Description
Book SynopsisNonwhite women primarily appear as marginalized voices, if at all, in volumes that address constructions of race/ethnicity and early Christian texts and contexts. The contributors, who identify as African American, Asian American, and Asian, analyze the historical, literary, ideological construction of racial/ethnic identities. In reading how identity is constructed in early Christian texts, the contributors employ an intersectional approach. Thus, they read how race/ethnicity overlaps or intersects with gender/sexuality, class, religion, slavery, and/or power in early Christian texts and contexts and in U.S. and global contexts, historically and currently. Identity construction occurs in public and private spaces and institutions including households, religious assemblies/churches, and empire. While some studies discuss the topic of race/ethnicity and employ intersectional approaches, this book is the first volume that nonwhite women New Testament Bible scholars have written. Given th
Trade ReviewThis volume is an important and urgently needed intervention into New Testament scholarship in multiple ways. First, it highlights the work of women of color within New Testament Studies, despite the structural racism that has produced a guild that is by vast majority male and white. Second, the book acknowledges the recent surge of scholarly work on ethnicity and race in the Classics and in the study of early Christianity, and goes past them, offering not only historical ideas of race or ethnicity, but also intersectional analyses that balance between past texts and present realities. The essays treat the rhetorical othering of women prophets, the marginalization of Hagar’s children, the fraught topics of mixed marriages and immigration, the ways in which racialized groups may resist even apostolic characterizations of their identity, and the possibilities of reconstructing the memory and mourning of women. These essays take seriously the experiences and critical scholarly analyses of women of color, and the book opens up new ways of understanding New Testament texts. -- Laura Nasrallah, Yale Divinity School
Table of ContentsChapter One
Introduction by Mitzi J. Smith and Jin Young Choi
Chapter Two
Weren’t You with Jesus the Galilean?: An Intersectional Reading of Ethnicity, Diasporic Trauma, and Mourning in the Gospel of Matthew by Jin Young Choi
Chapter Three
In Christ, but Not of Christ: Reading Identity Differences Differently in the Letter to the Galatians by Jennifer T. Kaalund
Chapter Four
Hagar’s Children Still Ain’t Free: Paul’s Counterterror Rhetoric, Constructed Identity, Enslavement, and Galatians 3:28 by Mitzi J. Smith
Chapter Five
Feminized-Minoritized Paul? A Womanist Reading of Paul’s Body in the Corinthian Context by Angela Parker
Chapter Six
Gender, Race, and the Normalization of Prophecy in Early Christianity and Korean and Korean-American Christianity by Jung H. Choi
Chapter Seven
You Have Become Children of Sarah: Reading 1 Peter 3:1–6 through the Intersectionality of Asian Immigrant Wives, Patriarchy, and Honorary Whiteness by Janette H. Ok
About the Contributors
