Toward Decentering the New Testament

Toward Decentering the New Testament is the first introductory text to the New Testament written by an African American woman biblical scholar and an Asian-American male biblical scholar. This text privileges the voices, scholarship, and concerns of minoritized nonwhite peoples and communities. It is written from the perspectives of minoritized voices. The first few chapters cover issues such as biblical interpretation, immigration, Roman slavery, intersectionality, and other topics. Questions raised throughout the text focus readers on relevant contemporary issues and encourage critical reflection and dialogue between student-teachers and teacher-students.

""This is the book I wish had been assigned in my days as a young Christian college undergraduate student. The authors go beyond pointing out the hubris of those who think a New Testament introduction can somehow be politically objective or ideologically neutral. Instead, they show us how a 'de-centering' of Scripture--in all its messiness--can serve as a form of 'resistance literature' which opens up ways of thinking otherwise and of imagining new worlds altogether.""
--Roberto Sirvent, Hope International University

""This exemplary volume represents refreshingly unchartered terrain in New Testament introductions, with conceptual and theoretical analyses that will help the reader understand why apprehending the noetic complexities of the politics of empire and power, gender, race, intersectionality, migration, postcolonial theory, and questions of hybridity, and subaltern agency, are thoroughly indispensable in interrogating early Christian origins, and in adjudicating the ever-evolving iterations and often contested implications of what this history means for critical pedagogies and practices of resistance, hope, and justice in our times.""
--Clarice J. Martin, Colgate University, Hamilton, New York

""The authors bring to the literary surface voices often relegated to the margins. The margin does not replace the center, but through historical, racial, ethnic, class, and gender analyses the book provides tools on how to dismantle its metes and bounds. This work renders a less hegemonic and more inclusive hermeneutical lens for studying the New Testament and the context that produced its content.""
--Stephanie Buckhanon Crowder, Chicago Theological Seminary

""This book establishes so many firsts. The most important may be that it marks a liminal moment in NT studies. In foregrounding what has been in the background it will open up new worlds of learning for students and teachers alike.""
--Michael Joseph Brown, President of Payne Theological Seminary

""Mitzi Smith and Yung Suk Kim offer a refreshing orientation to the New Testament that privileges marginalized perspectives, and deftly challenges many traditional assumptions about texts. Impressive in its scope and depth, the book masterfully explicates both historical-cultural contexts such as slavery and contemporary issues like migration. Anyone who reads this book will see the New Testament in a very different light. A much needed addition to biblical scholarship.""
--Raj Nadella, Columbia Theological Seminary

Mitzi J. Smith is Professor of New Testament and Early Christian Studies at Ashland Theological Seminary, Detroit. She is the author of Insights from African American Interpretation; Womanist Sass and Talk Back: Social (In)Justice, Intersectionality and Biblical Interpretation; I Found God in Me: A Biblical Hermeneutics Reader; The Literary Construction of the Other in the Acts of the Apostles; and co-editor of Teaching All Nations: Interrogating the Matthean Great Commission.

Yung Suk Kim is Associate Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Samuel DeWitt Proctor School of Theology, Virginia Union University. Kim is the author of eight books, including Christ's Body in Corinth, Biblical Interpretation, Resurrecting Jesus, and Messiah in Weakness. He edited two volumes: 1-2 Corinthians and Readin