K. K. Yeo

Biography

He was a Lilly Scholar (1999) and Henry Luce Scholar (2003), research later published respectively as Chairman Mao Meets the Apostle Paul (2002) and Musing with Confucius and Paul (2008). He is an elected member of the Society of New Testament Studies (SNTS) since 1998, and a member of Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) since 1992. In the last thirty years, he has been a visiting professor in the Middle East, Europe, Asia, and to major universities in China, and is the co-director, Center for Classical Greco-Roman Philosophy and Religious Studies at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He has authored or edited more than forty Chinese and English-language books on critical engagement between Bible and cultures, including co-editing the six-volume Eerdmans/Langham series on Majority World Theology (2014-2019), omnibus volume by IVP as Majority World Theology (2020). He is author of What Has Jerusalem to Do with Beijing? (2nd edition, 2018), editor of The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in China (Oxford University Press, 2021), Theologies of Land: Contested Land, Spatial Justice, and Identity (Cascade, 2021), and Scripture, Cultures, and Criticism: Interpretive Steps and Critical Issues Raised by Robert Jewett (Pickwick, 2022).

Academic biography

Academic CV

Research topics

1. How is one’s own “culture” understood differently by ethnic, national, social and religious groups in our world today especially in light of the way we understand identity, ourselves and our world [hermeneutics]? This is particularly acute for those of us who have been and continue to be exposed to multiple cultural identities and meanings as we have moved through our lives.
    
2. What is the role of cultures in the Bible and in biblical interpretation? 
   1. Is the salience of cultural context  limited only to ways we approach the contexts of the Bible and its authors?
   2. And/or is culture itself also the lens through which the biblical authors or readers down through the centuries of the Christian tradition express and understand the biblical message?
   3. Are the cultures of the Bible also to be seen as part of the content in the Bible as well as in our biblical interpretation?
       
3. Is “cross-cultural” biblical interpretation necessary? What is it? And why or why not should we engage in cross-cultural interpretation and theology?

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