Joseph A. Marchal

Trans Biblical provides some of the most exciting new scholarly work in trans biblical interpretation to help us better understand our Bibles, our bodies, and one another in a fraught and fractious world. Trans Biblical: New Approaches to Interpretation and Embodiment in Scripture offers a collection of wide-ranging essays exploring key issues animating trans biblical interpretation from a variety of angles and emphases. Contributors, who themselves represent a range of gender identities, answer the question "what makes a biblical reading trans, or a trans reading biblical?" in diverse and exciting ways. They also promote new ways of thinking about gender variation in the ancient world while more sensitively and critically addressing ongoing debates about gender and embodiment. This collection is a helpful entr e into how biblical readers and interpreters can make new, more creative, reflexive, and accountable connections to influential texts and traditions. It represents a historic effort to situate, expand, and elaborate on the current trajectories of trans biblical interpretation. Gender variance is as old as stories about creation, and biblical texts are more variable than we have been trained to see. They disrupt present-day assumptions of a simple and stable gender binary, often deployed against trans, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming people. Taking us from Genesis through the Gospels and epistles and into rabbinic and early Christian scriptural engagement, Trans Biblical sharpens our awareness of what is in these texts and builds up our capacities for what can be done with our encounter with biblical texts and traditions. In short, the work of the scholars gathered in this one, convenient collection meets an important, even urgent, need by providing a range of entry points and approaches to biblical texts and traditions in a contextually and theoretically nuanced fashion.

The letters of Paul are among the most commonly cited biblical texts in ongoing cultural and religious disputes about gender, sexuality, and embodiment. Appalling Bodies reframes these uses of the letters by reaching past Paul toward other, far more fascinating figures that appear before, after, and within the letters. The letters repeat ancient stereotypes about women, eunuchs, slaves, and barbarians--in their Roman imperial setting, each of these overlapping groups were cast as debased, dangerous, and complicated. Joseph Marchal presents new ways for us to think about these dangers and complications with the help of queer theory. Appalling Bodies juxtaposes these ancient figures against recent figures of gender and sexual variation, in order to defamiliarize and reorient what can be known about both. The connections between the marginalization and stigmatization of these figures troubles the history, ethics, and politics of biblical interpretation. Ultimately, Marchal assembles and reintroduces us to Appalling Bodies from then and now, and the study of Paul's letters may never be the same.

The letters of Paul are among the most commonly cited biblical texts in ongoing cultural and religious disputes about gender, sexuality, and embodiment. Appalling Bodies reframes these uses of the letters by reaching past Paul toward other, far more fascinating figures that appear before, after, and within the letters. The letters repeat ancient stereotypes about women, eunuchs, slaves, and barbarians--in their Roman imperial setting, each of these overlapping groups were cast as debased, dangerous, and complicated. Joseph Marchal presents new ways for us to think about these dangers and complications with the help of queer theory. Appalling Bodies juxtaposes these ancient figures against recent figures of gender and sexual variation, in order to defamiliarize and reorient what can be known about both. The connections between the marginalization and stigmatization of these figures troubles the history, ethics, and politics of biblical interpretation. Ultimately, Marchal assembles and reintroduces us to Appalling Bodies from then and now, and the study of Paul's letters may never be the same.

Relatively brief and seemingly unassuming, Philippians is frequently underestimated by its readers and users. This guide shows that what lies within this letter is much more complicated and dynamic than many expect.After surveying the major historical problems and the methods scholars use to arrive at competing solutions, Marchal focuses on the letter’s famous hymn of Christ—a rare glimpse into a tradition created by the community in Philippi, even earlier than Paul’s letter. Given its impact and potential, the hymn deserves sustained attention, including its connections to slavery and other modes of social power. Turning to the letter as a whole, Marchal asks how this letter fits with types of argumentation in Greco-Roman culture, moving then into a detailed sketch of the rhetorical patterns in the letter, from unity and sameness to hierarchy and modeling. Feminist and empire-critical approaches are presented alongside more traditional assumptions and ideas throughout, signaling how choices in approach and starting points have historically affected the scholarly visions and communal uses for Philippians.In the final chapter the letter is put to a series of atypical uses, as the insights of queer theories are brought into surprising interaction with the arguments in the letter. Tarrying over unmentionable ideas and provocative moments that readers typically race past, this chapter takes the reader from the hierarchical heights of a cosmic Christ to the depths of excrement being emptied from the same body, from the arguments of waste to revealing asides about human waste and feminine lack. The performative power and possibilities of Paul’s letters has never been stranger nor more subversive of the too often destructive and dehumanizing uses of biblical images, ideas and arguments.

Was Paul an opponent of imperialism or a participant in the patriarchal social codes of his day? Joseph A. Marchal moves beyond this too-simple dichotomy to examine the language of power and obedience, ethnicity, and gender in Paul's letters, arguing that understanding the way rhetorics of power overlap and intersect requires a nuanced combination of feminist and post-colonial criticism and a "thick description" of colonized space. His analysis of gender and power dynamics in the Roman colony of Philippi is an exemplar of a new approach to reading Paul in his contexts, always attentive to the contexts of the contemporary interpreter as well. The Politics of Heaven offers new clarity and precision in the interpretation of the apostle and the social spaces in which he moved.

Joseph A. Marchal leads a group of scholars who are also experienced teachers in courses on Paul. More than a series of how-to essays in interpretation, each chapter in this volume shows how differences in starting point and interpretive decisions shape different ways of understanding Paul. Each teacher-scholar focuses on what a particular method brings to interpretation and applies that method to a text in Pauls letters, aiming not just at the beginning student but at the tough choices every teacher must make in balancing information with critical reflection.