Global Bible Commentary

The Global Bible Commentary, with seventy-two contextual articles and/or commentaries provides Bible study groups, classes, and individual Bible readers with an instrument to look at the Bible in a new way while encouraging active participation from the reader in the reading process. For example, Nicole Duran’s disturbing question about rape in her “Western” reading of Jesus will surely make people think: “Like the twenty-three men executed in Texas in the year 2003, he was disposed of by the state as harmful to society. Stripped of his agency and his clothes, costumed, blindfolded, and beaten, might he, like incalculable numbers of American prisoners, have been raped?” (348). Duran’s question breaks down the image of a ghostly gentle Christ within Western circles that produces a Jesus similar to the likings of an educated Euro-American Christian elite: “For me it means a different understanding of his powerlessness and his identification with the powerless, an identification with the often invisible, largely African-American prisoners of my country” (349). But to Duran, the American Jesus is not the arrested, executed criminal, despite the United States imprisoning more of its population than any other country in the world. The American Jesus is as innocent as the Americans are: peace-loving and terrified of disorder. He is not a loser or failed revolutionary, and he dies without a hint of despair. The American Jesus is a projection of Western ideals. [Full Review]

St Petersburg Christian University; University of Pretoria St. Petersburg, Russia; Pretoria, South Africa The Global Bible Commentary (GBC) is a comprehensive one-volume commentary aimed at undergraduate and seminary students and their teachers; it is also useful for pastors and adult Sunday school classes (xxi). This work is also to be made available in other languages (e.g., a Spanish edition of the GBC is in preparation [539]) The volume contains seventy-two short essays written by an international group of biblical scholars and religious workers from various hermeneutical, sociocultural, political, ethnic, religious, and gender perspectives. The majority of the contributors are from Latin America, Asia, Africa, and North America; other continents and/or ideological contexts are represented. (If one suggestion could be made, it would be to include perspectives from Russia and the countries of the former Soviet Union, since there the reading of the Bible has a long, complex, and unique history.) The contributors to this volume have rich, wide-ranging sociocultural and educational backgrounds. They speak from the heart and mind of true citizens of the global village. The GBC ’s introductory essays explain the theoretical and pragmatic rationale behind the volume and give some indications as to how the GBC can best be utilized by its readers. The rest of the essays are divided into two parts: the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. [Full Review]