Dr. Mark McEntire, professor of Biblical studies, has published The Internal Conversation of the Old Testament as part of the Smyth & Helwys Bible Commentary Supplemental Series, for which McEntire is also the Old Testament General Editor.

A description of the book is below:

“Any sustained reading of the Old Testament will reveal that, as a composite document, it has seams, fractures, and conflicting components. The Internal Conversation of the Old Testament embraces these features as essential to the text. The many voices editors brought into the text were engaged in a conversation about questions vital to human existence. How do we remember our ancestors? How do we portray our heroes? How do we govern ourselves? How do we measure our successes and failures? Careful attention allows us to overhear this ancient conversation and bring what we can learn from it into modern conversations about these and other questions that still center our communal lives.

The Smyth & Helwys Bible Commentary series brings insightful commentary to bear on the lives of contemporary Christians. Using a multimedia format, the volumes employ a stunning array of art, maps, and drawings to illustrate the insights of the Bible. It is built upon the idea that meaningful Bible study can occur when the insights of contemporary biblical scholars blend with sensitivity to the needs of students of Scripture. In addition, the CD-ROM, which offers powerful searching and research tools, pairs the text with a digital resource that is a distinctive feature of this series.”

Dr. Gideon Park, a Fellow in Religion in the College of Theology and Christian Ministry, recently published The Politics of Race and Ethnicity in Matthew’s Passion Narrative with Palgrave Macmillan. A description of the book is below:

“In Matthew’s passion narrative, the ethnoracial identity of Jesus comes into sharp focus. The repetition of the title “King of the Judeans” (ὁ βασιλεὺς τῶν Ἰουδαίων) foregrounds the politics of race and ethnicity. Despite the explicit use of terminology, previous scholarship has understood the title curiously in non-ethnoracial ways. This book takes the peculiar omission in the history of interpretation as its point of departure. It provides an expanded ethnoracial reading of the text, and poses a fundamental ideological question that interrogates the pattern in the larger context of modern biblical scholarship. Wongi Park issues a critique of the dominant narrative and presents an alternative reading of Matthew’s passion narrative. He identifies a critical vocabulary and framework of analysis to decode the politics of race and ethnicity implicit in the history of interpretation. Ultimately, the book lends itself to a broader research agenda: the destabilization of the dominant narrative of early Christianity’s non-ethnoracial origins.”