Thomas R. Yoder Neufeld (ThD, Harvard Divinity School) is associate professor of religious studies (New Testament) and peace and conflict studies at Conrad Grebel University College at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario. He is also director of graduate theological studies at Conrad Grebel.

Asking about violence rather than peace is to come at the New Testament with a specific set of concerns growing out of a public discourse that has raised the issues of violence to new levels of urgency. While violence may not be as central a concern to the writers of the New Testament as is peace, it opens up avenues of analysis and reflection that shed important light on the New Testament. For many readers these may be unaccustomed and even troubling.

Thomas Yoder Neufeld

Cover page

About the Author

Title-page

Imprint

Dedication

Ephesians

Preface

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

1. ‘Violence’ and ‘New Testament’

2. Turn the cheek and love your enemies!

3. Forgive, or else!

4. Violence in the temple?

5. Atonement and the death of Jesus

6. Subordination and violence

7 Divine warfare in the New Testament

Conclusion

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An honest and compelling presentation of the present-day tensions surrounding the interpretation of New Testament texts relating to violence. While violence may not be as central a concern to the writers of the New Testament as is peace, it opens up avenues of analysis and reflection that shed important light on the New Testament.

The Good Book Stall

This book reads as a diverse set of New Testament passages and Christian doctrines, and usefully summarises, in each case, a number of existing or possible interpretations. The passages include, in order, The Sermon on the Mount; the ‘Parable of the Unforgiving Slave’; the ‘cleansing of the Temple’; the doctrine of the Atonement; a so-called ‘Household Code’ in which passages and verses, mainly from the Epistles, are read as instructions for domestic life and the ordering of domestic power; and apocalyptic passages describing or foreseeing ‘Divine warfare’. These readings are presented as part of a single argument suggesting that, although they all describe or invoke ‘violence’, Jesus appears through them as a model of ‘the subversion of violence’ rather than of its ‘legitimization’. This hardly surprising conclusion might become more intriguing if the varied concepts clustered here as ‘violence’ were interrogated a little; and also if the sometimes interesting information about the social and political circumstances in which the passages were written was allowed to suggest that what is under consideration is actually not Christ himself but interpretations of him made by different writers in strongly differing times.

Jesus and the Subversion of Violence

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Jesus and the Subversion of Violence

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