Minoritized Women Reading Race and Ethnicity

Nonwhite 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 their small numbers in the academic study of the Bible, this book gives voice to a critical mass of nonwhite women scholars and offers a critique of dominant forms of knowledge and knowledge production. The contributors provide provocative, innovative, and critical cultural and ideological insights into constructions of race/ethnicity in early Christianity and contemporary contexts.

This 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.

Jin Young Choi is associate professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School and author of, Postcolonial Discipleship of Embodiment: An Asian and Asian American Feminist Reading of the Gospel of Mark. Mitzi J. Smith is the J. Davison Philips Professor of New Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary. and author of Toward Decentering the New Testament: A Reintroduction.