Description
Book SynopsisNonwhite women primarily appear as marginalized voices, if at all, in volumes that address constructions of race/ethnicity and early Christian texts. Employing an intersectional approach, the contributors analyze historical, cultural, literary, and ideological constructions of racial/ethnic identities, which intersect with gender/sexuality class, religion, slavery, and/or power. Given their small numbers in academic biblical studies, this book represents a critical mass of nonwhite women scholars and offers a critique of dominant knowledge production. Filling a significant epistemological gap, this seminal text provides provocative, innovative, and critical insights into constructions of race/ethnicity in ancient and modern texts and contexts.
Trade ReviewThis volume is an urgently needed intervention into New Testament scholarship. 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, it acknowledges the recent surge of scholarship on ethnicity and race in the Classics and in the study of early Christianity, and exceeds them, offering historical ideas of race or ethnicity, and also intersectional analyses that balance past texts and present realities…. These essays take seriously the experiences and critical scholarly analyses of women of color and open up new ways of understanding New Testament texts. -- Laura Nasrallah, Yale Divinity School
Wow. Six women—African American, Asian American, and Asian—collaborate to produce essays on key New Testament texts sensitive to the intersections of race/ethnicity and gender/sexuality. The work is unapologetically ideological, theoretically sophisticated, focused on the materiality of bodies, embodied voices, performance, and the relevance of both ancient and modern contexts. A milestone…. -- Shelly Matthews, Brite Divinity School
Employing disparate methodologies with great sophistication, the volume offers unique perspectives that are deeply disruptive and profoundly formative. Contributors read the texts astutely and engage issues of race and ethnicity in powerful ways. A must-read in this political context.
-- Raj Nadella, Columbia Theological Seminary
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
