The New Testament Apparatus and the Rise of the American Cold War
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2026-06-01
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Abstract
A New Testament apparatus criticus orders a vast material history within an array placed below a text that either prints a desired referent in the upper register or gestures toward that referent, conceptually. Relegating manuscripts to the role of data and extracting their variants, textual criticism masters past corruption while promising an ever-advancing present that never quite arrives. The apparatus therefore testifies not only to textual difference but also to extractive resource hoarding and the progress-at-any-cost epistemologies of modernity. Focusing on the International Greek New Testament Project’s “new Tischendorf” and the expeditions it prompted, this essay tracks the direct involvement of government, corporate, and intelligence entrepreneurs in “saving the New Testament” or, more accurately, advancing the Cold War interests of, among others, the Library of Congress, the United States State Department, Gulf Oil, and institutions like the Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis.
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Knust, J (2026). The New Testament Apparatus and the Rise of the American Cold War. Philological Encounters, 11(1-2). pp. 147–181. 10.1163/24519197-bja10077 Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/34911.
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Jennifer Wright Knust
Jennifer Knust is a scholar of religion who specializes in early Christian history and the religions of the ancient Mediterranean. Author of To Cast the First Stone: The Transmission of a Gospel Story(with Tommy Wasserman, Princeton 2018), Unprotected Texts: The Bible’s Surprising Contradictions about Sex and Desire (HarperONE 2011), and Abandoned to Lust: Sexual Slander and Ancient Christianity (Columbia 2005), she studies early Christian texts, their contexts, and their receptions from multiple angles, with a particular focus on rhetoric and gendered discourse. Her numerous articles, book chapters, and edited books address the materiality of texts, the intersection of Christian practices with other ancient religions, and the ethics of interpretation in ancient as well as contemporary contexts.
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