Reading the Christian New Testament in the Contemporary World

Reading the Christian

New Testament in the

Contemporary World

Kwok Pui-lan

On Ascension Sunday in May 2012, the faculty and students of my school who were taking part in

a travel seminar to China attended the worship service at the Shanghai Community Church. We

arrived half an hour before the service began, and the church, which can accommodate about two

thousand people, was already ﬁlled to capacity. Another two thousand people who could not get

into the sanctuary watched the worship service on closed-circuit TV in other rooms in the church

building. rough this experience and while visiting churches in other cities, we learned about and

encountered the phenomenal growth of the Chinese churches in the past twenty-ﬁve years. e

oﬃcial statistics put the number of Chinese Christians at around 30 million, but unoﬃcial ﬁgures

range from 50 to 100 million, if those who belong to the unregistered house churches are counted.

China is poised to become the country with the highest number of Christians, and China has

already become the largest printer and user of the Bible in the world. In 2012, the Amity Printing

Company in Nanjing celebrated the publishing of 100 million Bibles since its inception in 1987

(United Bible Societies 2012).

Besides China, sub-Saharan Africa has also experienced rapid church growth, especially among

the African Independent Churches, Pentecostal churches, and Roman Catholic churches. By 2025,

Africa will be the continent with the greatest number of Christians, at more than 670 million. At

the turn of the twentieth century, 70 percent of the world’s Christians were European. By 2000,

that number had dropped to 28 percent (Flatow). e shift of Christian demographics to the South

and the prospect of Christianity becoming a non-Western religion have attracted the attention of

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scholars and popular media (Sanneh 2003; Jenkins; Johnson and Ross). According to the World

Christian Encyclopedia, almost two-thirds of the readers of the Bible are Christians from Africa,

Asia, Latin America, and Oceania (around 1.178 billion) as compared to Europe and America

(around 661 million) and Orthodox Eastern Europe (around 158 million) (Patte, xxi).

ese changing Christian demographics have signiﬁcant implications for reading the Bible as

global citizens in the contemporary world. To promote global and intercultural understanding, we

can no longer read the Bible in a narrow and parochial way, without being aware of how Christians

in other parts of the world are reading it in diverse linguistic, cultural, and social contexts. In the

past decade, biblical scholars have increasingly paid attention to global perspectives on the Bible to

prepare Christians to live in our complex, pluralistic, and transnational world (Patte; Wicker, Miller,

and Dube; Roncace and Weaver). For those of us living in the Global North, it is important to pay

attention to liberative readings from the Global South and to the voices from the majority world.

Today, the ﬁeld of biblical studies has been enlivened and broadened by scholars from many social

locations and culturally and religiously diverse contexts.

The New Testament in Global Perspectives

e New Testament touches on many themes highly relevant for our times, such as racial and

ethnic relations, religious pluralism, social and political domination, gender oppression, and reli-

gious movements for resistance. e early followers of Jesus were Jews and gentiles living in the

Hellenistic world under the rule of the Roman Empire. Christianity developed largely in urban

cities in which men and women from diﬀerent linguistic, cultural, and religious backgrounds inter-

acted and commingled with one another (eissen; Meeks). Christians in the early centuries lived

among Jews and people devoted to emperor cults, Greek religion, and other indigenous traditions

in the ancient Near East. Jesus and his disciples spoke Aramaic, the common language of Palestine.

e New Testament was written in Koine Greek, the lingua franca of much of the Mediterranean

region and the Middle East since the conquest of Alexander the Great. Living under the shadow of

the Roman Empire, early Christians had to adapt to the cultures and social structures of empire, as

well as resist the domination of imperial rule.

From its beginning in Palestine and the Mediterranean, Christianity spread to other parts of the

Roman Empire and became the dominant religion during Constantine’s time. Some of the notable

early theologians hailed from northern Africa: Origen (c. 185–254) and Athanasius (c. 300–373)

from Alexandria, Tertullian (160–225) from Carthage, and Augustine (354–431) of Hippo. While

Christianity was persecuted in the Roman Empire prior to 313, it found its way to the regions east

of the Tigris River possibly as early as the beginning of the second century. Following ancient trade

routes, merchants and missionaries brought Christianity from the Mediterranean to the Persian

Gulf and across central Asia all the way to China (Baum and Winkler, 8). In the early modern

period, Christianity was brought to the Americas and other parts of the world, with the help of

the political and military power of colonizing empires. Even though Christianity was a world reli-

gion, the study of church history in the past tended to focus on Europe and North America and

to marginalize the histories in other parts of the world. Today, scholars of world Christianity have

READING THE CHRISTIAN NEW TESTAMENT IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD 7

contested such Eurocentric biases. ey have produced comprehensive accounts that restore the

peoples of Africa, the Near East, and Asia to their rightful place in the rich and multilayered Chris-

tian tradition (Hastings; Irvin and Sunquist 2001; 2012; Sanneh 2007).

e translation of the Bible, especially the New Testament, into the native and vernacular

languages of diﬀerent peoples was and remains an important strategy of Christian missions. e

United Bible Societies (2013) report that the complete Bible has been translated into at least 451

languages and the New Testament into some 1,185. e Bible is the most translated collection of

texts in the world. ere are now 2,370 languages in which at least one book of the Bible has been

produced. Although this ﬁgure represents less than half of some 6,000 languages and dialects pres-

ently in use in the world, it includes the primary means of communication of well over 90 percent

of the world’s population.

Most Christians are more familiar with the New Testament than the Hebrew Bible. e New

Testament is read and preached throughout the world in liturgical settings and worship services,

taught in seminaries and church Sunday schools, studied in private devotions, and discussed in

Bible study groups, women’s fellowships, college campuses, and grassroots religious organizations

and movements. Christians, Jews, Muslims, and atheists debate the meaning of Jesus and the gospel

in books, mass media, and on the Internet. e life and the story of Jesus Christ have been depicted

and interpreted in popular culture, such as ﬁlms, songs, music videos, ﬁction, blogs, websites, photo-

graphs, paintings, sculpture, and other forms of art. e study of the New Testament is not limited

to the study of the biblical text, but includes how the text is used in concrete contexts in Christian

communities, popular media, and public spheres.

e Bible is taken to mean many things in our contemporary world. Christian communities

regard the Bible as Scripture, and many Christians think that it has authority over their beliefs and

moral behavior. In the academy, the Bible is treated more as a historical document, to be studied by

rigorous historical criticism. Increasingly, the Bible is also seen as a cultural product, embedded in

the sociocultural and ideological assumptions of its time. e meaning of the Bible is not ﬁxed but

is continually produced as readers interact with it in diﬀerent contexts. e diverse understanding of

what the Bible is often creates a clash of opinions. For example, Christians may think Lady Gaga’s

“Judas” video (2011) has gone too far in deviating from orthodox teaching. ere is also a wide gap

in the ways the Bible is read in the church and academy. e experts’ reading may challenge the

beliefs of those sitting in the pews.

In the ﬁeld of biblical studies, Fernando F. Segovia (34–52) delineates three stages in the devel-

opment of academic biblical criticism in the twentieth century. e historical-critical method has

been the dominant mode of interpretation in academia since the middle of the nineteenth century.

e meaning of the text is seen as residing behind the text—in the world that shaped the text, in the

author’s intention, or both. e second stage is literary criticism, which emerged in the middle of

1970s in dialogue with literary and psychoanalytic theory. e literary critics emphasize the mean-

ing in the text and focus on genre, plot, structure, rhetoric, levels of narration, and characterization

as depicted in the world of the text. e third stage is cultural studies or ideological criticism of the

Bible, which developed also in the 1970s, when critics from the two-thirds world, feminist theolo-

gians, and racial and ethnic minority scholars in North America began to increase their numbers in

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the guild. ey have increasingly paid attention to the ﬂesh-and-blood readers in front of the text,

who employ diﬀerent methods, such as storytelling and reader-response criticism, in their interac-

tion with the text to construct meaning in response to concerns arising from their communities.

e shift to the ﬂesh-and-blood reader contests the assumption that there is a “universal” reader

and an “objective” interpretation applicable to all times and places. e claim of an “objective” and

“scientiﬁc” reading is based on a positivistic understanding of historiography, which presumes that

historical facts can be objectively reconstructed, following established criteria in Western academia.

But the historical-critical method is only one of the many methods and should not be taken as the

“universal” norm for judging other methodologies. Its dominance is the result of the colonial legacy

as well as the continued hegemony of Eurocentric knowledge and cultural production of our time.

Nowadays, many methods are available, and biblical critics have increasingly used interdisciplinary

approaches and a combination of theories and methods, such as postmodern theory, postcolonial

theory, and queer studies, for interpretation (Crossley; Moore 2010).

What this means is the democratization of the study of the Bible, because no one group of

people has a monopoly over the meaning of the Bible and no single method can exhaust its “truths.”

To understand the richness of the biblical tradition, we have to learn to listen to the voices of

people from multiple locations and senses of belonging. Eleazar S. Fernandez (140) points out, “real

ﬂesh-and-blood readers assume a variety of positions—in relation to time, geography, geopolitics,

diaspora location, social location, religion, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and so on—in the power-

knowledge nexus that inform their readings and cultural or religious discursive productions in the

global market.” Interpreting the Bible in global perspectives requires us to pay attention to the

contextual character of reading and the relationships and tensions between the global and the local.

Reading the New Testament in Diverse Contexts

e shift from the author and the text to the reader means that we need to understand the ways the

Bible functions in diverse sociolingusitic contexts (Blount 1995). Our critical task must go further

than analyzing the text and the processes for production and interpretation, to include the cultural

and social conditions that inﬂuence the history of reception. Let us go back to the examples of

reading the Bible in the Chinese and African contexts. When Christianity arrived in China, the

Chinese had a long hermeneutical tradition of interpreting Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist texts.

e missionaries and biblical translators had to borrow from indigenous religious ideas to trans-

late biblical terminologies, such as God, heaven, and hell. e rapid social and political changes in

modern China aﬀected how the Bible is read by Christians living in a Communist society (Eber,

Wan, and Walf). When the Bible was introduced to the African continent, it encountered a rich

and complex language world of oral narratives, legends, proverbs, and folktales. e interpretation

of oral texts is diﬀerent from that of written ones. In some instances, the translation of the Bible

into the vernacular languages has changed the oral cultures into written cultures, with both posi-

tive and negative eﬀects on social development (Sanneh 1989). And if we examine the history of

translation and reception of the English Bible, we will see how the processes have been aﬀected by

READING THE CHRISTIAN NEW TESTAMENT IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD 9

the rise of nationalism, colonial expansion, and the diverse forms of English used in the English-

speaking world (Sugirtharajah 2002, 127–54).

Some Christians may feel uneasy about the fact that the Bible is read in so many diﬀerent ways.

For the fundamentalists who believe in biblical inerrancy and literal interpretation, multiple ways

of reading undermine biblical authority. Even liberals might wonder if the diversity of readings will

open the doors to relativism. But as James Barr has pointed out, the appeal to the Bible as author-

ity for all doctrinal matters and the assumption that its meaning is ﬁxed cannot be veriﬁed by the

Bible itself. Both Jesus and Paul took the liberty to repudiate, criticize, and reinterpret parts of the

Hebrew Bible (Barr, 12–19). Moreover, as Mary Ann Tolbert has noted, since the Reformation,

when the doctrine of sola scriptura was brought to the forefront, the invocation of biblical authority

by various ecclesiastical bodies has generally been negative and exclusive. “It has been used most

often to exclude certain groups or people, to pass judgment on various disapproved activities, and to

justify morally or historically debatable positions [such as slavery]” (1998, 142). e doctrinal appeal

to biblical authority and the insistence on monocultural reading often mask power dynamics, which

allow some groups of people to exercise control over others who have less power, including women,

poor people, racial and ethnic minorities, and gay people and lesbians.

Multiple readings and plurality of meaning do not necessarily lead to relativism, but can foster

deeper awareness of our own interpretive assumptions and broaden our horizons. In his introduc-

tion to the Global Bible Commentary, Daniel Patte (xxi–xxxii) oﬀers some helpful suggestions. (1)

We have to acknowledge the contextual character of our interpretation. ere is no context-free

reading, whether in the past or in the present. (2) We have to stop and listen to the voices of bibli-

cal readers who have long been silenced in each context. (3) We have to learn the reading strategies

and critical tradition developed in other parts of the world, such as enculturation, liberation, and

inter(con)textuality. Contextual readings do not mean anything goes or that interpreters may pro-

ceed without self-critique. (4) We have to respect other people’s readings and assume responsibility

for our own interpretation. (5) Other people’s readings often lead us to see our blind spots, and

invite us to notice aspects of the Bible we have overlooked. (6) We have to learn to read with others

in community, rather than reading for or to them, assuming our reading is superior to others.

We can use the diﬀerent readings of the story of the Syrophoenician woman (Matt. 15:21-28;

Mark 7:24-30) to illustrate this point. Many Christians have been taught that the story is about

Jesus’ mission to the gentiles, because Jesus went to the border place of Tyre and Sidon and healed

the gentile woman’s daughter and praised her faith. Japanese biblical scholar Hisako Kinukawa (51–

65), however, does not emphasize gentile mission but Jesus’ crossing ethnic boundaries to accept

others. She places the story in the cultic purity and ethnic exclusion of ﬁrst-century Palestine and

draws parallels to the discrimination of Koreans as minorities living in Japan. We shall see that the

generalization of ﬁrst-century culture may be problematic. Nevertheless, Kinukawa argues that the

gentile woman changed Jesus’ attitude from rejection to aﬃrmation and created an opportunity for

Jesus to cross the boundary. Jesus has set an example, she says, for Japanese people to challenge their

assumptions of a homogeneous race, to overcome their prejudice toward ethnic minorities, and to

respect other peoples’ dignity and human rights.

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On the African continent, Musa W. Dube, from Botswana, emphasizes the importance of read-

ing with ordinary readers. She set out to ﬁnd out how women in the African Independent Churches

in Botswana read the Matthean version of the story (2000, 187–90). She found that some of the

women emphasized that Jesus was testing the woman’s faith. ey said the meaning of the word

“dog” should not be taken literally, as Jesus often spoke in parables. Several women did not read the

story as if Jesus had insulted the woman by comparing the Canaanites as “dogs” to the Israelites as

children. Instead, they saw the Canaanite woman as one of the children because of her faith, and the

“dogs” referred to the demonic spirits. is must be understood in the context of the belief in spirits

in the African religious worldview. e women interpreted the woman’s answer to Jesus, that even

the dogs eat the crumbs from the master’s table (Matt. 15:27), to mean that no one is permanently

and totally undeserving. e women believed that Jesus had come for all people, without regard for

race and ethnicities.

ese two examples show how social and cultural backgrounds aﬀect the interpretation of the

story and the lessons drawn for today. e majority of interpreters, whether scholars or ordinary

readers, have focused on the interaction between Jesus and the woman. I would like to cite two

other readings that bring to the forefront other details of the text that have been overlooked. Laura

E. Donaldson reads the story from a postcolonial Native American perspective and places the

“demon-possessed” daughter at the center of her critical analysis. In the text, the daughter does not

speak, and her illness is considered taboo and stigmatizing. Donaldson challenges our complicity in

such a reading and employs the insights of disabilities studies to demystify the construction of “able”

and “disabled” persons. She then points out that the Canaanites were the indigenous people of the

land, and the daughter might not be suﬀering from an illness pejoratively identiﬁed as “demon

possession” by the Christian text. Instead, the daughter may be in an altered state of consciousness,

which is a powerful form of knowing in many indigenous spiritual traditions. For Donaldson, the

daughter may “signify a trace of the indigenous,” who has the power to access other sites of knowl-

edge (104–5).

While many commentators have noted the lowly position of dogs in ancient Mediterranean

and Near East culture, Stephen D. Moore, who grew up in Ireland and teaches in the United

States, looks at the Matthean story through the prism of human-animal relations. He contrasts the

construction of the son of man with the dog-woman in Matthew. While the son of man is not an

animal and asserts power, sovereignty, and self-control, following the elite Greco-Roman concept

of masculinity, the dog-woman of Canaan embodies the categories of savages, women, and beasts.

Jesus said that he was sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel and it was not fair to take the

children’s food and throw it to the dogs. e problem of the dog-woman is that she is not a sheep

woman. e image of Canaan as heathen, savage, and less than human justiﬁed the colonization

of non-Christian people in Africa, the Americas, and other regions. Moore notes that the image

of “heathens” in nineteenth- and twentieth-century biblical commentary conjured up the reality of

“unsaved” dark-skinned people in need of Christ and in need of civilizing, and hence in need of

colonizing (Moore 2013, 63). Moore’s reading points out that mission to the gentiles may not be

benign, and might mask colonial impulses.

READING THE CHRISTIAN NEW TESTAMENT IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD 11

ese diverse interpretations of the Syrophoenician woman’s story illustrate how reading with

other people can radically expand our imagination. We can see how a certain part of the story is

emphasized or reinterpreted by diﬀerent readers to address particular concerns. Sensitivity to con-

textual and cross-cultural interpretation helps us to live in a pluralistic world in which people have

diﬀerent worldviews and assumptions. rough genuine dialogue and listening to others, we can

enrich ourselves and work with others to create a better world.

Interpretation for Liberation

In the second half of the twentieth century, people’s popular movements and protests led to the

development of liberation theologies in various parts of the world. In Africa and Asia, anticolo-

nial struggles resulted in political independence and people’s demand for cultural autonomy. In

Latin America, theologians and activists criticized the dependence theory of development, which

continues to keep poor countries dependent on rich countries because of unequal global economic

structures. Women from all over the globe, racial and ethnic minorities, and lesbian, gay, bisexual,

and transgender people have also begun to articulate their theologies. People who are multiply

oppressed began to read the Bible through the intersection of gender, race, class, sexuality, religion,

and colonialism. I focus on liberative readings from the Global South here.

Following Vatican II (1962–1965), Latin American liberation theology began to develop in the

1960s and focused on social and economic oppression and the disparity between the rich and the

poor. Using Marxist analysis as a critical tool, liberation theologians in Latin America argued that

the poor are the subjects of history and that God has a preferential option for the poor. ey insisted

that theology is a reﬂection of social praxis, which seeks to change the oppressive situation that the

majority of the people ﬁnd themselves in. Juan Luis Segundo (9) developed a hermeneutical circle

that consists of four steps: (1) our way of experiencing reality leads to ideological suspicion, (2)

which we apply to the whole ideological superstructure, and especially theology, (3) being aware of

how prevailing interpretation of the Bible does not take important data into account, resulting in

(4) the development of a new hermeneutic.

Latin American theologians contested the formulation of traditional Christology and presented

Christ as the liberator. e gospel of Jesus Christ is not about saving individual souls, without

import for our concrete lives. In A eology of Liberation, Gustavo Gutiérrez (102–5) argues that

Christ is the liberator who opts for the poor. Jesus’ death and resurrection liberates us from sin.

Sin, however, is not private, but a social, historical fact. It is the absence of fellowship of love in

relationship among persons and the breach of relationship with God. Christ oﬀers us the gift of

radical liberation and enables us to enter into communion with God and with others. Liberation,

for Gutiérrez, has three levels: political liberation, liberation in the course of history, and liberation

from sin and into communion with God.

Latin American women theologians have criticized their male colleagues’ lack of attention to

women’s issues and machismo in Latin American culture. Elsa Tamez, from Mexico, is a leading

scholar who has published extensively on reading the New Testament from a Latin American

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feminist perspective (2001; 2007). She has raised questions about Jesus’ relation with women in the

Gospels and the class diﬀerence between rich and poor women in the early Christian movement.

e discussion of the Bible in the base Christian communities and women’s groups helped spread

the ideas of liberation theology among the populace. A collection of discussions of the gospel by

Nicaraguan peasants who belonged to the Christian community of Solentiname was published as

e Gospel in Solentiname (Cardenal). e peasants approached the Bible from their life situation of

extreme poverty, and they connected with Jesus’ revolutionary work in solidarity with the poor of his

time. Some of the peasants also painted the scenes from the Gospels and identiﬁed biblical events

with events leading to the 1979 Sandinista revolution (Scharper and Scharper). In response to the

liberation movement, which had spread to the whole continent, the Vatican criticized liberation

theology and replaced progressive bishops with conservative ones. But second-generation libera-

tion theologians continue the work of their pioneers and expand the liberation theological project

to include race, gender, sexuality, migration, and popular religions (Petrella).

Unlike in Latin America, where Christians are the majority of the population, Christians in

many parts of Africa and Asia live among people of other faith traditions. Here, interpretation of

the Bible follows two broad approaches. e liberation approach focuses on sociopolitical dimen-

sions, such as the ﬁght over poverty, dictatorship, apartheid, and other social injustice. e encul-

turation or the indigenization approach brings the Bible into dialogue with the African or Asian

worldviews, popular religion, and cultural idiom. e two approaches are not mutually exclusive,

and a holistic transformation of society must deal with changing the sociopolitical structures as well

as the culture and mind-sets of people.

One of the key questions for those who read the Bible in religiously pluralistic contexts is how to

honor others who have diﬀerent religious identities and cultures. Some of the passages in the New

Testament have been used to support an exclusive attitude toward other religions. For example,

Jesus said that he is the way and no one comes to the Father except through him (John 14:6) and

charged his followers with the Great Commission, to “make disciples of all nations” (Matt. 28:19).

But as Wesley Ariarajah (1989) has said, the universality of Christ supports the spirit of openness,

mutual understanding, and interfaith dialogue with others. In Acts 10:9-16, Peter is challenged in

a vision to consider nothing unclean that God has made clean. He crosses the boundary that sepa-

rates Jews and gentiles and meets with Cornelius, the Roman centurion, which leads to his conver-

sion. When Paul speaks to the Athenians, he says that they are extremely religious, and he employs

a religious language diﬀerent from that when he speaks to the Jews (Acts 17:22-31). Ariarajah

argues that openness to others and dialogue does not contradict Christian witness.

In their protests against political oppression and dictatorship, Asian Christians have reread the

Bible to empower them to ﬁght for human rights and dignity. Minjung theology arose in South

Korea during the 1970s against the dictatorship of the Park Chung Hee government. e word

minjung comes from two Chinese characters meaning the masses of people. New Testament scholar

Ahn Byung Mu points out that in the Gospel of Mark, the ochlos (“crowd or multitude”) follows

Jesus from place to place, listens to his teachings, and witnesses his miracles. ey form the back-

ground of Jesus’ activities. ey stand on Jesus’ side, against the rulers of Jerusalem, who criticize and

challenge Jesus (Mark 2:4-7; 3:2-22; 11:8; 11:27; 11:32). Jesus has “compassion for them, because

READING THE CHRISTIAN NEW TESTAMENT IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD 13

they were like sheep without a shepherd” (6:34). Jesus proclaims to them “the kingdom of God has

come near” (1:15). He identiﬁes with the suﬀering minjung and oﬀers them a new hope and new

life. Minjung theology developed a political hermeneutics not for the elite but for the people, and

spoke to the Korean reality at the time.

In India, the caste system has subjected the Dalits—the “untouchables”—to the lowest rank

of society. Dalits are the oppressed and the broken. ey are discriminated against in terms of

education, occupation, social interaction, and social mobility. e prejudice against the Dalits is so

deep-seated that they face a great deal of discrimination even in Indian churches. Dalit theology

emerged because of the insensitivity of the Indian churches to the plight of the Dalits and to give

voice to Dalits’ struggle for justice. In constructing a Dalit Christology, Peniel Rajkumar (115–26)

ﬁnds Jesus’ healing stories particularly relevant to the Dalit situation. Jesus touches and heals the

leper (Mark 1:40-45), and transcends the social norms regarding purity and pollution. Afterward,

Jesus asks the man to show his body to the priest (Mark 1:44) to bear witness that he has been

healed and to confront the ideological purity system that alienates him. Jesus is angry at the system

that maintains ritual purity to alienate and classify people. In coming to ask for healing, the leper

also shows his faith through his willingness to break the cultural norm of purity. Again, we will ﬁnd

that the generalization of Jewish culture and purity taboo may be open to criticism. Jesus’ anger

toward injustice and his partnership with the leper to create a new social reality would help Dalits

in their present struggles. e emphasis of Jesus’ crossing boundaries is a recurrent theme in other

Dalit readings (Nelavala). Many of the Dalit women from poor rural and urban areas are illiterate

and do not have access to the written text of the Bible. e use of methods such as storytelling and

role-play has helped them gain insights into biblical stories (Melanchthon).

In Africa, biblical scholars have addressed poverty, apartheid, religious and ethnic strife, HIV

and AIDS, and political oppression, all of which have wreaked havoc in the continent. During

apartheid in South Africa, a black theology of liberation was developed to challenge the Western

and white outlook of the Christian church and to galvanize people to ﬁght against apartheid. Itu-

meleng J. Mosala developed a historical-materialist reading of the Bible based on black history and

culture. Mosala and his colleagues from Africa have asserted that Latin American liberation her-

meneutics has not taken seriously the history of the blacks and Indians. His reading of Luke 1 and

2 brings out the material condition of the text, focusing on the colonial occupation of Palestine by

Rome and the imperial extraction from peasants and the poor. He then uses the history, culture, and

struggle of black people as a hermeneutical tool to lay bare the ideological assumptions in Luke’s

Gospel, showing it to be speaking for the class interest of the rich and eclipsing the experiences of

the poor. He charges that some of the black theologians have continued to use Western and white

hermeneutics even as they oppose the white, dominant groups. What is necessary is a new herme-

neutics based on a black working-class perspective, which raises new questions in the interpretative

process and enables a mutual interrogation between the text and situation.

In order to develop this kind of hermeneutics, biblical scholars must be socially engaged and

read the Bible from the underside. With whom one is reading the Bible becomes both an episte-

mological and an ethical question. Several African biblical scholars emphasize the need for socially

engaged scholars to read the Bible with ordinary poor and marginalized “readers.” Gerald O. West

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maintains that if liberation theology begins with the experience of the poor and the oppressed, then

these persons must be invited and included in the dialogical process of doing theology and reading

the Bible. He describes the process of contextual Bible study among the poor, the roles of engaged

biblical scholars, and lessons gleaned from the process. In the contextual reading of Luke 4:16-22, for

instance, the women living around Pietermaritzburg and Durban related the meaning of setting the

prisoners free, healing of the blind, and the relief of debts to their society. ey discussed what they

could do following the insights from the story to organize their community and create social change.

e Circle of Concerned African Women eologians, formed in 1989, has encouraged Chris-

tian women from the African continent to produce and publish biblical and contextual hermeneu-

tics. Some of the contributions have been published in Other Ways of Reading: African Women and the

Bible (Dube 2001). e authors discuss storytelling methods, reading with and from nonacademic

readers, toward a postapartheid black feminist reading, and the divination method of interpreta-

tion. e volume demystiﬁes the notion of biblical canon, showing how women of the African

continent have read the Bible with the canon of various African oral cultures. Aspects of African

cultures serve as theories for analyzing the Bible. e volume is also conversant with feminist read-

ings from other parts of the world, and in particular with African American women’s hermeneutical

approaches.

e HIV and AIDS epidemic brings enormous loss of life and suﬀering in the African conti-

nent, and the virus has spread mostly among heterosexual people. ere is an increasing concern

that in the sub-Saharan region, HIV infects more women than men. Musa Dube has played a key

role in helping the African churches and theological institutions in addressing HIV and AIDS

issues. In e HIV and AIDS Bible (Dube 2008), she implores scholars to develop biblical schol-

arship that is prophetic and healing. She challenges patriarchy and gender justice, and urges the

churches to move beyond their comfort zone to respond to people aﬀected by the virus. e church

is HIV positive, she claims. Reading with people living with AIDS allows her to see the potential

of the Bible to liberate and heal. She brings new insights to reading the miracles and healing stories

of Jesus, such as the healing of Jairus’s daughter (Mark 5:21-45). Her reading breaks the stigma and

silence around HIV and AIDS while calling for adequate and compassionate care, and placing the

HIV and AIDS epidemic within the larger context of other social discrimination.

e biblical readings from the Global South contribute to a global scholarship that takes into

account other religious texts and classics in what is called intercultural and cross-textual reading

(Lee). It is also interpreted through the lens of oral texts and retold and performed through story-

telling, role-play, and skits. e exploration of these methods decentralizes Eurocentric modes of

thinking that have gripped biblical studies for so long. It allows us to see the Bible and the world

with fresh perspectives and new insights.

Contemporary Approaches to the New Testament

Books that introduce the wide array of contemporary methods used to interpret the New Testa-

ment are readily available (Anderson and Moore; Crossley). I have selected a few approaches that

READING THE CHRISTIAN NEW TESTAMENT IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD 15

have global signiﬁcance, as scholars from both the Global North and the Global South have used

them and commented on them to illustrate current discussions shaping biblical scholarship. We will

look at feminist approaches, social scientiﬁc approaches, racial and ethnic minority approaches, and

postcolonial approaches.

Feminist Approaches

e New Testament was written by authors who lived in a patriarchal world with androcentric

values and mind-sets. For a long time, churches have used parts of the Bible to deny women’s full

participation and treat them as second-class citizens in church and society. For example, churches

have denied women’s ordination based on the argument that all of Jesus’ disciples were male. People

have also cited the household codes (Col. 3:18—4:1; Eph. 5:21—6:9; 1 Peter 2:18—3:7) to support

wives’ submission to their husbands. Paul’s teaching that women should be silent in the church (1

Cor. 14:34-35) has often been used to deny women’s religious leadership. It is little wonder that

some Western feminists have concluded that the Bible is irredeemably sexist and have become post-

Christian. But feminist interpreters around the globe have developed ingenious ways to read against

the grain and to ﬁnd the Bible’s liberating potential.

Christian feminists in many parts of the world have focused on stories about women in the

Gospels. ey have shown that women followed Jesus, listened to his preaching, and were healed

because of their faith. Even when the disciples deserted Jesus at the cross, women steadfastly showed

their faith. Scholars have drawn from some of these Gospel stories of women to illuminate how the

gospel may speak to women’s liberation of our time (Kinukawa; Tamez 2001). Christian women

have also reclaimed and retold these stories, imagining dialogues, and supplying diﬀerent endings.

For example, I have heard from Christian women that the ending of Mary and Martha’s story

(Luke 10:38-42) should not end in Jesus’ praising Mary over Martha, but the sisters’ inviting Jesus

to help in the kitchen so that all could continue the dialogue.

Other scholars ﬁnd that the focus on biblical women is rather limited, for it does not provide

a comprehensive framework to interpret the whole New Testament and still gives primacy and

authority to the biblical text. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s inﬂuential book In Memory of Her

(1983) presents a feminist historical-reconstructionist model, which places women at the center

of the reconstruction of the Jesus movement and early Christianity. She shows that women were

apostles, prophets, missionaries, as well as founders of household churches. She suggests that the

radical vision of Jesus’ movement was the praxis of inclusive wholeness and “discipleship of equals”

(105–59). But women’s leadership was increasingly marginalized in the second century, as patri-

archalization set in when the church became more institutionalized. Schüssler Fiorenza’s feminist

model of critical interpretation insists that women should have the authority to judge whether a

particular text is liberating or oppressive in the context of its reception.

Another approach is to use historical data and social theories to investigate the social world of

early Christianity and to present a feminist social history. ese studies look at women’s marriage,

status in the family, work and occupation, slave women and widows, and women’s resistance in

the Roman Empire (Schottroﬀ; Yamaguchi). e parable of the leaven, for instance, makes visible

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women’s work and uses a woman baking bread to describe the kingdom of God (Matt. 13:33; Luke

13:20-21). ese works examine the impact of Roman persecution on women, the exploitative

economic system, and Jewish resistance movements to provide a wider context to read the New

Testament. Inﬂuenced by liberation theology, Elsa Tamez (2007) employs class analysis to study the

Pastoral Letters. She describes how the rich people had challenged the leadership of the elders and

presbyters in the church to which 1 Timothy was addressed. e injunction that women should be

silent and submissive (1 Tim. 2:11-12) targeted the rich women, who used their power and status

to cause troubles in the church.

Feminist scholars have also used literary and rhetorical approaches. For example, Ingrid Rosa

Kitzberger uses a literary approach to examine the women in the Gospel of John, paying attention

to the characterization of the Samaritan woman, Mary Magdalene, Mary and Martha, and the

mother of Jesus, the intention of the narrator, narrative devices and rhetorical strategies, and the

sequential perception of the reader in the reading process. Her goal is to present a reading against

the grain—a feminist hermeneutics that empowers women. Antoinette Clark Wire reconstructs a

picture of the women prophets in the church of ﬁrst-century Corinth by analyzing Paul’s rhetoric

in 1 Corinthians. She suggests that the Corinthian women prophets claim direct access to resur-

rected life in Christ through the Spirit. ese women sometimes conﬂicted with Paul, but they were

known for proclaiming God’s thought in prophecy and responding for the people to God (11:5;

14:1-38). Others use rhetorical criticism not to reconstruct historical reality but to focus on the

persuasive power of the text to motivate action and shape the values and ethos of the community.

Schüssler Fiorenza (1992, 40–50) has suggested a rhetorical approach that unmasks the interlock-

ing system of oppression because of racism, classism, sexism, and colonialism. She coins the term

kyriarchy (from kyrios, the Greek word for “lord” or “master”) to describe these multiple systems

of domination and subordination, involving more than gender oppression. Her goal is to create

an alternative rhetorical space that respects the equality and dignity of women and is deﬁned by

the logic of radical democracy. She uses the term ekklēsia gynaikōn or “wo/men church” to denote

this political hermeneutical space. e Greek term ekklēsia means the democratic assembly, and

“wo/men” signiﬁes not the feminine gender (as ladies, wives, mothers, etc.) but full decision-making

political subjects. She argues that “one can theorize ekklēsia of wo/men not only as a virtual utopian

space but also as an already partially realized space of radical equality, as a site of feminist struggles

to transform social and religious institutions and discourses” (2007, 73). Feminist biblical scholars

have also begun to unpack the structures of masculinity in the ancient world and how they were

embedded in the biblical text (Moore and Anderson).

Social-Scientific Approaches

As mentioned above, biblical interpreters have used social sciences to learn about the social and cul-

tural world of New Testament texts. One of the early important ﬁgures is Gerd eissen, who studied

the sociology of early Palestinian Christianity by focusing on the three roles of the Jesus movement:

the wandering charismatics, their supporters in local communities, and the bearers of revelation. e

use of social scientiﬁc methods has broadened the scope and sources of the third quest or newest

quest of the historical Jesus since the 1980s. Billed as interdisciplinary research, scholars claim to

READING THE CHRISTIAN NEW TESTAMENT IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD 17

possess at their disposal the latest archaeological knowledge, sociological analysis, cultural anthro-

pology, and other newest social-scientiﬁc tools. Scholars have employed theories from the study of

millennial movements, Mary Douglas’s theory of purity and pollution, and non-Western medicine,

magic, and charismatic religion to scrutinize the Jesus movement (e.g., Gager; Crossan 1991; Borg).

Schüssler Fiorenza has criticized the social-scientiﬁc quest of Jesus. She notes that the emer-

gence of this third quest coincided with conservative politics of the Reagan and atcher era and

with growing right-wing fundamentalist movements. She chastises the restoration of historical

positivism as corresponding to political conservatism and the proliferation of the historical Jesus

books as feeding “into literalist fundamentalism by reasserting disinterested scientiﬁc positivism

in order to shore up the scholarly authority and universal truth of their research portrayal of Jesus”

(2000, 46). While these Jesus books are written for popular consumption with their authors fea-

tured in mass media, the works of feminist scholars are sidelined and dismissed as being too “politi-

cal” and not “objective” enough.

From a South African perspective, Mosala asks whether the social-scientiﬁc approaches to the

Bible are “one step forward, two steps back” (43). On the one hand, the social-scientiﬁc approaches

are useful, he says, because they help us to see biblical texts as ideological products of social systems

and power relations. Far too often, middle-class Christians have the tendency to psychologize or

use an individualist lens while reading the Bible. On the other hand, the social-scientiﬁc approaches

as practiced in the white, liberal, North American and European academy often reﬂect bourgeois

interests. Many scholars, for example, have adapted interpretive sociology and structural-function-

alist analysis to study the social world of the New Testament. e structural-functionalist approach

looks at how social systems are related to one another so that society can function as a whole.

Focusing more on integration, stability, and unity, it is less prone to analyze social confrontation

and conﬂict. Using eissen’s study of Palestinian Christianity as an example, Mosala points out

that eissen fails to provide an adequate structural location of the Jesus movement in the political

economy of the Roman Empire and does not deal with the real economic and political contradic-

tions of the time (64–65). As such, eissen’s study will be of limited use for the black South Afri-

cans struggling against apartheid and other social oppression. Mosala challenges biblical scholars to

be open about their own class interest and the limitations of their methods.

One of the important dimensions of social-scientiﬁc criticism is the introduction of models from

social and cultural anthropology. In addition to the ancient Jewish, Hellenistic, and Roman cultures

that biblical scholars have been studying, Bruce J. Malina, Jerome H. Neyrey, and others suggest a

pan-Mediterranean culture, with values and ethos markedly diﬀerent from those in North Ameri-

can culture. e pivotal characteristics of Mediterranean culture in the ﬁrst century included honor

and shame, patronage and clientele, dyadic personality, and rules of purity. ey apply the study of

Mediterranean culture to interpret the group development of the Jesus movement and Paul’s Letters.

Scholars have questioned whether it is appropriate to impose models of contemporary societies onto

the ancient Mediterranean. ey remain doubtful whether the pivotal values of honor and shame are

so diﬀerent from the values in North American and northern European cultures. James G. Crossley

also notes that “the Mediterranean frequently blurs into the contemporary Arab world, an area of

renewed interest in American and European politics and media in the past forty years” (27).

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As a discipline, anthropology emerged during the colonial time and often served the interests of

empire. e hypothesis of a distinct Mediterranean culture and personality as contrasted with those

in Western society reinforces a binary construction of the colonizers and the colonized. Malina and

others have imported twentieth-century anthropological studies to the study of ﬁrst-century Gali-

lean and Judean society, assuming that Mediterranean cultures had remained unchanged over the

years. Furthermore, the honor and shame code is attributed to a strong division of sexual and gender

roles in the region and to the anxiety of Mediterranean men over their manhood. Female scholars

such as Marianne Sawicki have voiced concerns that the study of honor and shame has largely fol-

lowed a masculinist script and that women’s experiences are overlooked and diﬀerent. She suggests

that the honor-shame sensibility might simply be an ethnocentric projection of the Euro-American

male researchers onto the people they are studying (77).

R. S. Sugirtharajah, from Sri Lanka, has criticized Orientalism in the work of biblical scholars

who use social-scientiﬁc methods. In Orientalism, Edward W. Said questions the representation

of the Middle East as inferior, exotic, and stagnant in Western scholarship. Sugirtharajah notes

prevalent Orientalist tendencies and the recycling of Orientalist practices in biblical scholarship,

especially in the study of the social and cultural world of Jesus. He surmises that designations such

as “Israel,” “Judah,” “the Holy Land,” “Mediterranean,” “world of Jesus,” and “cultural world of

Jesus” are “ideologically charged rhetoric and markers of Eurocentric and Christian-centric con-

ceptualizations of that part of the world” (2012, 103). New Testament scholars have reinscribed

Orientalist messages by suggesting the idea of a static Orient, by generalizing and reducing com-

plex Mediterranean cultures to a few essentials, by gender stereotyping, and by highlighting the

contrast between the East and the West. Jesus is depicted as one who is secure in his culture and

yet critical of it through redeﬁning honor culture and rearranging Mediterranean values. Since the

publication of Said’s work, many disciplines have become cautious about Orientalist methods and

tendencies. But such methods have resurfaced in biblical studies and books that display Orientalist

biases. Sugirtharajah points out that some of them have even become best sellers in mainstream

culture (102–18).

Racial and Ethnic Minority Approaches

Racial and ethnic minorities in the United States began to develop their hermeneutical approaches

to the Bible during the struggles of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. e development of

black theology, Hispanic/Latino theology, and Asian American theology in the United States could

not be separated from the ferment and protest against imperialism and apartheid in the Global

South. Tat-siong Benny Liew (2013) characterizes racial and ethnic minority readings of the New

Testament as “border crossing”—transcending the border of theology and biblical studies and the

border between biblical studies and other disciplines. He also succinctly delineates the diﬀerent

stages of the development of such readings. In the ﬁrst stage, racial and ethnic minority theologians

and biblical scholars interpreted the biblical message through their social realities and experiences.

For example, James Cone’s black theology (1969; 1973) relates the gospel of Jesus to black power

and freedom and argues that Christ is black, because Christ identiﬁes with the powerless in society.

Mexican American theologian Virgilio Elizondo relates the story of the marginalized Galilean

READING THE CHRISTIAN NEW TESTAMENT IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD 19

Jesus who came from the borderland area of Galilee to the story of Hispanic/Latino people as a

new mestizo people. Asian American Chan-Hie Kim sees parallels between the Cornelius story in

Acts 10–11 and Asian immigrant experience because both Cornelius and Kim are outsiders. Other

scholars began to ﬁnd minority subjects in the Bible and presented positive images of them or more

complex pictures, such as the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8:26-40 (C. J. Martin 1989), and discussed

slavery in early Christianity and modern interpretations (Lewis; Martin 1991).

In the current, second stage, racial and ethnic minority scholars do not simply employ diﬀerent

methods of biblical criticism with a racial inﬂection; they are more thoroughly informed by schol-

arship in ethnic studies and cultural studies. eir interpretation of the New Testament no longer

begins with the biblical texts but with their experience as racial and ethnic minorities living in the

United States. Liew characterizes this shift of emphasis as the move from “reading Scripture read-

ing race” to “reading race reading Scripture” (2013, 183). Instead of ﬁnding “race” in the biblical text,

new frameworks and paradigms of engaging with the Bible are sought. is shift can clearly be seen

in African Americans and the Bible (Wimbush), which considers the Bible in contemporary Afri-

can American culture, including poetry, aesthetics of sacred space, gospel music and spirituals, rap

music, folk oratory, and many other contexts. Liew’s own volume What Is Asian American Biblical

Hermeneutics? (2008) reads all the major genres of the New Testament with Asian American litera-

ture, ethnic studies, and current events. David A. Sánchez’s study of Revelation includes signiﬁcant

resources from Latino/a studies and Chicana/o studies.

Another signiﬁcant development in the second stage is the move beyond a uniﬁed and essen-

tialized notion of race to an acknowledgment of internal diversity within each racial and ethnic

minority group. African American women articulate the issues of womanist interpretation of the

Bible, placing gender at the intersection of race, class, and other anthropological referents. Dem-

etrius K. Williams examines the biblical foundation of understanding of gender in black churches,

while Rachel Annette Saint Clair presents a womanist reading of Mark’s Gospel. Within the Asian

American community, heterogeneity can be seen not only in the addition of women’s voices but also

in readings by diverse ethnic groups, intergenerational interpretations, and readings by Asian Amer-

ican adoptees and queer people (Foskett and Kuan; Cheng). Likewise, the diversity of the Hispanic/

Latino people has been highlighted, and notions of borderland and mestizaje diﬀer among diﬀerent

ethnic groups. Manuel Villalobos has combined the insights from feminist and queer theories to

read the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts to bring hope and aﬃrmation to Latino queer bodies.

Moving into the third stage, racial and ethnic minority theologians and biblical scholars have

begun collaboration across minority groups. e move from articulating minority experience vis-à-

vis the white dominant culture to conversing with other racial and ethnic minorities signals a new

awareness, which is much needed to prepare for 2040, when, if current trends continue, there will

be no racial and ethnic majority in the United States. An important example of such endeavor is the

volume ey Were All Together in One Place? Toward Minority Criticism, coedited by African, Asian,

and Hispanic Americans (Bailey, Liew, and Segovia). is collaboration shows a desire for mutual

learning and communication across color lines. In the future, more attention needs to be paid both

to engaging Native American readings and, given our transnational world, to linking minority criti-

cism with readings in the Global South.

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Postcolonial Approaches

Emerging in the late 1970s, postcolonial studies has had signiﬁcant inﬂuence in the ﬁelds of the

humanities and social sciences. e preﬁx post- does not simply signify the period after colonialism

in a chronological sense, but also refers to reading and social practices that aim at contesting colo-

nialism and lifting up the voices of the suppressed and formerly colonized. Postcolonial criticism

has drawn from many disciplines and was introduced to biblical studies in the 1990s, particularly

through the works and encouragement of R. S. Sugirtharajah (1998; 2002). Other scholars have

included a postcolonial optic in the study of the New Testament; for example, Tat-siong Benny

Liew (1999), Fernando F. Segovia, Musa W. Dube (2000), Laura D. Donaldson, Stephen D. Moore

(2006), and me (2005).

During Jesus’ time, Galilee was under Roman imperial occupation and ruled by Herod Antipas

(4 –39 ), and the early Christian communities lived under the whims of empire. Postcolonial

critics of the New Testament share common interests with those contributing to the emerging sub-

ﬁeld of “empire studies,” promoted enthusiastically by Richard A. Horsley (1997; 2002) and other

scholars (e.g., Carter; Crossan 2007). is subﬁeld consists of books and articles with the recur-

rent words empire or imperial in their titles and with the intention of using the theme of empire to

reframe New Testament interpretation. While the authors of works in empire studies are interested

in the ancient imperial contexts, and some have related their work to contemporary contexts, they

may or may not use postcolonial studies to aid their research and few have shown particular interest

in aﬃxing the label “postcolonial” to their works (Moore 2006, 14–19).

Postcolonial critics emphasize that biblical texts are not innocent. Sugirtharajah, for instance,

understands postcolonial criticism as “scrutinizing and exposing colonial domination and power as

these are embodied in biblical texts and in interpretations, and as searching for alternative hermeneu-

tics while thus overturning and dismantling colonial perspectives” (1998, 16). Postcolonial criticism

shares similarities with liberation hermeneutics, but also diverges from it because postcolonial critics

are more suspicious of the historical-critical method that many liberation critics use. Postcolonial

critics see biblical texts as more complex and multilayered and do not construct rich/poor, colonizer/

colonized, and oppressor/oppressed in binary and dichotomous ways, as some liberation theologians

do. Liberation theologians from Latin America tend to be Christocentric, while postcolonial critics

engage more fully with religious pluralism and popular religions (Sugirtharajah 2002, 103–23).

Applying postcolonial criticism to the Gospels, Sugirtharajah (2002, 86–91) ﬁnds that there

is no mention of Jesus’ explicit resistance against the colonial occupiers. Yet Jesus’ critique of local

proﬁteers who colluded with the Romans and some of his sayings about earthly rulers (Matt. 11:8;

Luke 7:25; 13:32) suggest that his alternative vision was against those in power. Horsley (2002)

takes a stronger stance that Jesus was against empire. He places the Jesus movement within the con-

text of popular resistance movements in Judea and Galilee, and says that the anti-imperial nature

of Jesus’ movement can provide a basis for theological critique of the Roman Empire in the past

and the American empire in the present. Postcolonial studies of Paul’s letters have also appeared;

for example, Joseph A. Marchal applies feminist and postcolonial theories to the study of Philip-

pians. e 2011 volume e Colonized Apostle: Paul through Postcolonial Eyes (Stanley) is the most

READING THE CHRISTIAN NEW TESTAMENT IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD 21

comprehensive study to date, discussing Pauline agency, Paul’s supposed social conservatism, hybrid

identity and ethnicity, gender and colonialism, and Paul’s relation to struggles in South Korea and

the Philippines, among other topics. Moore (2006) uses postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha to read

apocalypse in Mark and John and the book of Revelation and argues that these texts mimic to a

certain extent Roman imperial ideology, even when resisting and eroding it. A Postcolonial Commen-

tary on the New Testament Writings (Segovia and Sugirtharajah), published in 2007, showcases the

diversity of approaches and is an invaluable resource for further studies.

Postcolonial feminist interpretation challenges white male and female metropolitan readings

for ignoring the issues of colonialism and imperialism and shows how their readings might collude

with empire (Dube 2000). As we have discussed, Dube has lifted up the readings of ordinary female

readers in African Independent Churches. Other critical concerns of postcolonial feminist criticism

include the investigation of how the deployment of gender and symbolization of women relate to

class interests and colonial domination in the Bible and studying women in the contact zones and

the borderlands, such as Rahab, Ruth, and the Syrophoenician woman (Kwok, 81–85).

e publication of Postcolonial Perspectives in African Biblical Interpretations (Dube, Mbuvi, and

Mbuwayesango) in 2012 pushes the envelope of postcolonial criticism even further. It raises the

possibilities of “unthinking Eurocentrism” in biblical studies and developing Afrocentric criticism.

e volume discusses the politics of translation of the Bible, the Bible as read in and through Afri-

can creative writings, the relation of the Bible and “the scramble of Africa,” HIV and AIDS, and

the roles of socially engaged biblical scholars. e volume oﬀers much insight and food for thought

for interpreters in other parts of the Global South as well as in metropolitan areas who want to

decolonize their minds and their methods when approaching the Bible.

Contemporary Issues

In this ﬁnal section, I would like to take up some contemporary issues to see how they have led to

new readings of the New Testament from fresh angles. First, the Holocaust has prompted many

scholars to be conscious of the long history of anti-Jewish and antisemitic biases in the history of

biblical interpretation. Scholars have proposed new ways to interpret New Testament texts so that

they will not be construed as anti-Jewish. Second, the vigorous debates on same-sex marriage in the

United States and elsewhere require us to reexamine the teachings on marriage, family, and same-

gender relationships in the New Testament. ird, the study of “Gnosticism” and other writings in

early Christianity has made us keenly aware of the politics of inclusion and exclusion surrounding

the New Testament canon. A group of scholars has produced a new version of the New Testament

combining both traditional and newly discovered texts.

Anti-Judaism and Antisemitism

Anti-Jewish attitudes and prejudices have contributed to antisemitism and the tragic genocide in

modern times of Jewish people in Europe. Jews have been blamed for killing Jesus. Jesus’ accusa-

tions against the scribes and Pharisees as hypocrites and his polemical sayings about the Jews in

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John’s Gospel have been used to cast Jewish people as the other, who did not accept the good news

of Jesus Christ. Jesus has been seen as the founder of a new religion, separate from his Jewish back-

ground. Paul’s contrast of law and gospel has been taken as the foundational diﬀerence between the

covenant of the old and the new. Christianity has often been hailed as a universal religion, accept-

ing gentiles into its mix, while Judaism has been cast in a negative light as a religion belonging to

a particular group. Many Christians continue to harbor a supersessionist viewpoint, believing that

Christianity ultimately triumphs over Judaism.

Interpreters sensitive to the charges of anti-Judaism and antisemitism have presented alterna-

tive views and interpretations diﬀerent from those often taught in Christian churches. New Testa-

ment scholars have emphasized Jesus’ Jewishness and interpreted Jesus’ movement as a movement

within Judaism. For example, Géza Vermes regards Jesus as a Jewish Galilean charismatic, while E.

P. Sanders sees Jesus as an eschatological prophet who believed that the promises to Israel would

soon be fulﬁlled and restoration would be at hand. Jewish New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine

(2011) calls Jesus “the misunderstood Jew,” and her work helps Jews and Christians understand the

Jewish context of the ﬁrst century. In e Jewish Gospels, Daniel Boyarin, a professor of talmudic cul-

ture, argues that Jesus’ teachings can be found in the long-standing Jewish tradition and the coming

of the Messiah was imagined in many Jewish texts. Many also point out that Jesus’ arguments with

the Pharisees and Jewish leaders were not conﬂicts between Christian and Jews, but intra-Jewish

arguments (Wills, 101–32).

Jewish scholars such as Judith Plaskow and Levine (2000) have cautioned against the blanket

generalizations of Jewish culture as misogynist in order to construct Jesus as a feminist over against

his cultural background. Sometimes, Christian feminists have used Jesus’ critique of his culture to

support their challenge of patriarchy in their own cultures. To heed these scholars’ call, we must

avoid generalization and not imagine “the Jews” as the same transhistorically and transculturally.

Some of the characterizations of “purity” discussed earlier would seem to fall under this criticism.

More attention must be paid to local practices, regional history, and religious views and political

ideologies of diﬀerent groups and factions in ﬁrst-century Judaism. Levine also suggests reading in

community so that we can be exposed to our biases and blind spots in our reading.

An exciting development is the publication of the volume e Jewish Annotated New Testament

(Levine and Brettler) in 2011, a collaborative eﬀort of an international team of ﬁfty Jewish schol-

ars, which presents Jewish history, beliefs, and practices for understanding the New Testament.

e New Testament is interpreted within the context of the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic literature.

Each book of the New Testament is annotated with references, and the volume includes thirty

essays covering a wide range of topics, including the synagogue, the law, food and table fellowship,

messianic movements, Jewish miracle workers, Jewish family life, divine beings, and afterlife and

resurrection. It also addresses Jewish responses to the New Testament and contemporary Jewish-

Christian relations. e book will facilitate Jewish-Christian dialogue because it helps Christians

better understand the Jewish roots of the New Testament and oﬀers Jews a way to understand the

New Testament that does not proselytize Christianity or cast Judaism in a negative light.

It should be pointed out that there is a diﬀerence between antisemitism and the critique of the

policies of the state of Israel and its unequal treatment of Palestinians. Some Jewish thinkers and

READING THE CHRISTIAN NEW TESTAMENT IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD 23

leaders, such as Judith Butler and Rabbi Michael Lerner, have criticized political Zionism, the dis-

possession of land, and hard-line policies of the Israeli state. Palestinian liberation theologian Naim

Stifan Ateek has challenged Christian Zionism, adherents of which believe that the Jews must

return to the Holy Land as a prerequisite for the second coming of Christ. Ateek draws from the

example of Jesus to discuss the relation between justice and peace, nonviolent resistance, and the

peacekeeping imperatives of the church.

Same-Sex Marriage

Debates on same-sex marriage in United States, Europe, Latin America, and Asia saw both sup-

porters and opponents citing the Bible to support their positions. In the United States, the inﬂu-

ential conservative Christian leader James Dobson defends what he calls the biblical deﬁnition

of marriage, and blames homosexuality and gay marriage for all kinds of social decline. A cursory

search on the Internet can ﬁnd numerous posts citing biblical passages to defend heterosexual mar-

riage and label homosexual passions and acts as unnatural, shameful, and contrary to God’s will.

ese posts usually cite the creation of Adam and Eve in Genesis and the views of Jesus and Paul

on marriage and sexuality as support.

Many Christians believe that the modern nuclear family represents the Christian ideal, but the

current focus on heterosexual nuclear family dates back only to the 1950s. Dale B. Martin argues

that there are more sources in the New Testament to criticize the modern family than to support

it. Jesus was not a family man, and the Gospels present Jesus as living in alternative communi-

ties that shared his vision of divinely constituted family. He refused to identify with his natural

family, saying, “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother” (Mark 3:35; cf.

Matt. 12:50; Luke 8:21). Jesus forbade divorce, even though Mosaic law allowed it (Matt. 19:4-9;

Mark 10:6-12). But Matthew follows this with the saying about those who have “made themselves

eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 19:12), which might imply that the avoid-

ance of marriage and of procreation is preferable. Jesus also says in the Gospels that in the resurrec-

tion, marriage will be obsolete (Matt. 22:30; Mark 12:26).

Paul in 1 Corinthians 7 did not promote marriage or traditional family and preferred Christians

to follow his example and remain single and celibate. He thought that marriage would become a

distraction from the life of faith “in Christ.” But he allowed marriage for those who were weak and

could not control their passions, saying “it is better to marry than to be aﬂame with passion” (1 Cor.

7:9). In Paul’s time, passion and sexual desires were associated with the body and had to be put under

severe control. e letters to the Colossians and Ephesians contain the household codes, which

propose the hierarchy and order of a patriarchal family. But these letters are generally considered

deuteropauline and were written during the increasing patriarchal institutionalization of the church.

Opponents to same-sex marriage often cite Rom. 1:23-27 to support their claims that homo-

sexual acts are unnatural. Scholars have oﬀered diﬀerent explanations of the context of this text to

argue that it is not against homosexual relations as we have come to know them in the present day

(Goss, 198–202). Some suggest that homosexual acts were considered part of unclean gentile cul-

ture and were condemned by Paul for that reason. Others claim that Paul was not speaking about

adult homosexual relations but pederasty in the Greco-Roman world. Some even proﬀer that Paul

FORTRESS COMMENTARY ON THE BIBLE

might have in mind oral or anal sex as unnatural sexual intercourse, among opposite-sex partners

as well. Bernadette J. Brooten comments that Paul’s injunction against female homosexual relations

was due to his understanding of gender roles. Paul did not want women to exchange their suppos-

edly passive and subordinate desire for an active role (216). Feminist scholars have challenged the

androcentric mind-set and patriarchal ideologies of Pauline and other New Testament writings.

e New Testament thus cannot be easily enlisted to support a reductionistic understanding

of “Christian marriage” or “family values,” as if these have not changed over time. While same-sex

marriage has become a rallying cry for marriage equality and recognition of human rights, some

lesbians and gay men have also expressed concerns that the legislation of marriage would give too

much power to the state, which can legitimize one form of sexual relationship while excluding

others. Dale B. Martin belongs to this latter group and encourages queer Christians to expand

their imaginations to “allow scripture and tradition to inspire new visions of Christian community

free from the constraints of the modern, heterosexual, nuclear family” (39). Tolbert (2006) adds

that same-sex couples can ﬁnd the ideals of friendship in the New Testament supportive of their

relationship. In John, Jesus told the disciples that they were his friends and shared with them his

deepest knowledge of God. e New Testament, Tolbert says, does not promote marriage, hetero-

sexual or not, as the bedrock of Christian community, but rather values friendship; as Jesus says, “No

one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13). Even though

the notion of friendship in the ancient world might be quite diﬀerent from ours, the shift from

promoting marriage to friendship opens new horizons.

A “New” New Testament

In 1945, local peasants in Nag Hammadi in Egypt discovered papyrus codices in a clay sealed jar

consisting of ﬁfty-two gnostic writings that were previously unknown. ough the papyrus dated

back to the fourth century, some of the texts in the manuscripts can be traced back to as early as

the ﬁrst or second century. e Nag Hammadi library contains texts such as the Gospel of omas,

the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Truth, and writings attributed to Jesus’ followers, such as the Secret

Book of James, the Apocalypse of Paul, and the Apocalypse of Peter (Pagels). e discovery of these texts

greatly expanded our knowledge of religious writings in the early centuries.

Just as Jewish scholars have challenged us to reexamine our assumptions about Christian origins

and the Jewish roots of Christianity, the discovery and study of the Nag Hammadi library raised new

issues about the conceptualization of the history of the early church. Before the discovery, all we knew

about “Gnosticism” was that the orthodox heresiologists, especially Irenaeus and Tertullian, viliﬁed it.

Karen L. King (2003) argues that these polemicists had constructed the category “heresy” as part of

their project of identity formation and to exclude Jews and pagans as outsiders. e Nag Hammadi

writings show what scholars have called “Gnosticism” as highly pluralistic and the boundary between

Christianity and “Gnosticism” as more permeable than previously assumed. Both the so-called ortho-

dox and the heretical writings belonged to a common body of tradition and represented “distinct

varieties of Christianity developed in diﬀerent geographical areas, at a time when the boundaries

of orthodox and heresy were not at all ﬁxed” (152). Moreover, certain texts were excluded from the