A Latino Reading of Race, Kinship, and the Empire John’s Prologue

This book provides a Latino reading of John’s prologue with special attention to how the themes of race, kinship, and the empire are part of the gospel’s racial rhetoric. By drawing from the insights of Latinx texts and theology, this book reveals how the prologue provides a lens to read the entire gospel with a keen awareness of Jesus’s engagement with people groups—from his own family to the Roman authorities. The prologue participates in the gospel’s racial rhetoric by shaping the reader’s racial imagination even before a person enters the narrative. By doing so, Jesus’s identity becomes constructed and defined through racial rhetoric since the opening verses of John’s gospel.

Chapter 1: Revisiting the Problem of the Johannine Prologue.- Chapter 2: Reading the Ancient World through Latinx Eyes.- Chapter 3: Race and Representation.- Chapter 4: The Prologue’s Racialized Reality: John 1:1-18.- Chapter 5: The Prologue and Kinship.- Chapter 6: The Prologue and Race.- Chapter 7: The Prologue and the Roman Empire.- Chapter 8: A Racially Profiled Prologue.

Rodolfo Galvan Estrada III is the Assistant Professor of the New Testament at Vanguard University in Costa Mesa, CA. His research focuses on race and ethnicity in the Greco-Roman world, Gospel of John, Jude, and Latino readings of the New Testament.