A Newer Jerusalem

A couple years ago, I was privileged to have been published in this wonderful volume Transformed into the Same Image: Constructive Investigations into the Doctrine of Deification by Paul Copan and Michael M.C. Reardon, eds. (here's  an excellent review from J. David Moser ). To buy the book, click the title above. In that contribution, which was called "Deification and the Eschatological City: Exegetical and Theological Connections in Early Christian Thought," I noted how often the heavenly Jerusalem (esp. that of Revelation 21) occurs in the early Christian literature in conjunction with Psa. 82, where God addresses his divine assembly thus: "You are gods, and sons of the Most High." This, I pointed out, displays how early Christian authors (and their readers an hearers) conceived of the New Jerusalem as a "city of Gods" (the title of my own book by the same name). So today, I found a late medieval French manuscript, kept at the Bodleian Library, wh...

The New Jerusalem. Armenian manuscript by Malnazar and Aghap'ir in New Julfa bible, 1645. [Thanks to Alin Suciu for pointing out a Coptic error below, now fixed.] Background I'm currently writing a long article on the reception of the New Jerusalem in apocryphal literature, esp. the Clementine Recognitiones Book 1, the Latin Visio Pauli (and the Apocalypse of Paul in Syriac), the First Apocryphal Apocalypse of John (in Greek), and The Book of Bartholomew (which exists only in Coptic). I was curious about the expression "City of Christ" that appears in the Visio Pauli , so thought I'd quickly dig through the Brepols Library of Latin Texts to see what turned up. Strikingly little. How about Greek? Also very little. And same for Syriac and Coptic. And yet there were some really quite interesting parallels and places where the term showed up.  I thought it was going to be a 10-line (and 10-minute!) footnote, but after doing all the digging and a bit of bibliogra...

In my City of Gods book (Brill 2025), I followed up on an intuition that I had that the New Jerusalem in the Scripture is in fact not a reference to a certain place but rather to a certain people. Namely, that "New Jerusalem" is something like a metonym, that is, "a word or expression that refers to something using the name of one of its qualities or features." Here, the something being referred to is the people of God in toto, and the word or expression that is used to refer to it is "New Jerusalem. Scholars like Robert Gundry have noticed this (and successfully argued it, I think) in the past,* but I wanted to root it more historically in my book, and not just carry around the hunch. That's because hunches, while an absolutely vital starting place for much good research, are not findings in themselves. You can't really footnote a hunch, though some people have tried to pull it off. See, for instance, Nicolas Berdyaev, The Divine and the Huma...

I'm happy to report that the article I wrote for the French edition of Communio, a French Catholic scholarly journal of theology, was recently translated into the Czech edition of Communio. The work fills in some of the theological and biblical (esp. Johannine) back story of my DFG research into the figure of the New Jerusalem.  Here are the details: “Communio v Novém zákoně: Od nynějška až navěky,” Mezinárodní katolická revue: Communio 119 (2/2026), 24–37. If you can manage Czech, here's the first page. Feel free to reach out if you want the full article. Also feel free to reach out if you want to publish the English original (which remains unpublished)!

In the last few weeks, I've travelled to a couple places and want to make a bit of a record as to what's been going on vis-à-vis my research and ancillary items. I'll focus on Cambridge and Oxford (both two weeks ago) and will devote this post to my activities in Cambridge. My post on the Oxford conference will be posted separately soon. The Cambridge conference will perhaps be a surprise to those who know my research; however, there is a deep connection, and one that will in time I hope become more apparent for its value. This was a conference hosted by the Cambridge Centre for Chinese Theology at Selwyn College, Cambridge, and the Cambridge Divinity Faculty. The main excuse for going (beyond my current research), if indeed I need one, was the fact that I was going to present on my current research in Oxford immediately after this conference, and going to the UK a few days in advance to take in this conference seemed a very good use of time and resources (two birds with on...