Dr. Minna Shkul

BA Hons, MA, PhD

Email address: m.shkul@sheffield.ac.uk

Telephone: +44 (0)114 222

Teaching Fellow in New Testament Studies

Department address: Department of Biblical Studies, 45 Victoria Street, Sh

effield S3 7QB

Biography:

I grew up in Finland, with moomins and trolls. I came to Sheffield in 1999 to do an MA in Biblical Studies, and after a few years in HR management a PhD in NT studies. I was reading Ephesians

and found lots of ‘gaps in the text’ that affect how we understand its ‘abolition of the law’ and mimicking Jewish traditions. Before taking up my current post at Sheffield I have worked as a Director of Theology & Religious studies partnerships at University of Wales Lampeter, and held two post-doctoral research fellowships funded by the Finnish Academy projects, “Explaining Early Jewish and Christian Movements: Ritual, Memory and Identity” (2008-2010) and ‘Enemies in the Making: "Others" and the Construction of Early Christian Identities’ (2010-2012). These project groups explore(d) how religious identities and traditions were formed and transmitted, drawing on the recent developments in the field of cognitive study of religion and social psychology. My contribution explores the Disputed Paulines, assuming that they were written by the followers of the apostle. The main output for this research is a forthcoming monograph discussing social positioning of Jesus-followers, deviants and outsiders in the pseudo-Pauline texts of the NT.

Research interests:

• The Disputed/Pseudo-Paulines; socio-ideological orientation of post-pauline Christianities and transformation of what following Jesus was believed to involve; and its relation to Jewish Jesus movement and second century Christian writers who devalued Jewish traditions and culture.
• The reception of sacred texts in faith communities, hermeneutics and social orientations in different religious traditions and movements – and especially the voices from the margins and minorities.

Current research projects:

I am currently working on two main projects. Firstly, analysing any differences between Jewish Paul and cultural positioning of the pseudonymous and non-canonical texts. I am also studying social orientations of contemporary biblical interpretations, with particular interest on different aspects of social identity, such as leadership, gender modelling, attitudes towards minorities, prejudice and discrimination. Both of these projects apply literary critical perspectives and social-scientific theories, examining identity, group processes and social memory, in particular, both in the world of the text / antiquity, and how these texts are interpreted in the 21st century.

Teaching:

I currently teach the following modules:

• NT Greek I, II
• NT Texts
• Decoding the New Testament
• Postcolonial Bible
• Literary Imagination

Publications:

“Prejudice, Discrimination and the Pastoral Epistles“ (forthcoming in 2013).

“Colossians” in Coleman Baker and Brian Tucker (eds), T&T Clark Handbook for Social Identity
and the New Testament. London & New York, T&T Clark (forthcoming in 2013).

Pseydonymous Ephesians and Remembering Paul’s Jewishness” in Petri Luomanen (ed. et al), Explaining Early Jewish and Christian Identities: Ritual, Memory & Identity (forthcoming).

“Identity and Belonging: Social Functions of Pentecostal Hermeneutics” in Andrew Davies and Jacqueline Gray (eds.), Sword of the Spirit: the Use and Function of the Bible in Global Pentecostalism. GPCS; Leiden: Brill (forthcoming).

Reading Ephesians, Exploring Social Entrepreneurship. Library of New Testament Studies 408.
London & New York: Continuum, 2009.

Conferences:

I have given papers in British New Testament Conference, Society of Biblical Literature Annual Congresses, European Association of Biblical Studies conferences, University of Sheffield, and at the University of Helsinki. Most of these relate to work that has been published in my monograph on Ephesians, but the most recent papers include work on other disputed texts, such as:

“Identity and Otherness in Colossians.” European Association of Biblical Studies, Amsterdam 2012.

“Ritualisation in the Deutero-Pauline Traditions” Rituals in the Early Jewish and Christian Traditions Workshop, University of Helsinki, August 2009.

“Mnemonic Socialisation in the Disputed Paulines: Ideology and Otherness in the Communal Remembering” SBL, Boston, USA, 2008.

“Difficult Readings and Dialogue: Between Theology and Theory” SBL, Boston, USA, 2008.

Other professional activities:

I am a member of the British New Testament Society and co-chair of its Social World seminar, and a member of European Association of Biblical Studies, Society of Biblical Literature and Finnish Exegetical Society.