T&T Clark Texts @ Contexts Series (3 vols.)

In this collection, scholars from diverse geographical locations revisit a cluster of five biblical texts: Ruth, Song of Songs, Qoheleth (Ecclesiastes), Lamentations and Esther. The volume presents various viewpoints and contexts-geographical, communal, religious, social, economical and ethical. Matching scholarship with social awareness, the contributors keep asking themselves and their readers a dual-faced question: how does our life context influence our scholarly and non-scholarly readings of the Bible, and how does reading the Bible critically influence our life?

To answer this question and to show it at work the contributors employ a range of contextual lenses. Geography is a major factor of the contributors’ contexts—with contributors from South Africa, Argentina, Israel, the Pacific Islands–but not the only one to influence their readings. Issues of society, culture and community are at the foreground for all contributors and their reading agendas with specific focus on the AIDs crisis in Africa, issues of migration and asylum, and feminist approaches to biblical texts.

This volume on Luke-Acts as with all titles in the Texts@Contexts Series highlights readings that make explicit the diverse contemporary contexts of biblical interpreters. The global spread of contributors includes scholarly voices from South Africa, South America and Hong Kong, as well as from the United States.

The chapters are organized around four themes. The first examines interpretations of Jesus, looking at his childhood, contemporary context, and his teaching—including whether Jesus’ sympathetic response to disease and pain might be used to advocate euthanasia. The second examines social categories: gender, race, and class, including a political and racialized reading of the history of diasporic Black America as a model for reading Acts as a diasporic history. The third examines issues of empire and resistance. The final part looks at society and spirituality, with a focus on modern contemporary contexts.

In this volume scholarly voices from diverse contexts and social locations are gathered together to bring new or unfamiliar facets of biblical texts to light, focusing on issues of intertextuality. Samuel, Kings and Chronicles I sheds light from new perspectives on themes in these so-called historical books including Asian American and Chinese readings, issues of land, genealogy and maleness. The authors challenge us to consider how we deal with cultural distances between ourselves and these ancient writings—and between one another in the contemporary world.

These goal of these essays is de-centre the often homogeneous first-world orientation of much biblical scholarship and open to up new possibilities for discovery of meaning and method.