A Newer Jerusalem

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...

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 ...

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...