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In Judges 19, the Levite from Ephraim, together with his concubine, on their journey back home pass by Jebus and refuse to stay in the hometown of the Jebusites, remarking that “we will not stop at a foreign city where there are no Israelites” (Judges 19:12). It is an ironic comment made as it is precisely within the city of Israelites in Gibeah that danger and violence will occur. This narrative portrayal is particularly poignant in the current context of the United States that is dominated by fear, specifically through the bodies of those who are deemed “other” in terms of their ethnicity. Meanwhile, it may be that the greatest threat in the United States today lies within its own walls, i.e., in the majority demographic. This paper explores the biases majority culture holds towards the supposed morality of “other” ethnicities and nationalities, considering questions regarding what is considered “normal” or “safe.” The fear that characterises the downfall of the narrative reaches beyond ethnic othering to gender and sexual othering as well, not only inside the text, but in interpretation and reception as well. Yet, the narrative shows this as baldly ironic in order to face it; whereas the United States and scholars within have yet to truly name the problem in order to maintain the ideals of hierarchy, power, and White supremacy.

Modern science fiction writers often draw upon the biblical flood story as inspiration for their own narratives. It is not uncommon to find humans fleeing on space arks to escape some cosmic disaster. In the process of adapting the biblical narrative to contemporary circumstances, these writers also frequently transform the unnamed female characters in the biblical story. Noah’s wife, Noah’s daughters-in-law, and the daughters of men become dynamic characters that actively shape the narrative and are vital to the survival of the human race. This article examines the character type of the “Noahic woman” as it appears in three early twentieth century science fiction narratives.

While queer biblical translation aims to validate the presence of the LGBTQI community within Christianity, it is often viewed as violating the ethical standards of canonical biblical texts. This paper analyses the Queen James Bible as an activist, queer translation of the Bible that intersects with questions of ethics. Drawing on prefatory material and textual and comparative analysis of the “clobber verses” as presented in the Queen James Bible and the King James Version on which it is based, I discuss how this Bible makes a significant contribution to both the LGBTQI community and activism. Engaging with queer translation and activist theory to frame my analysis, I explore how the Queen James Bible’s anonymous editors confer new meaning to normative biblical conventions, thereby subverting accusations by readers and theologians that depict this text as an unethical alteration of the Bible. By categorising the edits made on the “clobber verses” into four sections and investigating the editors’ engagement with the initial Hebrew and Greek scriptures, I conclude that translations such as the Queen James Bible contend with the issue of ethics by creating a queer hermeneutical space via religious scripture that is often used to marginalise the LGBTQI community.

In the virtual world elaborated in Marvel’s movies (the “Marvel Cinematic Universe” or MCU), “science” is creatively, strategically confused with “magic” and/or “religion.” Key supernatural/magical elements of the franchise’s comic-book source material are “retconned” (retroactively granted new narrative coherence and continuity) as advanced scientific marvels. I argue in the first section that a biblical studies perspective can shed valuable light on this contemporary sci-fi phenomenon, by highlighting the ideologically interested and culturally contingent character of “religious” phenomena like canons and marvels. The perspective thus provided can help elucidate the contexts and consequences of the MCU decision to retcon magical and religious cultural materials as scientific wonders. In the second section, I argue further that such reflection on science fiction and the MCU offers valuable perspective to biblical studies in return by opening new research avenues into the human and historical meaning of certain biblical traditions, in this case by recalling the sense of technology shock that must have sometimes accompanied ancient developments like the widespread use of war horses or the mass production of books—world-changing developments that modern biblical critics are not culturally primed to perceive and investigate as technological marvels.

This article employs two strategies to understand Paul’s dissatisfaction with the meal practice of the Corinthian assembly in 1 Corinthians 11:17-31. First, it uses a form of queer reading to interrogate the text for its assumptions about normativity and deviance. Second, it puts the Corinthian meals in conversation with modern queer potlucks and their emergence as sites of alternative community formation. Together, these strategies help create a reading of the text of 1 Corinthians that contextualizes the norms inherent in Greco- Roman dining practices and the ways Paul expected the practice of the “Lord’s Supper” to deviate from those norms and establish new norms.

Queer theory’s standard origin story centers on Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Teresa de Lauretis. This article proceeds down a less-traveled road, one yet to be explored in biblical studies. Like standard queer theory, this trajectory’s roots are also in French thought—not that of Foucault or Jacques Lacan, however, but of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The difference this makes is considerable, yielding, among other things, a concept of the gendered body that is neither discursive (à la Foucault) nor performative (à la Butler) but virtual; a concept of sexuality that exceeds the human/nonhuman binary no less than the heterosexual/homosexual binary; and an alternative version of the antisocial thesis in queer theory that precedes Lee Edelman’s influential Lacanian version by more than thirty years, namely, Guy Hocquenghem’s Deleuzoguattarian version. How might all or any of this translate into queer biblical reading? Addressing this question through an extended analysis of the Gospel of Mark is the principal project of this article.

This paper compares the development of fictional ship schematics for the original Star Trek’s Enterprise to the scribal schematics of the Temple in two key biblical passages (1 Kings 6 and Ezekiel 40-44) and a Talmudic discussion of the Hall of the Hearth. By centralizing spatial construction over narrative or historicity, we can see some features of fan creative activity that are distinctive to spatiality. While a connection between these documents and actual structures (temple, spaceship) is both possible but not-currently-real, I argue that such passages have a similar blending of basic concepts, real structures, and sheer imaginal elaboration. As with the fan’s engagement with ship schematics, the scribe or exegete’s activity in Temple schematics finds a significant part of its value in the imaginal activity itself, which demands a deep attentiveness and opens on to imaginal independence from “real” places.

Queering Jesus is a call to remember the danger of the story of Jesus. The primary aim of this article is to offer a comprehensive survey of the representation of queer Jesus. Building upon the deconstructive work of Johannes Baptist Metz and the notion of the dangerous memories of Jesus’s suffering and death (memoria passsionis), this article tries to make sense of the deconstruction of heteronormative and cisgender constructions of a white, male Jesus that supports the exclusion and oppression of queer folks. Queer constructions of Jesus in biblical interpretation and popular media are accused of being blasphemous fictions, while the same charge can be levied against the constructions of heteronormative and cisgender Christian churches who marginalize and stigmatize LGBTQI people. The imaginative remembering of the dangerous story of Jesus empowers queer folks to liberate and create a queer Jesus who allows LGBTQI Christians to experience the liberating presence of Jesus, to experience themselves as beloved, and to empower them to take back an inclusive Christianity.

This article argues that ecological hermeneutics, when taught in the biblical studies classroom, needs to draw on its roots in environmental activism. It recommends prioritising the urgency of the contemporary crisis alongside activist ways to respond to it over the teaching of the history and methodology of this approach. Singling out two topics, overpopulation and extinction of species, the article provides suggestions for resources on how to focus such teaching.

Biblical studies in the School of Religion, Philosophy, and Classics at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa has been partially constituted by the community-based activism of the Ujamaa Centre for Community Development and Research over a period of more than thirty years. This essay reflects on a particular series of contrapuntal movements in which 1 Kings 21:1-16 has been interpreted within this interface of community-based activism and formal academic pedagogy, moving between Contextual Bible Study workshops with unemployed African youth and classroom-based learning with African undergraduate and postgraduate students. We give particular attention in this essay to how interpretive space is reconstituted through this intentional collaboration.

Courses on the Bible, gender, and sexuality offer many opportunities to promote social justice in the classroom. Instead of emphasizing course content, this article focuses on practical strategies and tactics that incorporate social justice into the everyday teaching of these courses. Drawing on feminist, queer, and affect theory, as well as practical experience, I propose and discuss four questions for assessing classroom practices and materials: Is it welcoming?, Does this joy need to be killed?, Does it work?, and Is it fun? The article also addresses topics such as course design, the selection of readings, assessment, and course pacing from the perspective of teaching for social justice.

This article discusses the ways in which my Introduction to the New Testament class at the University of Tennessee engages with and offers students tools for understanding and participating in social activism, particularly around race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexuality, and class. In recent years I have added new readings and class projects to the syllabus explicitly to encourage students to consider ways in which interpretations influence our conversations on LGBTQ+ rights, feminism, and racial and economic justice. In addition to covering the early history and context of the New Testament texts, my course teaches students to recognize how readers’ own embodied experiences affect their culturally contingent reading of these influential texts. The region of Appalachia is largely rural and economically depressed; deeply held conservative Protestant strains of Christianity pervade this “the Bible belt” region, and Donald Trump won Appalachia easily in the 2016 presidential election. A new wave of student activism has developed on campus in response to recent national events and to the concurrent rise in polarizing rhetoric in our country. I demonstrate here some of the concrete ways I am adapting my classroom teaching about the New Testament to engage with these urgent local, regional, national, and global conversations and the activism they are inspiring.

This article adopts a trans-centered approach to reading the Gospel of Thomas, in particular key statements found in Gos. Thom. 22 and 114. Treatments of gender in the gospel are discussed from the author’s position as a queer woman of transgender experience, informed by postcolonial, feminist, and gender-critical theory and practice. Literary and historical comparisons with Philo of Alexandria and the apostle Paul are explored to uncover Thomas’s worldview, which is seen to be darkly critical of the material world, while being hopeful for spiritual transformation. Though the Gospel of Thomas participates in the prevalent masculinist ideology of most literature of the day, many of its sayings may garner a new or nuanced meaning when read through a transgender lens, including especially the demand for replacement of the outer person with the inner person (Gos. Thom. 22), and potential salvation through erasure of conventional gender difference in the making of an ungendered Living Spirit resembling Jesus (Gos. Thom. 114).

Together we seek to model the redemptive, liberatory, activist, feminist approach to collaborative working to which both authors are committed as teachers, students, rabbis and activists. In our rabbinic chain of tradition (more particularly through other female rabbis) we explore, through the lenses of student and teacher, the 5-year rabbinic course at Leo Baeck College (LBC). We seek to demonstrate how, when working at its best, LBC trains rabbis as activists. Our contention is that the rabbinic education at LBC has the potential to be transformative in creating rabbis as activist leaders, an ideal which ought to transcend the rabbinic training seminary and be taken forward into community.

What is the relationship between the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and the New Testament, where does Jesus fit in, and why do these questions even matter? In the context of the biblical studies classroom for Christian ministerial training, being able to answer these questions is an essential part of effective and responsible biblical interpretation that informs theological reflection, preaching, and ethical social engagement with a diverse world. Nevertheless, within the Christian ministerial training context, there appears to be a dearth of knowledge and understanding about how to approach the Hebrew Bible with integrity to its sources, function, and value within the Jewish tradition as well as the Christian tradition.

After an arrest was made in the Pittsburgh Synagogue shooting (27 October 2018), it came to light that the shooter’s social media page was emblazoned with a citation from John’s Gospel 8:44 and a rough paraphrase of what the shooter thought it meant: “Jews are the children of Satan”. In the days that followed the shooting, educators scrambled to try and help their students make sense of what had happened. As three biblical scholars who teach in higher education in the UK and the United States, we outline our approaches to teaching about anti-Semitism in the biblical studies classroom. From students who resist reading the gospels as dangerous texts for Jews to the subtler nuances of supersessionism in popular and scholarly understandings of the New Testament, we address the successes and failures of our own attempts to combat anti-Semitism in our classrooms.

Recent work in biblical studies has given increased attention to a reading of Jesus as a victim of sexual abuse. This article explores how the stripping of Jesus might be understood as an example of abuse ‘hidden in plain sight’. Most students are initially surprised or doubtful when it is suggested that Jesus is a victim of sexual violence. However, this scepticism can become a powerful learning resource if they are helped to ‘discover’ it for themselves through an experiential learning process. This might involve a critical examination of crucifixion and stripping images, and/or a contextual bible study on Matthew 27:26–31. Discovering the sanitising and erasure of sexual violence in the dominant (mis)understanding of crucifixion can offer students insight into other ways that past and present sexual violence is often marginalised, normalised, or hidden. Often these classroom exercises prompt a discussion of what makes abuse ‘sexual abuse’.

The discipline of embodied cognitive science and associated concept of intercorporeality provide the theoretical framework of our analysis of Proverbs 31:10–31. This essay fleshes out the underlying cognitive and meaning-making processes and entailments inherent in the valiant woman’s use of her hands and body as depicted in the poem. The valiant woman is contrasted with the hands and body of the sluggard fool to unveil how the activity or inactivity of the hands (and body) substantially affects the knowing of the valiant woman and the fool. Knowledge and wisdom emerged and are shaped by one’s hands and bodily interaction with the real world.

This essay explores the meaning of the word glōssa, the tongue, in Acts. The focus of my study will be Acts 2:1-13, the Pentecost narrative, where the reader first interacts with tongues of fire and with the experience of glossolalia, speaking in tongues. I read this passage exegetically (but playfully) while I consider the meaning and usage of the tongue through the theoretical lenses of poststructuralism and postcolonialism. This reading enables me to highlight the sensory elements of the tongue within Acts. How does it shift our view of Acts if we consider the meaning of glōssa to include the physical tongue, the home of our sense of taste? In doing so, I turn to the work of Jacques Derrida in order to suggest that glōssa functions within Acts as a new concept, one of Derrida’s “undecidable” terms. Finally, I will utilise postcolonial theory in order to suggest that glōssa spreads throughout the narrative and counters the major voices within the text. In this way, glōssa functions as an undecidable concept, a tongue that glides throughout the text of Acts, refusing to allow only the main voices to speak and thwarting the domination of the empire.

Groups and individuals known as “elders” (Greek: presbyteros, gerousia; Hebrew: zaqan) are often found in ancient Jewish texts and inscriptions. Their ubiquity in such texts and inscriptions is accompanied by very little information about their actual function. Generally, this may be because we have some kind of impression that a group of older men in patriarchal and androcentric societies might form a kind of local authority and would naturally be referred to as elders. In the works known as Judith and Susanna, female protagonists are set against or in contrast to elders. There is a presumption that these elders are an influential, all-male, locally authoritative, collective. This article will explore power dynamics within these texts where the elders function as a specific narrative device, often as a foil to exemplary female characters, and consider how this gendered reading of such a group forms contemporary understandings of ancient Judaism.

“The Bible” does not exist as material reality, and yet as a cultural icon “the Bible” animates institutions and enterprises devoted to it. This article assesses the short history of scholarship on one such institution, the controversial Museum of the Bible (MOTB) in Washington, D.C., in order to highlight and critique the fantasy of “the Bible” in academic biblical studies. I argue that while the MOTB provides a productive site for public scholarship on the Bible, it further functions as a mirror of the historic preoccupations of the guild of professional biblical scholars that reflects back to us the problems associated with our own fabrications of an iconic yet immaterial Bible.

This article reassesses the metaphors found in Isa 49.26a and 63.6 in their historical and socio-religious context of alcohol production. Using interdisciplinary approaches from archaeology and anthropology, traditional interpretations that have emphasised a context of alcohol consumption and drunkenness, rather than wine production, are countered. I argue that these grape treading images, which also evoke blood imagery, focus upon the transformation of grape juice into wine and invoke the notion of divine participation in the production of alcohol. The transformation of the blood of Israel’s enemies is the punishment that Yahweh is imagined to carry out in these scenes, rather than inflicting drunkenness on them.

This essay examines the Book of Revelation in dialogue with the films of Christopher Nolan, with particular attention to the use of nonlinear narrative. The approach taken to Nolan’s work is that of auteur theory, a pattern theory which traces the distinctive technical and artistic voice of the director across a wide range of films (e.g. Memento, The Prestige, Inception, Dunkirk). Insights from this analysis are brought into conversation with Revelation which also, it is argued, employs a temporally-disrupted nonlinear narrative structure. Particular attention is then given to the themes of time and space in Nolan’s Interstellar and the motif of heavenly ascent in Revelation and other apocalyptic literature.

The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs contain nuanced discussions of the nature of sin, which is invariably associated with both demonic forces and the human body. The senses are portrayed as human spirits. These senses, when used inappropriately, can allow the spirits of deceit to overcome a person and lead them to sin. Seeing, tasting and hearing can all be distorted by the spirits of deceit. When this happens a part of person’s nature is replaced with that of the forces of evil. The Testaments thus problematise the self and the body as a bonded category.

Using cognitive metaphor theory to examine the four NT nursing metaphors (1 Thess 2:5–9; 1 Cor 3:1–3; Heb 5:11–14; 1 Pet 2:1–3), this article demonstrates that the same nursing frame can be used quite differently. The work of separating the contributions of each input space and then running the blend demonstrates how each metaphor functions and, in 1 Corinthians 3 specifically, the overlaps and gaps that arise in the analysis explain previous discrepant interpretations as well as a new way forward. The nursing frame itself incorporates many different primary metaphors grounded in embodied experiences, but not all of these are activated in every metaphor. Each analysis concludes by pointing out its focus on specific blends and suggests the purpose of this focus through the use of social identity theory.

The verb ba’ash (lit. “to stink”) is used repeatedly in the Hebrew Bible to describe unwanted groups or individuals (Gen 34:30; Exod 5:21; 1 Sam 13:4; 1 Sam 27:12; 2 Sam 10:6; 1 Chr 19:6). However, there is an overwhelming tendency in English translations and commentaries to translate bet-aleph-shin in a figurative sense as “obnoxious” (NIV, NKJV), “odious” (NASB, ASV) or even “despised” (ISV). This paper answers the call to modern exegetes to read “not only with our eyes but with the other senses alert.” and proposes that by re-centring on and reading through smell, new exegetical possibilities are opened to us. Drawing on recent work on the verb ba’ash and anthropological research on the discourse surrounding smell or perceived social odours of migrants and immigrants, this article will demonstrate that stench and bad odour are employed as a form of metaphorical discourse in these texts to construct a narrative in which immigrants are viewed like bad smells: foreign, pervasive and unwanted.

Psalms write and express revelation, relationship, and response on and through the body; corporeal vocabulary, awareness of embodiment and somatic metaphors abound. This rhetoric draws people in through reference to common experience and uses somatic language to express thoughts and emotions which often escape conceptualisation, such as confusion, fear, and protection. Psalm 139 uses sensory language to stress how the Psalmist cannot escape God’s knowledge and power, and states that understanding God’s power is beyond humans. Movement, pressure, and touch highlight presence and protection, and sensory awareness establishes a relationship between the protector and protected. I consider translations of tesukeni and yeshupeni and sensory metaphors, closing with a treatment of sensory awareness and cognitive understanding within the Psalm.

The Woman clothed with the Sun makes a brief appearance in Revelation 12; however, her influence upon the imaginations of artists and interpreters is substantive. She is unnamed and yet multiple identities are ascribed to her including individual women (Eve, Mary), corporate institutions (Israel, the church), and ancient goddesses. In this article, rather than attempting to classify her with a definite identity, my goal is to destabilise this figure by aligning her with the monstrous. Using the lens of monster theory, I examine her otherworldly orientation, her hybrid and extraordinary body, and her correspondence with other monstrous characters. Her unknowability and refusal to fit interpretive categories are part of her monstrosity, as she moves across hybrid boundaries and liminal spheres.

This article explores the role of poetry and narrative methods in African-centred queer biblical studies and theology. As a case in point, it presents a poem, titled “Accused of a Sodomy Act,” by Tom Muyunga-Mukasa, that was written as part of a queer Bible reading project with Ugandan LGBTQ refugees. The poem is a contemporary re-telling of the gospel story about Jesus and the “woman caught in adultery” in the context of socio-political homophobia in Uganda. The poem is complemented by an autobiographical reflection by the writer, providing insight into his personal experiences of growing up as gay and religious in Uganda. This is embedded in a more general discussion, relating the poem to trends of life storytelling in African LGBTQ activism, and to established narrative methodologies in African theological and biblical studies scholarship. Overall, the article makes a methodological contribution, by foregrounding queer poetry and storytelling as innovations in African narrative hermeneutics that expand the established concern with gender and sexuality beyond a heterosexual framework, and that include the marginalised voices and experiences of LGBTQ people.

Typically, the cupbearer in Genesis 40–41 is interpreted only as a member of Joseph’s supporting cast. However, closely reading this minor character suggests more options for interpreting both him and other anonymous courtiers found throughout the Hebrew Bible. The cupbearer’s actions (and inactions) raise ethical and psychological questions about remembering, forgetting, and the shades of grey between them. The cupbearer, ironically, is remembered most for forgetting Joseph; yet in forgetting the cupbearer, we forget the lesson in remembrance that he exemplifies. This minor character study partners conventional narrative criticism with the gaps and possibilities found in the cupbearer’s reception among sources as diverse as Jerome, the Qur’an, Genesis Rabbah, and Thomas Mann.

Throughout Daniel 8–10, Daniel is touched five times by human-like figures. By these touch interventions, he receives both physical and emotional strength which allow him to continue participating in the revelatory experience. This essay argues that embodied participation marked by the sense of touch not only legitimates an authentic revelation but allows Daniel to make meaning—or make sense—of his experiences. Through embodied affect, repeated interaction, and bodily likeness between the subjects involved, Daniel is an active participant in the revelatory process rather than merely a passive recipient, a feature that provides further nuance for the definition of a literary apocalypse.

Is anonymity a form of violence? The woman of Judges 19 endured gang-rape and dismemberment, and neither the Bible nor its ancient exegetes gave her a name. This article surveys the modern writers and scholars who chose new names for her, examining how their choices of names reflected their broader goals for retelling her story. From there, I turn to the broader fields of critical fabulation and literary onomastics, particularly as rooted in Black American experience. I confront the affective yearning that undergirded these naming attempts and their negotiation with archival absence. Naming is an act of power, and the choice to name this woman ultimately reflects our own decision: do we “rescue” her from anonymity or leave her to dwell in a space of abjection? The decision is less simple than it appears.

This article concentrates on the affective impacts of the relationship between the bodies of the father and his daughter in Sirach. It relies on gender studies as well as affect theory to explore how intensities pass from body to body in the biblical text, and also to the bodies of those who read it. The father’s body is marked by gynophobic anxiety about his daughter that causes him to lose sleep, and by fear of being ridiculed by other men (Sir 42:9–11). He recommends controlling his daughter’s body and not radiating joy toward her (Sir 7:24–25). From her birth, a girl is considered a loss for her father and can bring shame and disgrace (Sir 22:3–5). Sir 26:10–12 presents the daughter’s body as an abject, marginalized and sexualized body designed to provoke disgust. This disgust did not cling to a real flesh and blood mother and daughter who participated in an empirical reading experience of these passages. Her emotional and bodily reactions went from anger to laughter, showing affective paths of resistance to Sirach’s androcentric presentation of a daughter’s body.

Americans overwhelmingly assume that Moses married a Black woman. Using sources from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this article highlights interpretations of Moses’s marriage to the Cushite woman in Numbers 12. Utilising cultural-critical reception history—that biblical interpretation is culturally conditioned—readers in the United States contrast a Black wife with an assumedly white Moses and Miriam and therefore display an assumption of a racial binary at work in their contemporary societies. In some cases, the name Tharbis is utilised as part of a post-biblical tradition that Moses acquired a war-bride in his early days as an Egyptian military leader. In three parts, the article first discusses nineteenth century associations between a Black wife and a white Miriam, followed by several examples of readers using “Moses Married a Black Woman,” or, as I call it, “Mosaic miscegenation” in their social and intellectual spaces. Readers call upon Moses’s marriage to a Black woman to address their contemporary social issues. Tharbis makes a come-back with twentieth-century novels that lead up to the 1956 Hollywood film The Ten Commandments. Whether named or not, the wife of Moses, mentioned briefly in Numbers, serves as a touchstone on which Americans project their anxieties about abolition and inter-racial marriage.

This article suggests that in Ezekiel 13:17–23 we have an example of the ritual activities of Yahwistic women being undermined. However, rather than opening the hermeneutical crux of attempting to understand what it is the women are doing or how their ritual activity is functioning, I will focus squarely on the broader social dynamics in the text. Specifically, I pay attention to the way in which stereotypes are used as foils in the struggle to define authentic authority and power. Instead of dividing ancient Israelite society solely along gender lines, I will acknowledge the text’s misogynistic undertones, but I will also attend to broader social questions. I use, as a heuristic analogy, examples of magic accusations drawn from Classics in order to illustrate the potentially complex social dynamics and tensions potentially underlying the text. I argue that Ezekiel’s accusation, in and of itself, of the women’s ritual deviancy is enough to damage the women’s reputation. Likewise, I argue for the possibility that the women’s ritual activity is an attempt to gain a sense of agency and control after the chaos of the Babylonian exile.

Rufus’s mother features in Paul’s concluding list of church leaders such as Phoebe in Romans 16. Paul calls her his own mother. I argue that Rufus’s mother’s inclusion indicates higher status and influence within the Pauline house-churches, building on Elmer’s notion of corporate Pauline authorship.

Editorial preface

“Aware-Settler” is a term coined here to describe the various hermeneutics that arise as increasingly, non-Indigenous biblical scholars take seriously that their research is done on colonized Land. Paying special attention to the principle of possessiveness, the article suggests breaking stubborn Settler-scholar hidden-default assumptions of ownership, proposing instead that biblical texts might be understood as another form of “Treaty territory.” Indigenous scholars’ common emphases on Landedness, relationality, spirituality, and community good, can inform methodologies employed by Settler biblical scholars. These hermeneutical principles, learned in a contact zone characterized by attention to reciprocity and respect, are employed in a brief look at Matthew 28:25–28. The so-called Great Commission is a foundational text of colonialism; many Indigenous scholars have judged it as “unreadable.” For that reason it provides a particularly appropriate test-case for applying Aware-Settler hermeneutics focussed on breaking claims of identity and ownership.

JIBS Vol 1 Issue 1 ISSN 2633-0695

Feminist approaches to early Christian texts have consistently evaluated female characters as the primary focus of analysis. Yet in doing so, placing the spotlight on the female figure inevitably pushes male figures, and by extension, the broader context to the margins. This type of analysis runs the risk of overemphasizing the role of a woman in a given text while neglecting their narrative function in relation to male characters. This article looks specifically of Mary in the Gospel of Thomas. Previously, her role has seen her as one of the disciples in this text. But using Eve Sedgwick’s homosocial bond theory reveals that Gos. Thom. wishes to emphasize the relationship between Jesus and Peter more so than it does Mary. This example is but a case in point in seeing that although our focus as modern scholars shifts to the woman, the ancient text is more so concerned about the iteration of power structures between men over women.

The targeting of religion in editorial cartoons has become a source of controversy. Particular tensions emerged following the publication of the Danish cartoons, a set of cartoons representing the Prophet Mohammed, published in Jyllands-Posten in September 2005. This research analyses cartoons from a different source, the satirical magazine Private Eye, with an eye towards the varied treatment of religion in this publication and the Jyllands-Posten cartoons. It focuses on the way the Bible features in Private Eye cartoons, and uses the semantic tool, the General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH), to analyse the way humour works in these cartoons, the target they aim at and the way the Bible features in the intertextual references of the reader. Analysing the targeting of such cartoons it concludes that there is a difference between the use of the Bible as a means of targeting other subject matter, as is evident in Private Eye examples, and the targeting within the Danish cartoons.

The article addresses the question why Christians often fail to achieve even the minimum standard of secular morality. It isolates from a long list of failures the undermining and maltreatment of women and sexual minorities. It describes four types of violence – gender, epistemic, symbolic, and hermeneutic – they are made to endure. It then undertakes a theological and philosophical analysis of some of the causes of failure, locating them in i) the moral hazards of “divine command ethics”; ii) the promulgation of immoral doctrines; iii) the perils of “costly discipleship”; iv) the quest for certainty; and v) adherence to the scripture principle or sola scriptura.

What happens when desires for homogeneity, belonging and possession conflict with realities of migration and loss? What happens when the life of the scholar and the life of the exile are imagined together? What does it mean to live simultaneously within two clashing narratives, as so many scholars do? And what if we treat the past as something other than our homeland? The following stories about archive, canon, and patrimony are also questions about scholarly subjectivity. By recounting scenes of living at odds with racialized or gendered narratives of the proper location and embodiment of knowledge, I seek to expand scholarly imagination. There are many more ways to relate to the past through the Classical or Christian archive than through simple assertions of continuity. Archival grief may be the condition to which the scholarly imaginary is subject.

This special edition is a form of pride. It is a celebration of thirty years since the birth of queer theory. Of course, being queer, this was no normative conception or birth. More of an artificial insemination and fusion of gene pools, characterised by anarchy, activism, subversion, deconstruction, alongside identitarian and non-identitarian concerns. Queer theory transcends many disciplines. Raising suspicion from those concerned with normative ideas of scholarship, queer oscillates between delighting the academy with its offer of dense critical theory and radical undoing, yet it also disgusts traditionalists who hold allegiances to normative scholarship. With its agenda of subversion and playful parody, it is no coincidence that the term “queer theory” was first coined as a joke. Teresa de Lauretis had heard the term “queer” reclaimed on the streets by gay activists, and, as David Halperin comments, “she had the courage, and the conviction, to pair that scurrilous term with the academic holy word ‘theory.’” Here, the authors of this special edition share the same courage and conviction to pair the term with biblical texts.

Spirits and the associated messianic secret play a central role in the Gospel of Mark. In this article I present a Gothic reading of the gospel. In the beginning of Mark, Jesus is driven by a spirit into the wilderness. In this Gothic, liminal space—filled with beasts, demons, and angels—he battles and overcomes the forces of darkness. Yet evil powers continue to make their presence felt in the rest of the narrative. Gothic literary criticism provides a fruitful domain in which to explore the way the spirits haunt Jesus. Utilising the concept of hauntology, I examine the interplay between Jesus and those that haunt him: the demons and his messianic secret. Gothic theory and hauntology elucidate the dark side to the good news Jesus preaches, demonstrating how Jesus and his good news haunt his followers and Mark himself.

In the Hebrew Bible, God epitomises an ideal hegemonic masculinity: sexless but reproductive, in control of his creation, and hypermasculine when engaging with his feminised followers. As such, the Gospel writers depict Jesus as the Son of God with this, as well as the masculine ideals of the Greco-Roman world, in mind. Ultimately, this causes a tension of divine masculinities, which is particularly exposed in the act of crucifixion where two different divine masculinities are at play. Using the queer and social-scientific methodology of Butler and Connell respectively, I argue that these biblical divine masculinities disturb dominant constructions of gender in the ancient world and followers of Christianity might be called to do the same.

The representations of religious tension between the polytheistic humans and the monotheistic Cylons in the Sci Fi (now Syfy) channel’s hit series Battlestar Galactica (2003–2009) is nowhere more evident than in the human “convert” to monotheism, Gaius Baltar, who struggles to proselytize his minority beliefs to other humans. Ancient Jewish literature also highlights the patriarch Abraham’s turn from a polytheistic past to a believer and follower of the one God. This article seeks to understand Baltar’s belief and actions in light of Abraham’s shift from polytheism to monotheism in ancient Jewish literature.

Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents provide readers with often radical re- visions and critiques of biblical texts. This article asks how the principal characters’ affective engagements with Scripture vary, and considers the extent to which fiction may “play” with the Bible, despite its authoritative distance. It employs Alicia Suskin Ostriker’s approaches from her 1993 monograph Feminist Revision and the Bible: a hermeneutics of suspicion, a hermeneutics of desire, and a hermeneutics of indeterminacy. Aligning these modes with the affect theory of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, this research finds that the position of a character’s ego (paranoiac versus depressive) affects how they may approach the “lost object” of religious authority. The more the reader is awakened to these different positions, the more they may eventually become comfortable with indeterminacy. Such freedom from a sense of the monologic permits creative engagement with the Bible that reflects recent aims of feminist and womanist theologies.

This article serves as an injunction for queer biblical studies to be reclaimed and mobilised as activist practice. First, I discuss the application and activist potential of queer theory – in and beyond the academy. To address concerns around queer elitism, I argue how rupturing the binary between theory and practice recharges the accessibility and the activist potential of queer. In my discussion of queer pedagogy in the biblical studies classroom, I offer practical strategies based on queer commentaries in teaching and learning. I explore the notions of risk, experimentation and failure, as well as of tackling specific issues relating to resistance to queer biblical criticism based on religious faith. Moreover, I consider how flipped learning theory can offer a personalised and holistic approach to queer studies. In emphasising the value of queer biblical studies as activist practice, I stress inclusion, intersectionality and student-educator parity as important elements in this project. In detailing my commitment to activism, I conclude that true commitment to social justice means that researchers aspire for their work to be irrelevant to future audiences: When the work of activist academics becomes irrelevant, it means scholarship has effected change, with social justice becoming realised rather than wish-ideology.