Trans Biblical: New Approaches to Interpretation and Embodiment in Scripture

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 entrée 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.

Joseph A. Marchal is Professor of Religious Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies at Ball State University. They are the author, editor, or coeditor of more than ten books, including Appalling Bodies: Queer Figures Before and After Paul’s Letters; Bodies on the Verge: Queering Pauline Epistles; and Sexual Disorientations: Queer Temporalities, Affects, Theologies. They are also currently serving as chair of the Society of Biblical Literature’s first-ever Committee for LGBTIQ+ Scholars and Scholarship and founding coeditor (with Melissa Wilcox) of the new journal QTR: A Journal of Trans and Queer Studies in Religion.

Melissa Harl Sellew is Professor Emerita of Classical and Near Eastern Religions and Cultures at the University of Minnesota. She is the editor or coeditor of three previous collections: Pauline Conversations in Context: Essays in Honor of Calvin J. Roetzel; The Fabric of Early Christianity: Reflections in Honor of Helmut Koester by Fifty Years of Harvard Students; and Living for Eternity: The White Monastery and Its Neighborhood. Her recent publications bring a trans-sensitive lens to works like the Gospel of Thomas and Acts of Paul and Thecla. She is the recipient of a three-year NEH grant to support the digital humanities project Resurrecting Early Christian Lives as well as a recipient of the Arthur Motley Teaching Award from the University of Minnesota.

Katy E. Valentine is a public scholar and owner of Soul Forge Coaching, empowering entrepreneurs and leaders to expand their spirituality and increase their impact on the world. She is the author of For You Were Bought with a Price: Sex, Slavery, and Self-Control in a Pauline Community and numerous articles on enslavement, embodiment, and transgender identities and the Bible. She recently published “Examining Scripture in Light of Trans Women’s Voices” in The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Approaches to the Hebrew Bible. She is cochair of the Society of Biblical Literature’s Gender, Sexuality, and the Bible program unit.