Reed Carlson

#AARSBL in Boston was awesome. Yesterday alone I had lobster, oysters, clam chowder, and shrimp.

Hey! I’m happy to send it (send me best address). I’ll be futzing with it until Monday but I’ll send you the final version of whatever I end up presenting.

will not ultimately be a part of God’s people. It’s not a point that I—not only a trained biblical scholar but also an ordained Christian minister—much like or would care to argue, but it’s one that I cannot deny is very prominent in my scriptures.

Those later theologians, I want to suggest, were not misreading Paul outside of his Jewish context—as some biblical theologians today might argue. Rather they were following Paul to his logical conclusion: Anyone, whether Jew or Gentile, who does not come to recognize Jesus as the Jewish messiah

Granted, other Jews at the time of Paul were also engaged in similar exegetical discourse and contesting the same terms. Paul is the only one, however, whose rhetoric enabled the eventual displacement of all Jews from the people of God according to the theology of the later church.

Yet, in this era of “Paul within Judaism,” we are at risk of losing track of what is still the essentially supersessionist character of Paul’s coordination of categories like Israel and Gentiles.

I’ll make one last observation today regarding what I see as a curious irony. At another time in the history of the SBL, my overarching point—i.e., that Paul is doing something profoundly different from his contemporaries—would seem hardly worth arguing.

My paper is called, "'A Remnant Chosen by Grace': Tracing a Supersessionist Motif through Isaiah 10, the Pesher Isaiah (4Q163), and Romans." Here's is an excerpt from my conclusion:

Hey, #aarsbl #sblaar. If you're interested in Jewish-Christian dialogue and real talk about supersessionism, please consider stopping by Monday afternoon for session S24-309.

Academics are people who insert a passive aggressive "[sic]" into just the right part of a block quote and think that they've done all that was needed to signal that they regard the source material as complete trash and that's why I'm not worried about chatGPT replacing me yet.

My spouse has been working on immigration & the church for over a decade, first as the pastor of an immigrant church in Boston, then as an academic. Tonight she is giving a live streamed lecture. In a world of hot takes, here’s an opportunity to hear from a voice with experience and perspective.

Commentary on Proverbs 31:10-31 - Working Preacher from Luther Seminary The Lectionary parsing of Proverbs 31 is unfortunate; without the opening verses the context is lost. The book is a collection of proverbial sayings; those in chapters 30 and 31 are from apparently no...

On this issue, I recommend the perspective of @wilgafney.bsky.social . An internet-friendly version of her take is here: www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries...

😬

Happy Problematic Sermons on Proverbs 31 Day to those who celebrate.

journal cover

New issue of Journal of Biblical Literature Vol. 143, No. 4, 2024 muse.jhu.edu/issue/54645 @sblpress.bsky.social @projectmuse.bsky.social @reedcarlson.bsky.social @samsquamptch.bsky.social

Thanks, i saw this in my searching but wasn’t sure how it compared to others.

I was thinking that even if I’m not yet permitted to post an article, I can still link the DOI.

Hey folks, what's your favorite nonprofit alternative to academia .edu / Google Scholar / etc. ? I'm not interested in the social media aspects of these sites and I don't really need them for finding resources. I'm mostly looking for a place where I can post my own research.

Student: (Brings up a scholar’s work in class not knowing it’s one of the prof’s grad school buddies)

Professor: Ok. So that’s a great connection you made and we should definitely talk about their contribution. First though I have to tell you this embarrassing story about them.

What particularity of your name sometimes causes people to cite you incorrectly?

Here’s mine: my first name is more commonly a last name.

In so doing, We Are Israel offers a more nuanced framework for thinking about supersessionism as a reflection of the shared heritage of these traditions—and therefore as a new starting point for Jewish-Christian dialogue.

Writing as Christian and Jewish Bible scholars who are grounded in the historical study of the ancient world and engaged with these texts as living scriptures for our respective communities, we trace these Jewish roots in terms of five key themes of Christian supersessionism.

Rather, supersessionism organically develops discourses that are native to the Hebrew Bible and shared with Second Temple and rabbinic Judaism. As Jon D. Levenson puts it, “Nowhere does Christianity betray [i.e., reveal] its Jewish roots more than in its supersessionism.”

Without denying that supersessionism has often had devastating consequences for Jews (and others), we show that the common portrayal of supersessionism as an entirely negative Christian innovation is both historically and theologically inaccurate.

Today, in many Christian spaces, this perspective on supersessionism has become axiomatic. We Are Israel: The Jewish Roots of Christian Supersessionism problematizes this simplistic story.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that supersessionism is the fundamental crux in Jewish-Christian relations. After the Holocaust, many Christian theologians began to interrogate and reject supersessionism as an evil Christian mutation that perverts the Bible and inevitably encourages violence.

“Supersessionism” is an umbrella term for a cluster of Christian theological ideas rooted in the core claim that, to one extent or another, the church has replaced the Jewish people as the party to God’s covenant. In a word, Christians, not Jews, are the true Israel.

Ethan Schwartz and I have signed a contract for a coauthored book called, “We Are Israel: The Jewish Roots of Christian Supersessionism.” We’re grateful to Hendrickson for their enthusiasm for this project, and we’re excited to make this intervention. Here's a brief description from our proposal:

Academia is when you send an email to someone politely reminding them to send you that article that they promised to write for your thing, then respond to another email in which you apologize for having not yet sent the article you promised to write for someone else’s thing.

Thanks. We can blame the low post count on my children who, it seems, are always home from school for some reason.