Is the Bible the unembellished Word of God or the product of human agency? There are different answers to that question. And they lie at the heart of this book's powerful exploration of the fraught ways in which money, race and power shape the story of Christianity in American public life. The authors' subject is the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC: arguably the latest example of a long line of white evangelical institutions aiming to amplify and promote a religious, political, and moral agenda of their own. In their careful and compelling investigation, Jill Hicks-Keeton and Cavan Concannon disclose the ways in which the Museum's exhibits reinforce a particularized and partial interpretation of the Bible's meaning. Bringing to light the Museum's implicit messaging about scriptural provenance and audience, the authors reveal how the MOTB produces a version of the Bible that in essence authorizes a certain sort of white evangelical privilege; promotes a view of history aligned with that same evangelical aspiration; and above all protects a cohort of white evangelicals from critique. They show too how the Museum collapses vital conceptual distinctions between its own conservative vision of the Bible and 'The Bible' as a cultural icon. This revelatory volume above all confirms that scripture - for all the claims made for it that it speaks only divine truth - can in the end never be separated from human politics.

Arguing with Aseneth shows how the ancient Jewish romance known as Joseph and Aseneth moves a minor character in Genesis from obscurity to renown, weaving a new story whose main purpose was to intervene in ancient Jewish debates surrounding gentile access to Israel's God. Written in Greco-Roman Egypt around the turn of the era, Joseph and Aseneth combines the genre of the ancient Greek novel with scriptural characters from the story of Joseph as it retells Israel's mythic past to negotiate communal boundaries in its own present. With attention to the ways in which Aseneth's tale "remixes" Genesis, wrestles with Deuteronomic theology, and adopts prophetic visions of the future, Arguing with Aseneth demonstrates that this ancient novel inscribes into Israel's sacred narrative a precedent for gentile inclusion in the people belonging to Israel's God. Aseneth is transformed from material mother of the sons of Joseph to a mediator of God's mercy and life to future penitents, Jew and gentile alike. Yet not all Jewish thinkers in antiquity drew boundary lines the same way or in the same place. Arguing with Aseneth traces, then, not only the way in which Joseph and Aseneth affirms the possibility of gentile incorporation but also ways in which other ancient Jewish thinkers, including the apostle Paul, would have argued back, contesting Joseph and Aseneth's very conclusions or offering alternative, competing strategies of inclusion. With its use of a female protagonist, Joseph and Aseneth offers a distinctive model of gentile incorporation-one that eschews lines of patrilineal descent and undermines ethnicity and genealogy as necessary markers of belonging. Such a reading of this narrative shows us that we need to rethink our accounts of how ancient Jewish thinkers, including our earliest example from the Jesus Movement, negotiated who was in and who was out when it came to the people of Israel's God.

Bringing together nationally and internationally-known scholars, The Museum of the Bible: A Critical Introduction analyzes the newly opened Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., from a variety of perspectives and disciplinary positions, including biblical studies, history, archaeology, Judaic studies, and religion and public life. Nominally eschewing ties to any particular religious tradition, the Museum of the Bible is poised to wield unparalleled influence on the national popular imagination of the Bible's contents, history, and uses through time. This volume provides critical tools by which a broad public of scholars and students alike can assess the Museum of the Bible's presentation of its vast collection and wrestle with the thorny interpretive issues and complex histories that are at risk of being obscured when private funds put a major museum on the National Mall.

Bringing together nationally and internationally-known scholars, The Museum of the Bible: A Critical Introduction analyzes the newly opened Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., from a variety of perspectives and disciplinary positions, including biblical studies, history, archaeology, Judaic studies, and religion and public life. Nominally eschewing ties to any particular religious tradition, the Museum of the Bible is poised to wield unparalleled influence on the national popular imagination of the Bible's contents, history, and uses through time. This volume provides critical tools by which a broad public of scholars and students alike can assess the Museum of the Bible's presentation of its vast collection and wrestle with the thorny interpretive issues and complex histories that are at risk of being obscured when private funds put a major museum on the National Mall.