A Latino Reading of Race, Kinship, and the Empire: John's Prologue

by Rodolfo Galvan Estrada III

Overview

This book provides a Latino reading of John’s prologue with special attention to how the themes of race, kinship, and the empire are part of the gospel’s racial rhetoric. By drawing from the insights of Latinx texts and theology, this book reveals how the prologue provides a lens to read the entire gospel with a keen awareness of Jesus’s engagement with people groups—from his own family to the Roman authorities. The prologue participates in the gospel’s racial rhetoric by shaping the reader’s racial imagination even before a person enters the narrative. By doing so, Jesus’s identity becomes constructed and defined through racial rhetoric since the opening verses of John’s gospel.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783031203053
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Publication date:	01/16/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	594 KB

About the Author

Rodolfo Galvan Estrada III is the Assistant Professor of the New Testament at Vanguard University in Costa Mesa, CA. His research focuses on race and ethnicity in the Greco-Roman world, Gospel of John, Jude, and Latino readings of the New Testament.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Revisiting the Problem of the Johannine Prologue.- Chapter 2: Reading the Ancient World through Latinx Eyes.- Chapter 3: Race and Representation.- Chapter 4: The Prologue’s Racialized Reality: John 1:1-18.- Chapter 5: The Prologue and Kinship.- Chapter 6: The Prologue and Race.- Chapter 7: The Prologue and the Roman Empire.- Chapter 8: A Racially Profiled Prologue.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“The more we study John’s prologue from different cultural perspectives, the more wealth of interpretations we learn from these readings. Rodolfo Estrada’s A Latino Reading of Race, Kinship, and the Empire: John’s Prologue surely completes this task. Estrada brings to bear a Latino perspective on the prologue. The volume provides an excellent example of the cultural turn in biblical studies with attention to an analysis of readings of the prologue, and with a sustained and critical analysis of the prologue in tandem with the Latinx culture and its reception in the Latin American colonial world. The result is an innovative work, with conclusions that will challenge the field of Johannine studies.” (Francisco Lozada, Jr., Charles Fischer Catholic Professor of New Testament, Latinx Studies Director: Latino/a/x Studies and Borderlands Institute, Brite Divinity School, USA)

“A complex cross section between critical theory, historical engagement, biblical studies, and cultural analysis, this book weaves together Johannine biblical concerns and Chicana/o and Latina/o questions of Identity as deeply shaped by experiences of colonization. Rodolfo Estrada helps us re-imagine spaces of identity and belonging in God through a deep reinterpretation of the gospel of John.” (Néstor Medina, Assistant Professor of Religious Ethics and Culture, Director of Master of Theological Studies, Emmanuel College of Victoria University in the University of Toronto, Canada)

“In this terrific book, Rodolfo Estrada reminds us that racial representation matters. Carefully and thoughtfully situated within his contexts as a scholar and a Chicano, Estrada challenges our assumptions about the racial imaginaries at work in the Gospel of John. This book is an important intervention in the study of rhetoric of kinship and belonging in both Latinx thought and biblical studies.” (Jacqueline M. Hidalgo, Professor of Latina/o/x Studies and Religion, Director of the Oakley Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Williams College, USA)