s vineyard (SBL/Bible Odyssey), and “The Hidden Benefits of Patronage: Debt” (in Anthropology and the Bible; Gorgias Press, 2010).

Rob Heaton (Ph.D., University of Denver, 2019) hosts Biblical Studies conversations for New Books in Religion and teaches New Testament, Christian origins, and early Christianity at Anderson University in Indiana. He recently authored The Shepherd of Hermas as Scriptura Non Grata: From Popularity in Early Christianity to Exclusion from the New Testament Canon (Lexington Books, 2023). For more about Rob and his work, or to offer feedback related to this episode, please visit his website at https://www.robheaton.com.

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In The Countercultural Victory of 1 John in Greco-Roman Context: Conquering the World (T&T Clark, 2023), Ahreum Kim re-examines conquering language in 1 John, arguing that when the letter is read with the context of Greco-Roman culture in mind, the conflict extends beyond in-fighting within the Johannine community. She suggests that the letter's author presents a consistent countercultural narrative due to concern about the predominant world, and proposes that the author exhorts the minority Johannine community to hold onto their belief while proclaiming that they are triumphant conquerors against the prevailing “world”.

Kim first examines how conquering language toward a Johannine nike utilizes militaristic undertones already familiar in Greco-Roman culture. She argues that each of the opponents mentioned is affiliated with “the world”, and it is ultimately the conquering of the world itself which marks the Johannine victory. Kim demonstrates that the author references the negative fear of the divine in the polytheistic world which contrasts with the Johannine love of God, and that his countercultural message continues to the very end, with a concluding warning against the many worldly idols. Finally, she posits that the battle with the Greco-Roman world is ultimately a conflict of pistis, comparing Roman soldiers achieving military victories with a pistis to their emperor, and the repeated emphasis on Jesus as the true Son of God.

Ahreum Kim recently completed her PhD under the supervision of Professor George van Kooten at the University of Cambridge. Her research spans across the New Testament and early Christianity, including Johannine literature, Jewish-Christian relations, and the disciples closest to Jesus. She is also the editor of Old and New: Essays on Continuity and Discontinuity in the New Testament, by Morna Hooker (Mohr Siebeck 2024).

Jonathon Lookadoo is Associate Professor at the Presbyterian University and Theological Seminary in Seoul, South Korea. While his interests range widely over the world of early Christianity, he is the author of books on the Epistle of Barnabas, Ignatius of Antioch, and the Shepherd of Hermas, including The Christology of Ignatius of Antioch (Cascade, 2023).

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The Second Epistle to Timothy is, by any standard, a remarkable document. Even as the apostle urges his friend and coworker hasten to Rome for a final meeting, the intimacy and urgency of Paul's words make clear his awareness that Timothy might not arrive in time to say goodbye. This makes the epistle deeply personal. But Paul has a much larger purpose in view than just Timothy's consolation. The epistle vibrates with Paul's concern for Timothy's endurance in the apostle's mission after Paul's death. Paul is at pains to emphasize for Timothy the seriousness of his responsibility, the difficulty of the context in which that duty will be discharged, and the divine assistance that will allow him to preserve and transmit the apostolic deposit to 'faithful men'. Even as he addresses Timothy, Paul is deliberately speaking beyond him to everyone who remains faithful to the apostolic gospel in the 'last days' following the apostle's departure. 

Mark Sweetnam's Paul's Last Letter: A Commentary on the Second Epistle to Timothy (Wipf and Stock, 2024) provides a detailed but nontechnical treatment of 2 Timothy, which interacts with contemporary scholarship on the epistle, while providing a literary, rhetorical, and parenetic analysis of Paul's last letter.

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The New Testament and the Theology of Trust (Oxford UP, 2022) argues for the recovery of trust as a central theme in Christian theology, and offers the first theology of trust in the New Testament.

'Trust' is the root meaning of Christian 'faith' (pistis, fides), and trusting in God and Christ is still fundamental to Christians. But unlike faith, and other aspects of faith such as belief or hope, trust is little studied. Building on her ground-breaking study Roman Faith and Christian Faith, and drawing on the philosophy and psychology of trust, Teresa Morgan explores the significance of trust, trustworthiness, faithfulness, and entrustedness in New Testament writings.

Trust between God, Christ, and humanity is revealed as a risky, dynamic, forward-looking, life-changing partnership. God entrusts Christ with winning the trust of humanity and bringing humanity to trust in God. God and Christ trust humanity to respond to God's initiative through Christ, and entrust the faithful with diverse forms of work for humanity and for creation. Human understanding of God and Christ is limited, and trust and faithfulness often fail, but imperfect trust is not a deal-breaker.

Morgan develops a new model of atonement, showing how trust enables humanity's release from the power of both sin and suffering. She examines the neglected concept of propositional trust and argues that it plays a key role in faith. This volume offers a compelling vision of Christian trust as soteriological, ethical, and community-forming. Trust is both the means of salvation and an end in itself, because where we trust is where we most fully live.

Teresa Morgan studied classics at Cambridge University, theology at Oxford, and violin and viola in London and Cologne. She joined Yale Divinity School in 2022, from Oxford University. Professor Morgan writes across Greek and Roman history, the New Testament, and early Christianity, especially on Greek, Roman, and early Christian ethics (e.g. Popular Morality in the Early Roman Empire, 2007), Greek and Roman education (Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds, 1998), and Paul (Being ‘in Christ’ in the Letters of Paul: Saved Through Christ and In His Hands, 2020). She is currently coming to the end of a four-volume investigation of the historical evolution, early religious meaning, and contemporary significance of ancient Mediterranean and early Christian trust and faith (Roman Faith and Christian Faith, 2015, The New Testament and the Theology of Trust, 2022, Trust in Atonement (2024), and The Invention of Faith (forthcoming). When this is finished, she plans to return to ethics with a study of the evolution of Christian ethics in the first four centuries CE.

Jonathon Lookadoo is Associate Professor at the Presbyterian University and Theological Seminary in Seoul, South Korea. While his interests range widely over the world of early Christianity, he is the author of books on the Epistle of Barnabas, Ignatius of Antioch, and the Shepherd of Hermas, including The Christology of Ignatius of Antioch (Cascade, 2023).

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In this episode, I speak with Marc Redfield, professor of Comparative Literature, English, and German Studies at Brown University about his most recent work, Shibboleth: Judges, Derrida, Celan, published in 2020 by Fordham University Press. In this short but intricate and dense work, Redfield investigates the “shibboleth”—the word, if it is one, and the concept—from its roots in the Book of Judges to the contemporary global regimes of technics that are defined by constantly proliferating technologies and practices of encryption, decryption, exclusion, and inclusion. 

At the heart of this book is an insightful interpretation of two poems by the Romanian-Jewish, German-language poet Paul Celan. Redfield places Celan into a polyphonic dialogue with others who invoked “the” shibboleth: the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, William Faulkner, and the Colombian visual artist Doris Salcedo (whose 2007 installation at the Tate Modern, which bears the title Shibboleth, provides the cover image for the book). In doing so, Redfield pursues the track of shibboleth: a word to which no language can properly lay claim, a word that is both less and more than a word, that signifies both the epitome and ruin of border control technology, and that thus, despite its violent origin and role in the Biblical story, offers a locus of poetico-political affirmation.

Britt Edelen is a Ph.D. student in English at Duke University. He focuses on modernism and the relationship(s) between language, philosophy, and literature. You can find him on Twitter or send him an email.

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In A History of the Hasmonean State: Josephus and Beyond (T&T Clark, 2019), Kenneth Atkinson tells the exciting story of the nine decades of the Hasmonean rule of Judea (152 - 63 BCE) by going beyond the accounts of the Hasmoneans in Josephus in order to bring together new evidence to reconstruct how the Hasmonean family transformed their kingdom into a state that lasted until the arrival of the Romans.

Atkinson reconstructs the relationships between the Hasmonean state and the rulers of the Seleucid and the Ptolemaic Empires, the Itureans, the Nabateans, the Parthians, the Armenians, the Cappadocians, and the Roman Republic. He draws on a variety of previously unused sources, including papyrological documentation, inscriptions, archaeological evidence, numismatics, Dead Sea Scrolls, pseudepigrapha, and textual sources from the Hellenistic to the Byzantine periods.

Atkinson also explores how Josephus's political and social situation in Flavian Rome affected his accounts of the Hasmoneans and why any study of the Hasmonean state must go beyond Josephus to gain a full appreciation of this unique historical period that shaped Second Temple Judaism, and created the conditions for the rise of the Herodian dynasty and the emergence of Christianity.

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Written in Rome as a book with revelatory intentions, the early Christian work known as the Shepherd of Hermas flourished especially in the second, third, and fourth centuries CE, was quoted as scripture by several church fathers, and, on the balance of manuscript attestation and translations from Greek to other languages, “is one of the most widely attested early Christian texts” (Lookadoo, 25). By contrast, outside of a niche of scholars, the book is widely unknown and underappreciated in the 21st century. 

In The Shepherd of Hermas: A Literary, Historical, and Theological Handbook (Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2021), Jonathon Lookadoo seeks to enable a wide range of readers to engage with this unfamiliar book via a focus on the text and message of Hermas, the theological themes with coherence to more familiar books of the New Testament, metaphors unique to Hermas’s “apocalyptic” imagination, and a digestible introduction to the enduring questions of critical scholarship such as authorship, date, authority/canonicity of the Shepherd, and its complex history of reception within the church. Dr. Lookadoo joined the New Books Network to discuss these issues and more from his worthy attempt to invite a wider circle of readers into the range of books that inspired forms of early Christian piety.

Jonathon Lookadoo (Ph.D., University of Otago, 2017) is Associate Professor at the Presbyterian University and Theological Seminary in Seoul, South Korea. His research interests range across the first two centuries of Christian history, with a particular focus on the Apostolic Fathers, while also taking interest in the writings of Paul and John and their reception in the second century. In addition to the present handbook on the Shepherd of Hermas, he is the author of The Christology of Ignatius of Antioch (Cascade Books, 2023) and The Epistle of Barnabas: A Commentary (Cascade, 2022). In his spare time, he enjoys running, hiking, and KBO baseball.

Rob Heaton (Ph.D., University of Denver, 2019) hosts Biblical Studies conversations for New Books in Religion and teaches New Testament, Christian origins, and early Christianity at Anderson University in Indiana. He recently authored The Shepherd of Hermas as Scriptura Non Grata: From Popularity in Early Christianity to Exclusion from the New Testament Canon (Lexington Books, 2023). For more about Rob and his work, or to offer feedback related to this episode, please visit his website at https://www.robheaton.com.

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The Bible shaped nearly every aspect of Jewish life in the ancient world, from activities as obvious as attending synagogue to those which have lost their scriptural resonance in modernity, such as drinking water and uttering one's last words. And within a scriptural universe, no work exerted more force than the Psalter, the most cherished text among all the books of the Hebrew Bible.

A Life of Psalms in Jewish Late Antiquity (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023) clarifies the world of late ancient Judaism through the versatile and powerful lens of the Psalter. It asks a simple set of questions: Where did late ancient Jews encounter the Psalms? How did they engage with the work? And what meanings did they produce? A. J. Berkovitz answers these queries by reconstructing and contextualizing a diverse set of religious practices performed with and on the Psalter, such as handling a physical copy, reading from it, interpreting it exegetically, singing it as liturgy, invoking it as magic and reciting it as an act of piety. His book draws from and contributes to the fields of ancient Judaism, biblical reception, book history and the history of reading.

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