Below is an exchange between Colleen Conway and David Maldonado Rívera on Conway’s book, The New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2023).
DMR: Colleen, thank you so much for agreeing to discuss your recently published The New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction. As someone who teaches Introduction to the New Testament with some frequency and has not set up on a specific textbook, I highly appreciate how you took on this work. It must be a daunting task to develop a textbook for a set of texts that already count with a variety of “textbook genres” based on audience, academic setting, along other factors. What was your main motivation as you engaged in this challenge?
CC: My textbook writing endeavors began with Introduction to the Bible: Sacred Texts and Imperial Contexts that I co-authored with David Carr, a specialist in Hebrew Bible (and my husband). At my institution I teach a one semester Introduction to the Bible. I could not find a textbook that offered up-to-date historical scholarship, engaged with contemporary methods, while also fitting reasonably within a 15-week course. So I proposed to David that we draw on our joint expertise to write an introduction to the Christian Bible, both Hebrew Bible and Old Testament, that was fully contemporary and short enough to allow students to read both it and the Bible. When we were asked to revise that work for a second edition, I thought that it would be useful to build on those revisions to offer a separate textbook designed for a one semester introduction to the New Testament. For this book, a major motivation was to incorporate the insights of contemporary approaches more fully into the main body of the text, rather than relegating them to separate text boxes or the like.
DMR: I am so glad you triumphed over the tyranny of the text box and the desire to know how much it can contain.
As a follow up, your decision to not include the twenty-seven texts of the New Testament while also featuring discussions of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, The Acts of Paul and Thecla, Tacitus among others, and inviting students to trust their curiosity as they explore the later history of the Jesus Movement, I found it to be taking a risk for the sake of pedagogical generosity. At least for me, this approach facilitates going through the textbook with solid time management in mind, while opening up various possibilities to bring other materials and media to the classroom. How did you reach that decision? Was there a particular moment when you settled on sending James, Jude, and 2 Peter to the bench?
CC: Here I followed my years of teaching with textbooks that were too long to assign for one semester, in fact, sometimes even for two semesters! I found that existing textbooks, though sometimes including each and every New Testament book, were too large and unfocused for students to truly read both them and the biblical texts to which they were being introduced. In writing a more teachable and focused textbook, I invariably had to make decisions as to what biblical books would not be included in any detailed way in class assignments. Obviously, students are most interested in learning about the gospels and the Pauline epistles. Beyond that, it was not as much a matter of what to exclude, but rather what to include. I find that the combination of Revelation, Hebrews and 1 Peter in their differing approaches to the social and political context of the empire works well in helping students grasp the diversity of perspectives and experiences of early Christ followers. Discussions of non-canonical texts like the Gospel of Thomas or Acts of Paul and Thecla make that important point even more sharply. They also help set New Testament writings in a broader context.
DMR: For those instructors who will teach later periods of Christian history and reception, your approach I am sure is heavily appreciated. It gives students a solid foundation and, as you say, an incentive “to seek out a wide range of perspectives and approaches to aid” their learning (225).
The attention you give in the first chapter of the book to matters of textuality (paratexts, the artifactness of reading technologies, literacy in the premodern world, Twitter as a way to explain literary genres and conventions, etc.) invites the student to both think of premodern writers and audiences and how we read now. You continue this approach by highlighting the dynamism of the Jesus movement by having students engage various texts in small groupings (i.e., 1 Thessalonians, Philippians, and Philemon are discussed in Chapter 3; Galatians and Romans in Chapter 4; 2 Thessalonians, Colossians, and Ephesians as one subgroup along with 1-2 Timothy and Titus as another subgroup in Chapter 6; Revelation, Hebrews and 1 Peter in Chapter 12). Were there pairings you tried in class before that did not make it to the book? Pairings you’d like to try in a future second edition?
CC: It is funny that you mention the Twitter example because even as I used it, I wondered how long it would be relevant. At this point, a second edition would need to read “X formerly known as Twitter.” But as to your question, of course there are many ways to group these texts in the classroom, especially the epistles. For instance, I have often put 1 Corinthians in conversation with Galatians because these two letters offer a contrast in Paul’s own writing that students can readily see: In his letter to the Galatians, Paul deploys the idea of freedom to convince the gentiles not to be circumcised. In contrast, when writing to the Corinthians, Paul leaves aside the theme of freedom while he contends with their claims that “all things are lawful (or right) for me” (1 Cor 6:12). One can still put these Galatians and 1 Corinthians together in the classroom, even while the letters are discussed in different chapters. Likewise, when one gets to the last chapter and the discussion of Revelation, it is productive to put Rev 2:14, alongside Paul’s discussion in 1 Corinthians 8-10 about eating food sacrificed to idols as well the narrator’s aside in Mark 7:19 that Jesus declared all foods clean. Students are intrigued by exploring evidence of competing ideas among Christ followers about what one should or should not eat.
So I can imagine that one productive addition would be to more explicitly highlight such differences, whether regarding food, responses to empire, or another topic. I am always open to suggestions from instructors who are using the book!
DMR: Thank you for the extra suggestions! I will definitely incorporate some of those to my next course. I really appreciate how the students in your textbook are always comparing texts, close reading, and drawing comparisons. One thing I have tried in my New Testament course is doing some material culture exercise (have the student copy amulets on papyrus with a reed pen, check out the facsimile copy of Codex Sinaiticus and try some transcription; pro tip: no ink usage in the classroom) and incorporate art and cinema as examples of contemporary reception. As you have arranged the textbook and your classes, what are some of your preferred supplemental class activities?
CC: Wow, I love these ideas for bringing awareness of the materiality of the ancient world into the classroom. I incorporate both art and film in my teaching. In fact, the cover of the textbook is intended as a teaching tool. I am fascinated by Julio Romero De Torress painting of the Samaritan woman from John 4. Her penetrating gaze and tight-lipped expression while a back-grounded Jesus addresses her invite discussion. Especially if the instructor puts this painting in conversation with other depictions of this scene (and there are many!) it helps students understand how visual media from different cultural contexts might shape interpretations of the biblical narrative.
DMR: You made me think a lot about how to organize the narrative arcs of a course and how less conventional approaches may prove beneficial to students. For instance, focusing a bit more on the history of biblical interpretation and academic discussions, you introduce the students to Paul with an early encounter of his earliest extant letters. Right after this, students fully engage with current discussions of “Paul within Judaism” scholarship by contrasting Romans and Galatians (Chapter 4). As you know, this is something that other textbooks tend to do to culminate their discussion of Paul rather than begin it. What advantages have you found with this approach?
CC: There are several ways that I break with many New Testament introductions. The first is that we read and discuss Paul before the gospels. It is important to me that students experience Paul as one whose work with Christ groups in the Roman empire occurred before the traditions about Jesus begin to circulate in a written narrative form. And, yes, I move to discussion of Galatians and Romans quite early because so many mistaken assumptions about Paul’s identity are rooted in interpretations of these letters. Introducing students to the history of scholarship on “perspectives on Paul” enables students to see that biblical studies, like any other academic discipline, is both historically situated and a continuous work in progress. In the case of Paul, students see him transform (through a scholarly lens) from a Christian convert who is antagonistic toward Judaism, to a Jewish Paul who nevertheless rejects elements of Judaism, to (most recently) a Hellenistic Jewish Paul whose apocalyptic interpretation of Jesus is fully situated within Judaism. For students, these shifting views of Paul are wonderfully illustrative of how biblical interpretations are never static and sometimes are tragically wrong. That said, I also emphasize scholarly humility, noting that future scholarship will no doubt bring additional insights to our understanding of the ancient world of Paul and other New Testament writers.
DMR: Considering the issue of the “contemporary” in the title, your approach reminds me of a brief essay by Giorgio Agamben, where he ponders about contemporariness as “a relationship with one’s own time, which adheres to it and, at the same time, keeps a distance from it” (Agamben, What Is an Apparatus?, 41). It appears to me that you have a similar approach in mind as each of the chapters of the book unfold. Your focus on the positionality of students, scholars, our academic field, and the texts in question is heavily emphasized throughout the work. What have been some of your experiences in the classroom that motivated the current shape of the book?
CC: My students, as well as many other students, typically have little to no knowledge of the Bible or the historical contexts in which the biblical texts took shape. Many of them are truly interested to “discover” the most basic historical details about the New Testament, for example, the fact the gospels were written after Paul’s letters. With my discussions of the historical context of the New Testament texts, I also had in mind instructors who may not have been trained in biblical studies, and whose primary research is in other disciplines. I wanted to provide them and their students with a concise resource to access updated historical critical scholarship.
At the same time, I want students to grasp the wide-ranging influence the Bible has had and continues to have on our world. I hope to demonstrate the rich variety of questions that contemporary scholars bring to biblical texts because often these concerns are deeply relevant to my students’ own lives. Perhaps even more, I want students to learn to form their own questions that arise out of their own social locations. In this way, my textbook aims to open students to an ongoing, informed conversation about New Testament texts that can include them.
Colleen Conway is Professor of Biblical Studies at Seton Hall University. Her research interests include gender critical approaches to the Bible, the gendered cultural history of biblical traditions, and the Gospel of John.
David Maldonado Rívera is associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Kenyon College. His research focuses on late ancient heresiology, Christian historiography, and medievalism in the Caribbean. He currently serves as part of the book review team of Studies in Late Antiquity.
