The New Testament in Color
A Multiethnic Bible Commentary
Edited by Esau McCaulley, Janette H. Ok, Osvaldo Padilla, and Amy Peeler
IVP Academic, 808 pages, $60
The New Testament in Color is the first robustly multiethnic single-volume New Testament commentary. Most contributors represent North American ethnic minorities, including African American, Asian American, Hispanic, and Turtle Island (indigenous) scholars. Several contributions come from white North American scholars.
International scholars are limited “for reasons of scope” and because the editors “believe that there are many other important volumes and projects that are calling attention to the testimony of the Majority World.” Other single-volume commentaries have gathered scholars of a specific social location, such as True to Our Native Land: An African American New Testament Commentary. But nothing quite like The New Testament in Color has previously been published.
It’s not just that no other multiethnic single-volume commentary has existed before. In November 2024, during the Society of Biblical Literature’s annual meetings, there was a panel on The New Testament in Color. One panelist, Max Lee, said he looked up the authors of 12 biblical commentary series. Seven of those commentary series, Lee reported, had no New Testament volumes written by a scholar of color, and the other five had just one such volume.
In other words, those who use biblical commentaries regularly, like preachers and teachers, could hardly cobble together a complete set of New Testament commentaries that was robustly multiethnic even if they tried. The New Testament in Color begins to correct this deficiency, offering preachers, scholars, and students an accessible multiethnic resource for biblical research.
Following an introduction by Esau McCaulley, the book contains five essays that survey the categories of ethnic interpretation reflected in the commentaries (such as Latino interpretation). The book’s core, of course, are the 22 entries covering the entire New Testament (with combined entries on the Thessalonian, Pastoral, and Johannine letters). Interspersed between these text-based entries are four essays on subjects related to socially located interpretation (gender, mental health, multilingualism, and immigration).
The essays surveying various categories of ethnic interpretation are brief, none being more than nine pages. Their brevity makes them ideal for pairing with other essays in the commentary. In a class on Paul’s letters, Bruce Longenecker and I assigned McCaulley’s introduction, the essay on African American interpretation, and Dennis Edwards’s commentary on Philemon for a single class.
The reading was 20 pages, offering our students a theological case for engaging in multiethnic discourse, a crash course in African American interpretation, and a concrete example of African American interpretation on a text with a troubled interpretive history. This combination worked well, generating conversation and thoughtful reflection among students who represented a spectrum of theological, ecclesial, and political positions.
The commentaries on New Testament texts are the heartbeat of The New Testament in Color. In the introduction, McCaulley explains that the editors asked contributors to interpret New Testament texts using a hermeneutic of trust, “wherein we recognize that the God we encounter in the biblical texts is in the end a friend, not an enemy.” Likewise, the editors said that the Apostles’ and Nicene creeds were confessional starting points for the commentary. The commentaries, in other words, are intended for the church’s use and edification.
At the same time, the editors asked contributors “to bring the entirety of themselves to the process of reading and interpreting the New Testament.” In terms of the contributors’ ethnicity, this comes through in various ways. Jordan J. Cruz Ryan illuminates Acts by weaving wisdom from his mother and father together with Filipino American traditions and language. Janette Ok reflects on 1 Peter’s vision of the church as a diaspora community in light of the Asian American experience of “being painted as the perpetual foreigner” (quoting Viet Thanh Nguyen). H. David Zacharias points out the similarity between Cree traditions of healing men and women and the peoples’ treatment of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew.
Other commentators, however, make far less explicit reference to their ethnic experience. For these scholars, theological or ecclesial commitments, with their related exegetical practices, appear to have outstripped ethnic experience in the interpretive process. But theological and ecclesial commitments, too, are features of a person’s “social location.” These authors did what they were asked to do: they brought their whole selves to the task of interpretation, stressing the features of social location they determined most relevant to the task.
This volume invites us to study Scripture with the help of Christ’s ethnically diverse body, to engage in genuine, intercultural listening. “In other words,” as Ok said during the Society of Biblical Literature panel, “this book will affirm and challenge, comfort and discomfort.”
And that is as it should be with a multiethnic commentary.
Zen Hess is a Ph.D. candidate in religion at Baylor University, host of the podcast Currents in Religion, and a former pastor.
