A Newer Jerusalem

It was an honor give a guest lecture in a graduate level class on Revelation that my former KU Leuven colleague Danny Daley is currently offering at Calvin Theological Seminary, where he's professor of New Testament. He'd asked me a few months ago to present on chapters 21-22 of Revelation and its New Jerusalem from a reception perspective. Since I wrote a big fat book on exactly that , I guess makes me qualified to talk about such things...  So I took the opportunity to take on them on guided tour of the first 1000 years of reception of the biblical image. The tour started with the text of Revelation itself, and then moved to the two main streams of reception: the literalist understanding of the New Jerusalem (present in Justin, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Lactantius, the early Augustine, etc.) and the spiritulist interpretation (present in all of the same authors, but also the likes of Clement of Alexandria, Origen, the Cappadocians, some of the medieval expositors of Revelation,...

Last Friday, a carload of biblical studies people (and me, a church historian smuggled in amongst them!) took a train and a car up to Göttingen for a wonderful conference hosted by the Evangelisch Theological faculty at Göttingen. The conveners were Professors Susanne Luther (Göttingen) and Tobias Nicklas (Regensburg), though Prof. David Cielonthko (Charles University, Prague) was also present. Unfortunately, Judith König (Regensburg), another organizer, was unable to join at the last minute. Aside from David, all the presenters were post-docs and doctoral students. We were also joined by Dr. Scott Robertson, a fellow DFG PI and my officemate at the Beyond Canon Centre in Regensburg. We covered a lot of ground:  A "figure analysis" of God's calling of Moses by Stephanie Ortmann (Regensburg) The story of Enoch in the Book of Parables developing the early Jewish development of narrated Messianology by David Cielontko (Prague). A brilliant presentation that developed materia...

  Another very complimentary (and thorough) review of the book Johan Leemans, Anthony Dupont, and I edited on the  New Jerusalem out from Mohr Siebeck in 2024 .  This time from Nebolsin Antal Gergely, Professor of the Department of Biblical Studies at the Theological Faculty of St. Tikhon's Orthodox University for the Humanities (Moscow).   He concludes very nicely thus (my Russian has wilted considerably since I learned it years ago, but Google Translate suits in a pinch): "In conclusion, we can say that we read this collection not only profitably but also with great pleasure. The overall excellent impression we received from it stems not so much from the high level of research of the articles contained within, but rather from the delight one involuntarily experiences when encountering the abundantly rich heritage of the ancient Church. The reviewer is confident that the authors of the collection will not be offended by this recognition." "Подводя итоги, с...

  I've only recently realized that I have a very strong sense of place--one that I thought everyone had, but it seems is less common than I thought. What I mean is this: when I'm in a place, I almost instantly map emotions, feelings, music, and history to it, and then forever after, those emotions and those places and historical details are deeply linked to form a sort of a 4-dimensional "feeling" of the place. It's almost like an internal multi-dimensional word that lives inside my head that I see through my eyes when I'm there (or imaginging it). As if I'm looking through Google Glass or some sort of virtual reality glasses. I'm in it. So this morning when I was mapping out the churches that I'll soon be visiting in Rome for my DFG-funded New Jerusalem research project--often churches that have mosaics that say something about the visual reception of the idea of the New Jerusalem in late antiquity--I rapidly found that I was creating an internal ...

First a small personal announcement, and then a much more important one following. Read on... First, the personal: it turns out I'm now a published author in Chinese! Specifically my chapter "Deification and the Eschatological City: Exegetical and Theological Connections in Early Christian Thought" (成神论与末世之城：早期基督教思想中的解经和神学联系) in this Chinese translation of the recent English book Transformed into the Same Image: Constructive Investigations into the Doctrine of Deification  (InterVarsity Press Academic, 2024) , edited by Paul Copan and Michael Reardon. The chapter has to do with the frequent juxtaposition of Rev. 21-22 (the New Jerusalem) and Psa. 82 (a classic passage pointing to deification in antiquity) pointed to by the early church fathers. Interesting, sure. But there's a more interesting and far more important story here, and this on two levels... Zooming out a bit now. This book, Transformed Into the same Image , was in fact a groundbreaking book in English whe...

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...