New Books in Biblical Studies

In Signs of the Messiah: An Introduction to John’s Gospel (Lexham Press, 2021), Andreas J. Köstenberger—veteran New Testament scholar and expert on the Gospel of John—guides readers through John and highlights its plot and message. John’s Gospel is written to inspire faith in Jesus. By keeping the Gospel’s big picture in view, readers will see Jesus’ mighty signs and be compelled to trust more ful...

John Calvin was known foremost for his powerful impact on the fundamental doctrines of Protestantism, and his biblical interpretation continues to attract interest and inquiry. Calvin, the Bible, and History investigates Calvin's exegesis of the Bible through the lens of one of its most distinctive and distinguishing features: his historicizing approach to scripture. Barbara Pitkin here explores h...

For the first time, one volume includes a discourse analysis of every writing in the New Testament. Discourse analysis of written texts involves examining units of language higher than the sentence and considering how the author used those units of language to accomplish communicative purposes. But discourse analysis is not a clearly defined method. Rather, it is a linguistic perspective that prov...

Elizabeth L. Jemison, who teaches American religious history at Clemson University, South Carolina, has written an outstanding new book, Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Post-Emancipation South (University of North Carolina Press, 2020). Focusing on the Lower Mississippi River Valley, and working from the 1860s to 1900, Jemison explains how white and African-American...

Traditional and mainline denominational churches who begin to make the transition to contemporary worship quickly learn that there is more at play than simply swapping organs for guitars or hymnals for projectors. How can churches honor tradition while also becoming conversant with new styles? Lester Ruth, research professor of Christian Worship at Duke Divinity School, and his team of graduate re...

The Need for Creeds Today: Confessional Faith in a Faithless Age (Baker Academic, 2020) offers an invitation to the historic creeds and confessions makes a biblical and historical case for their necessity and shows why they are essential for Christian faith and practice today. J. V. Fesko, a leading Reformed theologian with a broad readership in the academy and the church, demonstrates that creeds...

Migrating Tales: The Talmud's Narratives and Their Historical Context (University of California Press, 2014) situates the Babylonian Talmud, or Bavli, in its cultural context by reading several rich rabbinic stories against the background of Greek, Syriac, Arabic, Persian, and Mesopotamian literature of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, much of it Christian in origin. In this nuanced work,...

Dangerous Religious Ideas: The Deep Roots of Self-Critical Faith in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Beacon, 2020) reveals how faith traditions have always passed down tools for self-examination and debate, because all religious ideas—not just extremist ones—can cause harm, even as they also embody important moral teachings. Scripture’s abiding relevance can inspire great goodness, such as welcom...

In November 2015, Pope Francis made a call to theologians to explore whether Catholic practice ought to be amended to include Christians from different churches in full participation in the Eucharist. Thomas O’Loughlin replies in his book, Eating Together, Becoming One: Taking Up Pope Francis’s Call to Theologians (Liturgical Press Academic, 2019). This is an insightful and practical book explorin...

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...

The bible and Australian society! Meredith Lake's published a new 2020 edition of The Bible in Australia: A Cultural History (NewSouth Books, 2020). It's history and sociology and reflections on religion's role on the 'Great Southern Land'. Meredith Lake gets under the skin of a text that’s been read, wrestled with, preached and tattooed, and believed to be everything from a resented imposition to...

In his exciting and thorough book, The Golden Calf between Bible and Qur'an: Scripture, Polemic, and Exegesis from Late Antiquity to Islam (Oxford, 2020), Michael Pregill explores the biblical and Qur'anic episode of the golden calf as understood by various Jewish, Christian, and Muslim sources. The incident refers, of course, to when the Israelites created a golden calf in the absence of the Prop...

The Holy Spirit: Theology for the People of God (B&H Academic, 2020) analyzes the Holy Spirit through the lens of both biblical and systematic theology. Dr. Gregg Allison and Dr. Andreas Köstenberger provide a comprehensive look at the third person of the Trinity as revealed by Scripture, focusing on eight central themes and assumptions. Dr. Gregg Allison is a professor of Christian theology at Th...

For many years, the historical-critical quest for a reconstruction of the origin(s) and development of the Pentateuch or Hexateuch has been dominated by the documentary hypothesis, the heuristic power of which has produced a consensus so strong that an interpreter who did not operate within its framework was hardly regarded as a scholar. However, the relentless march of research on this topic has...

Studying the New Testament Through Inscriptions (Hendrickson Publishers, 2020)through Inscriptions is an intuitive introduction to inscriptions from the Greco-Roman world. Inscriptions can help contextualize certain events associated with the New Testament in a way that many widely circulated literary texts do not. This book both introduces inscriptions and demonstrates sound methodological use of...

Although most people acknowledge that Jesus was a first-century Jew, interpreters of the Gospels often present him as opposed to Jewish law and customs—especially when considering his numerous encounters with the ritually impure. In Jesus and the Forces of Death: The Gospels' Portrayal of Ritual Impurity within First-Century Judaism (Baker Academic), Matthew Thiessen corrects this popular misconce...

In Unbinding Isaac: The Significance of the Akedah for Modern Jewish Thought (Jewish Publication Society, 2020), Aaron Koller, professor of Near Eastern and Jewish Studies at Yeshiva University, provides a compelling contemporary perspective on one of the Bible's most famous and difficult texts, the Akedah, the Binding of Isaac. By plumbing the depths of commentaries both ancient and modern, Kolle...

On this episode of New Books in Christian Studies, we welcome Ken M. Penner, Professor of Religious Studies at St Francis Xavier University. After a career that has combined biblical studies and digital humanities, Ken has edited the second edition of The Lexham English Septuagint (Lexham Press, 2020), a fresh and historically specific translation into English of the Greek version of the Hebrew Bi...

John Barton is no stranger to Holy Scripture. Having spent much of his academic career as a chaplain and professor of theology at the University of Oxford, his latest book is an attempt to shed light on one of the world’s most influential texts – the Bible. In A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book (Viking, 2019), John demonstrates that the Bible, while often though...

Throughout the seventeenth century, and on both sides of the Atlantic, William Perkins exercised enormous influence on the ways in which protestants approached the reading of the Bible and thought about the practice of preaching. For all that Perkins had a strong interest in theology, he was no mere dogmatician, as Andrew Ballitch shows in his new book. The Gloss and the Text: William Perkins on I...

Mormonism's founder, Joseph Smith, claimed to have translated ancient scriptures. He dictated an American Bible from metal plates reportedly buried by ancient Jews in a nearby hill, and produced an Egyptian "Book of Abraham" derived from funerary papyri he extracted from a collection of mummies he bought from a traveling showman. In addition, he rewrote sections of the King James Version as a "New...

Popular culture helps shape how audiences imagine Biblical personalities in our contemporary moment. For many, Warner Sallman’s portrait of Jesus fixes him as white, others envision Moses as Charlton Heston because of Cecil B. DeMille’s film, The Ten Commandments, and the Jezebel stereotype is more well known than the Biblical figure. This merging of cultural productions and scripture clearly inte...

In this interview, Ruth Kara-Ivanov Kaniel discusses her first book, Holiness and Transgression Mothers of the Messiah in the Jewish Myth, with Rachel Adelman. Translated by Eugene Matansky and published by Academic Studies Press in 2017, it was originally written in Hebrew as Kedeshot ukedoshot: Imahot hamashiah bamythos hayehudi (2014).  The book engages with the female dynasty leading up to the...

In Revelation 21–22, John offered a resplendent portrayal of a new Jerusalem without a temple, in which he seemed to reference the final chapters of Ezekiel. The puzzling issue for interpreters is why John chose to utilize Ezekiel’s temple vision if he wanted to dispense with the temple. In Temple of Presence: The Christological Fulfillment of Ezekiel 40-48 in Revelation 21:1-22:5 (Wipf & Stock, 2...

In this episode, we focus on one of Eisler’s most controversial works, a reconstruction of the 1st-century Roman Jewish historian Josephus’ account of the events surrounding the death of Jesus and the ministry of John the Baptist, including a new physical description of Jesus that apparently prompted the Christ to appear to followers in America to prove he did not look like Eisler said he did. Als...