Scholars have rightly identified the roles of literal/historical interpretation and noetic/spiritual interpretation in Cyril of Alexandria's exegesis of Scripture. This article argues that narrative contributes to both methods by using events in the past to explain Scripture's meaning. He applies concepts established historically by Exodus’ recount of the Israelites’ presence in Egypt to his interpretation of the prophetic books. On the one hand, his literal interpretation draws from the Israelites’ return to idolatry, detailed in Exodus xxxii. On the other hand, his noetic interpretation relates the Egyptians’ oppression of the Israelites detailed in Exodus i to humanity's limitations under the devil.

Agimund's Homiliary is extant in two eighth-century manuscripts in BAV, Vat. lat. 3835 and 3836 and is one of the very few Roman texts actually written in Roman script surviving from the early Middle Ages. This article argues that the Homiliary is a crucial piece of evidence for early medieval Roman liturgical and cultural life and the patristic resources of Rome. Agimund's Homiliary, and the late eighth-century additions which are actually part of another, hitherto unidentified Roman Homiliary, together constitute evidence of the degree to which patristic theology and exegesis were embedded in Roman culture, of the interchange between the Latin- and Greek-speaking communities in Rome and the Lateran in the early Middle Ages, and of the intellectual productivity and cultural versatility of early medieval Rome.

This article presents a new account of Richard Simon's work as a biblical translator. Having first contextualised Simon's views on the vernacular Bible in the contested world of late seventeenth-century French Catholic biblical translation, it then examines how they were engaged with and disputed by contemporaries (in particular, Antoine Arnauld). It contends that Simon's novelty did not consist in applying history and philology to the Bible in order to reach a confessionally neutral version, but rather in reconceptualising the relationship between multiple legitimate biblical translations to craft a new form of Catholic vernacular Bible.

This article argues that Thomas Clarkson (1760–1846), the founder of the British campaign to abolish the slave trade, was a heterodox Anglican. Suspected of ‘Unitarian opinions’ in his youth, his religious writings in old age, including neglected notes on his copy of the New Testament, display a deep commitment to critical study of the Bible and a broadly Arian view of Christ. Knowing that Clarkson was a life-long but heterodox member of the Church of England challenges the conventional focus on Quakers and Evangelicals in the study of religion and abolitionism.

In the early twentieth century, Korean Catholic and Protestant Churches found themselves in a period of significant power transition, from a neo-Confucian dynasty to a colonial regime. Imperial Japan and Christianity thus posed a mutual challenge: church leaders worked to sustain and increase their Evangelical mission field within Korea's new socio-political environment, while, simultaneously, the Japanese depended on the cooperation of the Korean Christian communities to fulfil their colonial project. In this dynamic of State-Church relations, Catholics and Protestants constantly vied for ascendancy. This article examines how the two Christian denominations engaged with each other and with Korea's coloniser, as imperial Japan's policies varied and its international status fluctuated.

Roman Catholic missions preceded Protestant missions in Burma by three hundred years. Scripture extracts is the only known extant Burmese translation of portions of the Bible by the earlier Catholic missionaries. Produced by the Italian Barnabite missionary Guiseppe d'Amato, Scripture extracts represents the Catholic missionary strategy of inculturation. It was printed by the British Baptist missionaries to Burma, Felix Carey and James Chater, in Serampore in 1811, and passed on to the American Baptist missionary Adoniram Judson. Scripture extracts was an important resource for Judson's translation of the entire Bible into Burmese, although he employed a different translation approach.

It may appear odd to write a review article focused on two books that are fundamentally different in intention and scope. The first is a self-conscious attempt by a moral theologian of conservative inclinations to contribute a Christian ethical perspective to the culture wars currently raging on both sides of the Atlantic on empire, race, and slavery. Its author, Nigel Biggar, is the Emeritus Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford. The second book is a collection of papers by imperial and mission historians given at a workshop at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, in July 2018. Its brief is more limited, namely to explore the professed commitment of nineteenth-century Christian missions to bringing a gospel of peace into contexts that were frequently sites of violence, not least between indigenous peoples and European settlers and other colonial actors. Its geographical remit is limited to Africa and the Pacific. Biggar's book has provoked a predictable storm of criticism, both within the historical academy and beyond it. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, for example, rapidly published a 15,000–word rebuttal of Biggar's arguments by Alan Lester, Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Sussex, together with an almost equally lengthy reply by Biggar.1 In contrast, Geoffrey Troughton's edited volume, extremely valuable though it undoubtedly is, seems unlikely to attract notice beyond the limited constituencies of professional historians and scholars of mission studies. Although obviously differing in character, these two books, when set in juxtaposition, bring into focus some of the most pertinent issues raised for Christianity by the imperial past and the ambiguous role played within it by Christian missions.