Adding to his distinguished collection of over 30 published books
February 2026 – Stephen D. Moore, Edmund S. Janes Professor of New Testament Studies at Drew Theological School, has recently published a new book, Jesusviolence: Racism, Speciesism, and Other Violences in and after the Gospels, with Oxford University Press.
A native of Ireland, Moore came to the Theological School in 1999, having previously taught in Ireland, England, and elsewhere in the United States. The internationally-recognized biblical scholar has authored or edited more than 30 books, including, most recently, The Bible after Deleuze: Affects, Assemblages, Bodies without Organs (Oxford University Press, 2023) and Decolonial Theory and Biblical Unreading: Delinking Biblical Criticism from Coloniality (Brill, 2024).
In Jesusviolence, Moore examines the question: What does Jesus say and do within the narrative worlds of the New Testament gospels that enabled innumerable gory horrors and immense systemic violences to be perpetrated with his presumed permission?
The compound title explores the violences inflicted on the gospel Jesuses in their narrative worlds; the violences enacted by the gospel Jesuses in their narrative worlds; and the violences enacted in Jesus’s name in our histories and worlds.
Inspired by affect theory, non-representational theory, and other related currents of thought, Moore focuses on what gospel texts do rather than what they mean, not least when what they do, or cause to be done, is violent.
But those were not his only inspirations. The book’s acknowledgments begin: “The imagined audience most often in my head as I wrote was my social-justice-passionate, relevant–scholarship-demanding students…at Drew Theological School with whom I am privileged to work.”
