

Since 1900, the Christian Century has published reporting, commentary, poetry, and essays on the role of faith in a pluralistic society.
© 2023 The Christian Century.
We still need books about biblical women’s liberation
Two new ones by Susan Hylen and Nijay Gupta offer correctives many churches have not yet internalized.
Luke Timothy Johnson’s scholarly life
The prolific biblical scholar offers an engaging account of his career—and of the spiritual journey that helped shape it.
by David Heim
A New Testament that connects the heart languages of First Nations people
The translators hope that “the colonial language that was forced upon us can now serve our people in a good way.”
Luke Timothy Johnson wants us to read Paul in all his complexity
“What advantage do we gain by possessing a Pauline theology that lies outside and above his writings?”
Nijay K. Gupta interviews Luke Timothy Johnson
Understanding the biblical Herods
Bruce Chilton moves Herod the Great and Herod Antipas from backdrop to center stage.
by Tony Jones
When goodness is also lovely
The New Testament has two words for “good.” Knowing the difference between them can help us build a better society.
Deconstructing the Republican Jesus
Biblical scholar Tony Keddie shows how the conservative movement enlisted the Bible to help its cause.
by Aaron Klink
The Old Testament, the Tanakh, and the Hebrew Bible
Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler show how multiple traditions arise when different people read the same text.
Interpreting Jesus’ healings as a conflict with purity laws is dead wrong
Jesus’ conflict, Matthew Thiessen argues, was with the forces of death.
by Greg Carey
Candida Moss asks what bodily resurrection means
How early Christians thought about bodies and how we do
The essential challenge of anti-Judaism in the Bible
Do antisemitic appeals to the Bible always constitute an abuse of scripture? Would that it were so simple.
by Greg Carey
Knowing and preaching the Jewish Jesus
“If to get a good message you need to make Judaism look bad, then you don’t have a good message.”
Elizabeth Palmer interviews Amy-Jill Levine
What’s behind the New Testament?
There is abundant documentation of the intertestamental period. We just haven't read it.
by Tony Jones
200 years that shaped Judaism, Jesus, and all that followed
The religious world we know was formed between 250 and 50 B.C.E.
What made early Christians a peculiar people?
“One second-century pagan critic of Christianity was willing to tolerate everything else about Christians if they would only worship the gods.”
David Heim interviews Larry W. Hurtado
Matthew L. Skinner recommends the best recently published books in his field.
selected by Matthew L. Skinner
The lines between sacred history and contemporary life are wonderfully, miraculously blurred.
Richard Hays has said for years that he's working on something about "echoes of scripture in the Gospels." But life intervened, so he has produced this slim volume as an appetizer.
reviewed by Jason Byassee
In The Sea and the Mirror, W.H. Auden audaciously wrote new poems in the voices of each character in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, all set after the action of the play concludes. The result is a work both wonderfully reverent and plainly modern—you might even call it modern in its reverence.
I would have hoped that anyone presuming to put out a book called A New New Testament would borrow Auden’s approach and give us a genuine literary and theological invention.