This article examines how Greco-Roman ethnoracial views inform our understanding of Peter and Cornelius’s encounter in Acts 10:28–48. By drawing from the Gentile perception of Jewish misanthropy mentioned by Diodorus of Sicily and Tacitus, we find that Peter was harboring a resistance to preach the gospel to the Caesareans. By rereading the narrative from this perspective, visions and Spirit baptism within Acts 10 become divine events that challenge the reluctance to preach the gospel and associate with foreigners.

This article explores the implications of the community’s identity in the pentecostal hermeneutical methodology of Spirit-Word-Community. By drawing from the insights of pentecostal, postcolonial, and Latino scholars, I seek to demonstrate that the pentecostal community’s identity cannot be neglected in the construction of meaning. A more robust pentecostal hermeneutical methodology that affirms the role of the community must recognize its contextual identity and not ground it in a transcendent or universal understanding of what it means to be a Pentecostal. This article will draw out the implications of reading Scripture by analyzing the identity of a Chicano and Latino community and its role within a pentecostal hermeneutic.

Even though it is mentioned twice, the Spirit within the book of Jude has often been neglected and disconnected from the writer’ exhortation to contend for the faith. This paper aims to draw out Jude’s pneumatology, the problem of dreamers in the early church, and identity of the opponents in order to demonstrate how they all relate to Jude’s argument and the community’s understanding of false charismatics. Jude writes to a community that was in danger of losing its faith by both forgetting what the apostles have taught and by neglecting the spiritual practice of praying in the Spirit. Jude makes the point that in order to combat false charismatics and contend for the faith, one must neither stop the community’s engagement with the Spirit nor avoid pneumatic experiences altogether.

This essay argues that a canonical reading of Scripture that is attentive to the experiences it portrays must notice the centrality of the migrant experience throughout both the Old and New Testaments. We begin by tracing patterns of displacement, forced migration, and exile that define the lives of biblical figures such as Adam and Eve, Abraham, Ruth, Jesus, Paul, and the Early Christians. We also explore contemporary uses of the Bible that justify anti-immigrant policies and the dehumanization of immigrants, arguing that such interpretations contradict the text’s narrative. By reading Scripture through the lens of migration, Christians can better identify how the migration experience is both a theological and hermeneutical key to understanding God’s redemptive work in history.

John 15.26 has always been understood to be a continuation of the Paraclete’s testimony to the world. In this essay, the readers are urged to rethink the Paraclete’s witness not in relation to the world but in relation to the disciples and Johannine community’s context. By analyzing the literary and historical context, the relationship between testimony and faith, and the receptors of the Paraclete’s ministry in the Fourth Gospel, we will actually deduce that the ones who need the witness of the Paraclete the most are the disciples and Johannine community who are undergoing a trial of faith. The recognition of the Spirit’s role as an inner testifier is also manifested in other sources such as ancient Jewish literature and the New Testament canon.

This essay proposes a new interpretation of the Pauline expression to “clothe” (ἐνδύω) oneself in Christ (Rom 13:14; Gal 3:27; Eph 4:24; Col 3:10). The phrase has been understood in terms of putting on virtues and godly characteristics. Other understandings of this phrase appear in terms of a new identity (Gal 3:27). There has been relatively limited study, however, on the significance of clothing and how different racial groups were known and characterized by their dress. Clothing was not just something that one “puts on” to protect the body from the elements or analogously understood in terms of adopting virtues. Clothing was a racial signifier, and the putting on or taking off of clothing signaled a racial transformation. The ability to “put on clothes” would have been understood in terms of the malleable nature of racial identity. By drawing on the insights of Herodotus, Aeschylus, Plutarch, and other Greek and Roman writers, this reading proposes a racial interpretation of Paul’s “clothing” phrases in Romans 13:14, Galatians 3:27, Ephesians 4:24, and Colossians 3:10. This essay explores the interpretation of these Pauline passages in contemporary scholarship, describes how the changing of clothing also signified a change of racial identity, and lastly, demonstrates how these insights can impact our understanding of the Pauline expression to “clothe oneself in Christ”.