The Rise of Postcolonial Criticism in Biblical Studies and Its Current Status

This chapter explores the origins and development of the rapidly growing field of postcolonial biblical criticism and examines its current status. It begins with a brief account of postcolonial discourse in the secular academy which traces its roots to the anticolonial political and cultural struggles in twentieth-century Asia, Africa, and Latin America and serves as the foundation for postcolonial biblical criticism. It highlights major phases in the emergence of the field, its intellectual precursors, methods, and theories and assesses the contributions of key practitioners. The article analyzes the multifaceted and interdisciplinary nature of the field, its impact on biblical studies and current interpretive trajectories, and calls attention to the directions that research in the field should continue to take.

Empire, Postcolonial Criticism, and Biblical Studies

When it comes to the relationship between the Bible and ancient empires, the focus for the most part remains on the past and on the imperial contexts in which these texts were written. It must be noted that even though historical-critical scholarship has drawn our attention to historical contexts, empires continued to remain in the background in biblical studies. This chapter focuses on the relationship between the Bible and empire, not only of the past but also the present. It examines in depth the works of biblical scholars who have made a conscious attempt to expand the field of Biblical studies. Furthermore, by highlighting the points of convergence and divergence between the Bible and precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial empires, scholars can begin to see the ways in which the relationship between the Bible and empire has constantly evolved, transformed, and mutated as scholars transgress boundaries and draw on the work of one another.

The Bible and the Dutch Empire

Conversations on Dutch colonial heritage and its continuing influence are finally gaining momentum. It is important to also include the Bible and Christianity in the analyses. In this chapter, the role of Christian Scripture in the development of the ideology of Dutch colonialism, slavery, and Dutch national identity is explored. After the Dutch declared their independence over their Catholic Spanish rulers, the Republic as a Calvinist nation positioned itself within the biblical narrative. The Republic soon became a colonial power and colonial experiences, too, were understood through the framework of biblical interpretation. Existing supersessionist appropriations of biblical texts served as a model for colonial Christianity. The Dutch identified with biblical Israel. Initial worries that colonial activities and slave trade were against Scripture led to the development of a specific Calvinist defense of enslavement and colonialism. A central concern in the theological discussions on slavery and colonialism was Baptism. It was argued that all children in a Reformed household, including the enslaved, had to be given access to baptism. In the eyes of protestant Dutch slaveholders, being enslaved and being Christian became increasingly less compatible. As church authorities increasingly began to doubt the practice of baptism of enslaved people, baptism became an exclusive sacrament. Later however, an ideology of Christian slavery developed. In spite of decolonization, “genuine” Dutchness continues to be associated with Christianity and whiteness.

John’s Writings and Empire

In contrast to Johannine scholarship’s predominant focus on the religious and spiritual aspects of Johannine literature, empire studies examine the Roman presence in John’s writings or the ways the text negotiates imperial power. These studies generally argue that John employs counter-imperial rhetoric to resist the empire or disrupt accommodationist interactions with imperial power. Since identifying John’s Gospel as a resistant discourse (e.g., high christology) can reinscribe Christian superiority, postcolonial studies pay more attention to the colonial or imperializing rhetoric in John that creates the hierarchical order and marginalization of others. Such postcolonial studies examine power relations at work in the text and in their own geopolitical contexts from a resistant, ambivalent, or decolonial position. This essay suggests that empire-critical and postcolonial studies of John’s writings engage the material matrix of the text and its cultural production, a non-binary mode of interpretation focusing on postcolonial texts borne out of liberation struggles, and intersectional analyses of imperial-(post)colonial formations.

Competing Narratives on Bible Translation in India

This article focuses on Bible translation in India as a form of biblical criticism. It points out some of the limitations in scholarly approaches to the study of Bible translation in India and highlights the critical perspectives that a postcolonial translation approach can bring to scholarship on Bible translation and biblical criticism. This article argues for a radical rethinking and contextualizing of Bible translation that focuses on hitherto marginalized Indian translators who undertook translation of large parts of the Bible into verse. The article’s premise is that translation across genres should be taken as seriously as conventional linguistic translation since this approach offers a significant challenge to the concept of “authorized” Bible translation and, more significantly, to continued philological scholarship focused on comparisons of lexical items that obfuscate histories of power and marginalization.

The Roman Empire in Paul’s Letters

Paul’s reality as a colonized Jew and an imperial subject of Rome means that the Roman Empire loomed large in his world, especially given his frequent travels to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ to Gentiles of the Roman Empire. Although Paul’s letters seldom refer directly to the Roman Empire, the Roman Empire formed the content as much as it constituted the context of Paul’s letters. While these letters contain critiques of the Roman Empire, they also mirror the Roman Empire in different ways. Attempts to pin Paul down through his letters as either anti-imperial or pro-Rome are unrealistic and reductionist, because they do not take seriously the complexity of the Roman Empire, of Paul as a person, of language and writing, and of textual interpretation.

The Apocryphal Acts of Thomas and Empire

This chapter argues that studies on the Apocryphal Acts of Thomas tend toward Eurocentrism in ignoring the anti-imperial discourse that underlies heresy and fiction. Some of the main questions discussed are why prioritizing the Roman Empire when examining the early Christian period is problematic, how empire studies modify heresiology, and why the relationship between the Apocryphal text and the community of Thomas Christians of India deserves to be reexamined against the biases of modern-day research, especially when such research is overdetermined by imperial discourse. The chapter contributes to the study of literature and religion and Eastern Christianity in the post-colonial era.

Bible, Empire, Liberalism, and Racial Capitalism

The article examines how liberal discourses and practices become central to modern European empire. Liberalism as a discourse of uplift and progress resonates with the goals of Christian evangelism to make the world a better place. This article explores two different poles of the Bible in the midst of empire—the polarities of justification and resistance. The first part of the article examines how race and capital form strong motivations for empire that set the stage for the second section, which describes how the Bible provides justification for empire. At the heart of the article is the notion of the Bible’s function as a mechanism for the manufacturing of consent to empire at home and abroad. The final section of the article offers a treatment of Rastafari textual traditions that function as an overt rejection of the Bible as an example of the disruption of the logic of empire.

The Neo-Assyrian Empire through a Postcolonial Lens

This essay provides an overview of the Neo-Assyrian imperial ideology (ca. 934–609 bce) including how religion and politics intertwine, and how the images of self and other are constructed in this imperial ideology. This overview is followed by a discussion of how the biblical traditions of Isaiah and Deuteronomy responded to the Assyrian empire. Isaiah of Jerusalem (1-39) and the book of Deuteronomy subvert the Assyrian empire by way of mimicking its imperial discourse in order to underline the sovereignty of YHWH and in order to call the people of Judah to trust in their God. The essay then moves on to discuss how the books of Nahum and Jonah offer different perspectives on the notions of decolonization by way of bringing the divine judgment as in the case of Nahum or by way of calling the Ninevites to repent as in the case of Jonah.

The Babylonian Empire in the Bible

The Babylonian Empire appears in multiple manifestations in the Bible. In Revelation 17–18, Babylon is characterized as the “whore of Babylon.” In Genesis 11 the Tower of Babel episode extends the complexity and multifaceted representations of Babylon, while Daniel 3–4 recounts particular episodes of the encounter between Daniel and the Babylonian king. However, the most prominent feature of the Babylonian Empire in the Bible is that of the Babylonian exile. This article approaches the topic of the Babylonian Empire in the Bible broadly regarding themes and and explores several representative texts.