Posts

Robin M. Jensen's Review of Revelation's New Jerusalem in Late Antiquity (Mohr Siebeck 2024)

Image
Just saw that Robin M. Jensen, the well known scholar of Early Christianity teaching at Notre Dame (USA) has written a thorough and nicely complementary review about the volume that Anthony Dupont, Johan Leemans, and I edited a couple years ago. Most of it was done while I had the FWO fellowship, but much of the editing was done with FWO funding, and so deserves mention on this DFG project blog as well. It appears in in the Review of Biblical Literature, 2/2026 issue. Jensen writes... This edited collection of fifteen essays is an excellent contribution to Mohr Siebeck’s scholarly studies on the history of biblical exegesis. This volume, focused on the book of Revelation, looks specifically at the ways the image of the New Jerusalem was interpreted through various eras, places, and media. The range of approaches is impressively broad and interdisciplinary, combining both textual and material evidence. It includes close literary studies of ancient exegetical texts, attention to lived re...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Modest Conference Paper Proposal to the Evangelical Theological Society

Image
Image of page three of Johnathan Swift's infamous  A Modest Proposal  ( 1729).  Full facsimile at Internet Archive here . I've just submitted the following abstract to the ETS section on Deification as Apologetics. Deification has a perpetual presence in early Christian theology, and especially in the context of the New or heavenly Jerusalem. And so recently I've been discussing it more and more in my papers as a stand-alone topic. Not least because it helps me to develop my thinking on this complex animating idea within the ancient literature but also because the broader academic community stands in great need of realizing the centrality of this fundamental Christian doctrine in doing historical theology.  So here's the proposal as submitted: Rejection of Deification as Christian Heresy: A Modest Proposal In this fast-moving paper, I make a novel apologia for the centrality and orthodoxy of deification in the scriptural, apostolic, historic, and universal Christian ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Interview with Francis X. Clooney: Being Confronted by Texts

Image
Yesterday I was reading up a bit on Max Müller in the context of late-antique Buddhist-Christian exchange via Hellenistic culture. Müller was the Oxford professor of comparative philology who directed the Sacred Books of the East , a monumental 50-volume set of English translations. He also has the distinction of being the first to give the Gifford Lectures at Glasgow (1888-1892).  While reading up on Müller, I remembered the first time I'd heard of his work, which was during an interview I had of  the Jesuit priest and comparative theologian Francis X. Clooney (Harvard University). That was at a time when I was just starting my PhD at KU Leuven in 2019. I remember that I had to catch Clooney in his hotel lobby near the Leuven train station early on a Saturday morning. He'd been in town for the defense of a doctoral dissertation and it was the only moment he and I could find to meet up to conduct the interview for KU Leuven's Theology Research News .  Turns out it was wor...
Post a Comment
Read more

Book Review: Betz, Leemans, Dupont (Eds.), 'Revelation's New Jerusalem in Late Antiquity' (Mohr Siebeck, 2023)

Image
Another review of the book I edited with Johan Leemans and Anthony Dupont: Revelation’s New Jerusalem in Late Antiquity, History of Biblical Exegesis 6, Tübingen (Mohr Siebeck) 2023, 348 pp., ISBN 9783161623769. This review was written by Prof. Harri Huovinen and was published in the pages of Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum / Journal of Ancient Christianity, Vol. 29, Iss. 1. (2025). The entire review is available here: https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/zac-2025-0008/html 
Post a Comment
Read more

New Article: "From Here to Eternity: 'Communion' in the New Testament" in Communio 298 (2025)

Image
A year and a half ago, Régis Burnet (UC Louvain) approached me to solicit an article for the 50th anniversary of the French Edition of Communio , the storied journal of Catholic thought founded in 1972 by Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI), Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Henri de Lubac, among others. The topic was to be generally on the topic of 'Communion in the New Testament,' and he gave me a lot of lattitude as to how I'd approach the topic. Eventually, I chose to provide a panoramic essay on the concept of communion (i.e. fellowship) in the New Testament in the Johannine, Pauline, and Petrine corpora in the NT, and especially how the divine-human and human-human communion discussed by these authors entails divine communion in what is proper to us (esp. our humanity) and our communion in what is his (esp. life, love, and glory). The article had a pretty tight word limit (no longer than 6000 words), so in the end I focused mainly on the Pauline and Johannine corpus....
Post a Comment
Read more

New Review of 'Revelations 'New Jerusalem in Late Antiquity' (2025)

Image
It came to my attention recently that another review has come out of my 2024 book, edited with Johan Leemans and Anthony Dupont (both of KU Leuven). Sometimes book reviews are simply rehashing of the book under review, chapter by chapter. This goes further and engages with some of the core ideas of the book, which I'm pleased that this reviewer, Josh Roach (Point Loma Nazarene University), caught.  Read the whole thing here. 
Post a Comment
Read more

Watch: Ian Boxall's Live "City of Gods" Book Review

Image
Last month, we held our first book review session of the Revelation Reception Network. I'm delighted that Ian Boxall, the famed scholar who works on New Testament (and especially Revelation) reception, agreed to review my book, City of Gods: The New Jerusalem of John's Revelation in Early Christianity (Brill, 2025) . That's the book in which contains the research that came before the current DFG-funded Eigene Stelle project that this blog tracks. I must admit that I was on needles and pins before the session, not knowing what to expect. This was especially the case because we'd organized these review sessions so that one scholar would review the book, and then the author of the book would have a chance to respond.  And this was live, of course, and you never know what will happen on LIVE TV! Perhaps I was expecting the Spanish Inquisition, but then again, no one expects the Spanish Inquisition. (If you know, you know.)  Anyway, it turned out to be a very kind and inde...
Post a Comment
Read more