Esau McCaulley
A New Testament scholar who makes a claim most scholars would not risk: that enslaved people who could not read were better interpreters of the Bible than the men who owned them. He can also tell you which seminar room made Jesus white.
Dr. Esau McCaulley. The Jonathan Blanchard Associate Professor of New Testament and Public Theology at Wheaton College, and a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. Author of Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope (IVP Academic, 2020), Christianity Today's Book of the Year; Sharing in the Son's Inheritance (T&T Clark, 2019); and editor of New Testament in Color: A Multi-Ethnic Commentary on the New Testament (IVP Academic, 2024). His writing has also appeared in The Atlantic and the Washington Post.
Also anchors sessions 1.2, 3.3, 3.6, 5.6 of the learning path
Who he is
Esau McCaulley teaches New Testament and public theology at Wheaton College, where he holds the Jonathan Blanchard chair. He wrote Reading While Black, which Christianity Today named its Book of the Year, and edited New Testament in Color. He writes opinion for the New York Times.
He anchors more sessions of this learning path than any other scholar in the archive, and his interview is the one that most rewards being read whole. He is a working exegete with a mainstream platform who will nonetheless tell you that illiterate enslaved people read the Bible better than seminary-trained slaveholders, and then defend it as a scholarly claim rather than a sentiment.
What you are getting in this dossier
Why the divinity of Christ never needed asserting until somebody denied it. The specific intellectual tradition that produced a white Jesus, which is more recent and more traceable than you expect. The double standard buried in who gets counted as Black. His full theology of slavery, from creation to Revelation, including what the Old Testament slave laws were actually doing. The reframe that slaveholders opposed slavery. And the strange modern turn where critics of the Bible end up agreeing with the men who owned people.
Jesus does what God does
He begins by dismantling the way the question is usually posed.
"So when we think about God as a category, we tend to think of God having certain attributes. God's really strong, he's really powerful, he is all-knowing, all of these omnis. And so when we think about whether or not the early Christians thought of Jesus as God, we have this category of God in our head, and then we say eventually the Christians moved Jesus into this abstract category."
The rest of this dossier is part of Unspoken
4,784 more words and 18 more clips of him making the case, including the three objections he answers and the place he refuses to flatter his own argument.
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