Bitter the Chastening Rod follows in the footsteps of the first collection of African American biblical interpretation, Stony the Road We Trod (1991). Nineteen Africana biblical scholars contribute cutting-edge essays reading Jesus, criminalization, the enslaved, and whitened interpretations of the enslaved. They present pedagogical strategies for teaching, hermeneutics, and bible translation that center Black Lives Matter and black culture. Biblical narratives, news media, and personal stories intertwine in critical discussions of black rage, protest, anti-blackness, and mothering in the context of black precarity.

Nonwhite women primarily appear as marginalized voices, if at all, in volumes that address constructions of race/ethnicity and early Christian texts. Employing an intersectional approach, the contributors analyze historical, cultural, literary, and ideological constructions of racial/ethnic identities, which intersect with gender/sexuality class, religion, slavery, and/or power. Given their small numbers in academic biblical studies, this book represents a critical mass of nonwhite women scholars and offers a critique of dominant knowledge production. Filling a significant epistemological gap, this seminal text provides provocative, innovative, and critical insights into constructions of race/ethnicity in ancient and modern texts and contexts.

Nonwhite women primarily appear as marginalized voices, if at all, in volumes that address constructions of race/ethnicity and early Christian texts and contexts. The contributors, who identify as African American, Asian American, and Asian, analyze the historical, literary, ideological construction of racial/ethnic identities. In reading how identity is constructed in early Christian texts, the contributors employ an intersectional approach. Thus, they read how race/ethnicity overlaps or intersects with gender/sexuality, class, religion, slavery, and/or power in early Christian texts and contexts and in U.S. and global contexts, historically and currently. Identity construction occurs in public and private spaces and institutions including households, religious assemblies/churches, and empire. While some studies discuss the topic of race/ethnicity and employ intersectional approaches, this book is the first volume that nonwhite women New Testament Bible scholars have written. Given their small numbers in the academic study of the Bible, this book gives voice to a critical mass of nonwhite women scholars and offers a critique of dominant forms of knowledge and knowledge production. The contributors provide provocative, innovative, and critical cultural and ideological insights into constructions of race/ethnicity in early Christianity and contemporary contexts.

'The Construction of the Other in the Acts of the Apostles' explores the beginnings of the Christian Church, showing how early believers united and created a self-identity through delimiting the Other. Mitzi Smith shows how the creation and subjugation of the Other was crucial for the expansion of Christianity by the Apostles. Mitzi Smith employs Jonathan Smith's theory of otherness as a framework for analysing Luke's literary and discursive construction of character in Acts. In order to define the Self we define the Other, using opposition as a form of definition and subjugation. Furthermore, Jonathan Smith argues that the project of otherness is more about proximity than alterity; the other that is like us is the most threatening. Both Luke and many others have written accounts of Jesus's deeds; Luke's project of otherness was motivated by the need to promote his account as the most accurate. Projects of otherness are linguistic or discursive, evaluative, hierarchical, and essentially political and economic. Mitzi Smith provides a new way to understand Christian identity; allowing people to understand the Other in terms of themselves. Mitzi J. Smith is Associate Professor of New Testament and Early Christian Studies at Ashland Theological Seminary at Detroit. She is a contributor to 'True to Our Native Land' (2008). 'Here Mitzi Smith provides a subtle and well-written analysis of how the various kinds of characters are portrayed in Acts and what that means for Luke's theology of mission. She moves far beyond the usual literary summaries of Acts: both the nature of language and the nature of story-telling are treated with sensitivity and sophistication, and yet her book is readable for a non-scholarly audience. A must-read for all those interested in the literary achievement of Luke and Acts and what it means for Luke's theology'. Lawrence M. Wills, Episcopal Divinity School

Too often the negative characterization of "others" in the biblical text is applied to groups and persons beyond the text whom we wish to define as the Other. Otherness is a synthetic and political social construct that allows us to create and maintain boundaries between "them" and "us." The other that is too similar to us is most problematic. This book demonstrates how proximate characters are constructed as the Other in the Acts of the Apostles. Charismatics, Jews, and women are proximate others who are constructed as the external and internal Other.

Each volume in the Insights series discusses discoveries and insights gained into biblical texts from a particular approach or perspective in current scholarship. Accessible and appealing to today's students, each Insight volume discusses how this method, approach, or strategy was first developed and how its application has changed over time; what current questions arise from its use; what enduring insights it has produced; and what questions remain for future scholarship.Mitzi J. Smith describes the distinctive African American experience of Scripture, from slavery to Black Liberation and beyond, and the unique angles of perception that an intentional African American interpretation brings to the text for a contemporary generation of scholars. Smith shows how questions of race,ethnicity, and the dynamics of "othering" have been developed in African American biblical scholarship, resulting in new reading of particular texts. Further, Smith describes challenges that scholarship raises for the future of biblical interpretation generally.

That Christian missionary efforts have long gone hand-in-hand with European colonization and American imperialist expansion in the 19th and 20th centuries is well recognized. The linchpin role played in those efforts by the "Great Commission" - the risen Christ's command to "go into all the world" and "teach all nations" - has more often been observed than analyzed, however. With the rise of European colonialism, the Great Commission was suddenly taken up with an eschatological urgency, often explicit in the founding statements of missionary societies; the differentiation of "teachers" and "nations" waiting to be "taught" proved a ready-made sacred sanction for the racialized and androcentric logics of conquest and "civilization."