The Book of Chronicles stands out in the biblical context as it systematically, and at times literally, revisits historical events recounted in other biblical books like Samuel and Kings. This article aims to shed light on the phenomenon of this historical rewriting by employing Jeffrey Alexander’s cultural trauma theory. While Alexander’s theory has found application as a framework for interpreting specific biblical books in recent years, the uniqueness of the proposed article lies in its approach. Rather than applying Alexander’s theory to books written in close proximity to the traumatic events, such as the exile, the article seeks to explore its relevance in a book shaped approximately 250 years after the occurrence of the trauma.

This article seeks to answer how Paul’s Roman audience, composed mostly of non-Jews, would have understood Rom 1:3–4. It argues that the closest available frameworks would have been the myths of heroized demigods and the more recent imperial propaganda of deified emperors. This reading makes good sense of a number of emphases within Rom 1:3–4, aligns with others throughout the remainder of the Epistle to the Romans, and coheres with Paul’s concepts of the resurrected body and glorification elsewhere in his epistolary corpus (e.g., 1 Cor 15; Phil 2:5–11). The article then discerns three key reasons why Paul would have characterized Jesus in this way: 1) to draw from an existing religious grammar, 2) to justify cultic veneration of Jesus, and 3) to position Paul as a purveyor of divine truth or mysteries.

This article argues that several biblical texts, including some previously unrecognized ones, impelled the foundational apologetic argument of the first letter to Autolycus by Theophilus, the second-century bishop of Antioch. I focus here not only on biblical passages in Theophilus’s mental and social worlds that he may have consciously used and that appear in biblical indices in modern editions of Ad Autolycum, but also on previously unrecognized ones which, nonetheless, leave subtle traces, and which Theophilus may even have used unconsciously. To uncover the “literary echoes” of these passages, I exploit Hollander’s intertextual approach. This study can show how a sensitivity to literary echoes can produce deeper understanding of the formation of the strategy of Theophilus’s first apologetic letter, of his conformity to ancient ideals regarding the creative use of a classic corpus, and of functions of Scripture in his largely oral second-century community and in early Christianity more broadly.

This article uses Booker T. Washington, the founder of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, as a case study to interpret how coloniality structured Black Protestant institution-building in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Washington, who was born a slave on a plantation in Franklin County, Virginia sometime around 1858 or 1859, was quite literally reared on a plantation, and spent most of his public career trying to work “up from slavery,” as the title of his autobiography confirms. In the “afterlife of the plantation” (to borrow Jarvis McInnis’ term), his Protestant social respectability, Protestant work ethic, and Protestant institution largely recapitulated the plantation system in his embrace of agriculturalism, industrialism, and in his political and ethical commitments to gendered normative order and Black sexual Victorianism. This article sifts through these entanglements to interpret their meanings for the study of Black religion in and beyond historically Black institutional contexts.

With empathy under reevaluation, this study analyzes its place at the beginnings of the Jesus movement. As a capacity to resonate with the condition of another, “empathy” entails vicariously feeling or acting as though their situation is one’s own. Related concepts in antiquity, more often under the terminology of sympatheia (συμπάθεια) and cognates, concern interactions between body, soul, and cosmos. In this context, the Apostle Paul 1) formulated the cosmic significance of Christ’s empathetic embrace of human suffering; 2) urged humans, in turn, to embody Christ’s death and resurrection as their own; and 3) conceptualized the community as Christ’s body, empathetically uniting individuals and the creation itself. Hebrews adds a cognitive dimension: Christ’s experience of human suffering enables him to aid them in their own suffering, and members of the community should each imagine themselves in place of the other. Finally, Matthew identifies Christ as “the least of these,” making compassion toward him the basis for apocalyptic judgment.

This article revisits the evidence for the inclusion of Clementine writings in Syriac Biblical manuscripts—1 and 2 Clement, the two epistles De virginitate, and the Eight Books of Clement—introduces a series of new witnesses, identifies a likely cause for this inclusion (medieval rather than early Christian), and contends that, despite current assumptions in the field to the contrary, this is a case where the later, pseudepigraphic works influence and determine the reception of the older, “genuine” writing, rather than the other way around.

In recent decades, biblical and early Christian studies have become more keenly aware and critical of how ancient Mediterranean literature perpetuates patriarchal stereotypes about women, incites gendered violence, and often participates in a culture of blaming women for the perpetuation of such stereotypes and violence. This article examines how the soul is gendered and made a victim of sexual violence in a Nag Hammadi text known as the Exegesis on the Soul (Exeg. Soul). After introducing Exeg. Soul and Nag Hammadi Codex II, I examine how the text participates in victim blaming and in conversation with recent advances in classical and biblical scholarship, as well as key differences between Exeg. Soul and other texts in Codex II regarding their characterization of sexual violence. I argue that despite its usefulness in encouraging ascetics to resist desires and repent like the soul portrayed in the text, Exeg. Soul offers a less forgiving portrayal of divine intervention (or lack thereof) in moments of sexual violence and risks the revictimization of survivors.

This article addresses coloniality’s imposition of forgetting in the Afro-Atlantic world and attends to the gut as a “site of memory” in Afro-Diasporic religions. It opens with a consideration of what forgetting means for communities in which “counter-memories” could have mounted a challenge to dispossession and the establishment of settler-colonial political institutions. It then turns to Black Atlantic religious memory and to the colon as a metonym for gastrointestinal interiority. Building on The Gut: A Black Atlantic Alimentary Tract (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), the author contends that the emphasis on the gut in initiatory Black Atlantic traditions (such as Vodou and Lucumí) reflects the gastronomic and epistemological impact of coloniality and racial capitalism. The article ends on a cautionary note, warning that while the current focus on the head in Afro-Diasporic religious discourses may contest colonized epistemologies, it threatens to reinscribe coloniality’s erasure of the gut’s role in cognition.

This article examines the ontological perception of YHWH as a cornerstone in the theosophy, theurgy, and mysticism of 13th-century kabbalistic literature. Drawing on several examples from dozens of largely unpublished and understudied commentaries on the Tetragrammaton, it presents a fresh perspective on early kabbalistic theosophy. These texts illuminate the role of divine appellations as a framework for theurgical practices, particularly cleaving to and unifying the divine name. The study critiques the marginalization of linguistic theosophy in scholarship and challenges the dominant focus on the corresponding theosophical discourse of the sefirot. It reevaluates Gershom Scholem’s interpretation, contending that his emphasis on the “Gnostic” nature of the sefirot and symbolic approach to the Tetragrammaton distorted understanding of the kabbalistic godhead and its theurgical dimensions. Finally, it explores how R. Abraham Abulafia’s focus on divine names in ecstatic practices and subsequent academic classifications further obscured their role in theosophical Spanish kabbalah.

This analysis examines dominant conceptual frameworks in world-historical studies of slavery by relocating them within the theoretical and historical development of the capitalist world-economy and of capital itself. It critiques the limitations of existing historiography by demonstrating how world-historical approaches have largely failed to account for enslaved resistance as a constitutive element of capital’s formation, particularly in relation to non-wage labor. The article argues that future research must incorporate acts of resistance—especially those grounded in systems of belief and religious practice—into the historical logic of capital, rather than treating them as external or reactive phenomena. Rethinking the capital-labor relation in this way allows for a more historically accurate theory of capitalism and carries significant implications for understanding both past and present challenges to global capital. In doing so, the study centers the epistemological interventions and religious structures of slave resistance as foundational to Caribbean struggles against colonial domination and subjugation.

While Paul urged practitioners of Christ-worship to abandon their old gods and replace them with Christ—a demand later re-issued by Justin, Tertullian, and other spokespersons—this study suggests that such an “abandon and replace” ideal would not normally have been followed. Relinquishing old gods when turning to Christ posed risks compared to other methods of embracing new gods. Furthermore, in antiquity, abandoning old gods was neither necessary nor common upon adoption of new deities. In light of these observations, my study highlights underexplored modes of embracing Christ in the Roman principate, and argues that a plurality of Christ-followers maintained connections with the Roman gods. I suggest that interpretatio Christiana and various other forms of adding Christ to existing religious practices were likely embraced by a prominent number of Christ-followers prior to Constantine.

This article offers an exploration of the transmission of the Pericope Adulterae (PA) in medieval manuscripts through the reports of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Egyptian scholars Abū al-Barakāt ibn Kabar and al-Asʿad ibn al-ʿAssāl. Ibn Kabar’s investigation reveals disparities between Arabic and Coptic sections, prompting a study of the PA’s presence in manuscripts across languages. Ibn al-ʿAssāl’s research involves examining manuscripts in Coptic, Greek, and Syriac, uncovering the PA’s rarity rather than prevalence. Byzantine-text based Arabic translations are found to introduce the PA to Coptic and Syriac circles. In contrast, the Melkite tradition, reliant on Greek manuscripts, often omits the PA. By tracing these scholars’ inquiries, the article provides insights into the PA’s complex journey of presence and absence in medieval Egypt and the Levant.

The sea serves as an epistemological orientation for understanding Afro-Cuban religious traditions that access divinities and the dead to reinforce group solidarity and produce healing. This article explores how spirit mediums and entities create historical, cultural, and ritual intersections that elucidate an ongoing worlding that carries potent political strategies for sustenance through an enactment of the waters, especially the ocean. In particular, this work looks at synergies between bodily acts like the singing of the song “Mamá Francisca,” the drawing of Palo signatures for kalunga (the sea of the dead), and altar creation in honor of Yemayá. The result is a complex and fluid understanding of spiritual practices and relationships that resist flattening and slip through taxonomic rendering. Further, by continually accessing afterlives that are porous and action-oriented, Afrolatine spiritual communities create spatial and temporal conduits between the living and the dead that are full of a radical social purpose.

Psychedelics have led neuroscientists and policymakers to employ lexicons of theology and spirituality, but scholars of religion have been strikingly absent from the conversation. Consequently, psychedelic studies draws uncritically upon classic essentializations of “religious experience” that academic religious studies abandoned decades ago for crucial phenomenological and ethical reasons. In particular, psychedelic research would benefit from paying more attention to the hermeneutical dimensions of altered states, which point beyond perennialist paradigms. This article presents a case study of neo-Hasidism (non-Hasidic Jews who draw upon Hasidism for spiritual-cultural renewal). Representations of psychedelics in neo-Hasidism reveal not only a great deal about the movement itself, but also about the interpretive interplay between psychedelic experiences and situated subjectivities. Drawing upon neo-Hasidic discourses from the mid-1950s through early-1970s, including unpublished archival materials, this article investigates how Hasidic sources impact interpretations of psychedelic experiences and also, in turn, how those experiences transform perceptions of Hasidism.

Jewish Hebrew writings spanning the Middle Ages to Modern times across multiple genres frequently include a large number of biblical quotations, often merged semantically and syntactically with the original material. This biblical metatext—mostly employed through metaphors, allusions and allegories—serves as a literary device, fulfils an aesthetic function, and endows the text with didactical, historiosophical or theological depth. This article will focus on the influence of this metatext in Hebrew chronicles from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries and will examine cases where it demonstrates a specific type of historical thought, reflective of certain theological perceptions. The article will outline a tentative model of the phenomenon of biblical metatext through its cultural and social functions in traditional Jewish culture. Presenting this phenomenon as an “open work”—a concept developed by Umberto Eco—enables us to more clearly analyze the interaction between author and reader, as well as their creative process.

Several American Catholic biblical theologians have recently revived an old idea about the priestly laws in the Pentateuch. This view, with roots in antiquity and early modern thought, holds that these laws were a response to the golden calf episode and represent a decline from an earlier, closer bond between Israel and God. While ancient interpretative traditions are often valuable for contemporary Christian reading of the Hebrew Bible, the Pentateuchal narrative resists the notion that these laws were born of failure or punishment. Instead, they should be seen as reflecting a deepening of God’s bond with Israel centered on cultic presence. Far from diminishing Israel’s worship, the priestly laws enrich the covenantal intimacy between God and his people, offering a presence more perpetual than anything known before, even by the patriarchs.

Eco-interpreters frequently use the biblical story of Noah and the flood to reckon with collective human responsibility for climate crisis. Yet such universalizing readings can inadvertently obscure the disproportionate impact of catastrophic storms on marginalized communities. This article brings disability hermeneutics to the Noah story, considering the ark from the vantage point of those not assured a place on board. It reads Jewish traditions about the flood alongside two contemporary accounts of climate injustice: reflections from a Christian theologian in the Pacific Island nation of Tuvalu and the lived experiences of disabled people in the United States who faced civic abandonment during Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy. Certain rabbinic narratives amplify eugenicist motifs, emphasizing how the ark denies refuge to undesirable bodies. But other traditions resist this impulse, expanding the ark to encompass unruly bodies and imagining Noah striving to save those left behind as the waters rise.

Representations of martyrs are rare in early Christian art and largely render their pain and deaths invisible. Art’s unwillingness to confront devotees with images of violence and suffering contrasts with the visceral descriptions of martyrdoms in contemporaneous texts. These ekphrastic texts, some of which purport to describe violent paintings depicting the torture of saints, encouraged these same devotees to visualize and participatorily reperform the violence of these martyrdoms in their imaginations—spaces free from the dangerous interactivity and immediacy of physical vision. An examination of how these texts conceive of the (material) images they describe and the (mental) images they conjure demonstrates that representations of martyrdom varied fundamentally across text and image, as ekphrastic texts guided listeners to see beyond the literal in response to challenging physical sights. Martyrdoms were, at first, spectacles to be seen with the “eyes of the mind” and not the eyes of the body.

This article explores the affective salience of Christian grace-talk. Developing Stanley Cavell’s account of language and Simeon Zahl’s generative work on the “affective salience of doctrine,” I analyze how the conceptual dynamics internal to Christian arguments over grace and difference structure possibilities of thought and feeling. I deploy a threefold framework for tracing these dynamics, exploring the ways in which Christians have argued over 1) how grace makes a difference to creatures, 2) differential grace, or how grace makes a difference to the differences between creatures, and 3) how these operations of grace modulate one another. Each of these shapes of contestation illuminates the deep conceptual and affective significance of Christian grace-talk. Taken together, they also frame an account of grace as recursively transforming the character of “difference” itself through the work of theological reflection.