Prof. Luis Menéndez-Antuña Awarded Grant from Catholic Biblical Association
Assistant Professor of New Testament Luis Menéndez-Antuña was recently awarded a grant from the Catholic Biblical Association to start new research on Enslavement in Early Christianity. Every year, the Catholic Biblical Association grants four to six awards to promote biblical scholarship.
This project, entitled “Historiographies of Pain: Galatians 4, Enslavement, Inheritance, and Flesh,” asks the following questions: How should New Testament scholarship theorize pain mainly when the victim’s experience is both linguistically unrepresentable (the very essence of pain) and more relevantly, when primary sources do not contain first-person testimonies? Specifically, how does historiography account for the extreme pain experienced by victims of enslavement when the historical archive is empty of the victims’ voices and, in many cases, mystifies, allegorizes, or erases the victims’ agony?
Prof. Menéndez-Antuña’s project also seeks to understand how many theological concepts in the New Testament, such as “sin,” “inheritance,” “will,” or “filiation,” both depend on and occlude the reality of the enslaved person.
The grant will fund this new research and will support a presentation that will take place at the International Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature at the University of Pretoria in South Africa in 2023.