Warren Carter

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Warren Carter is an exegete specializing in the Gospel of Matthew, as well as the Greek New Testament in general. Born in New Zealand and now living in Kansas City, Missouri; Carter's education consists of a Ph.D. (New Testament), from Princeton Theological Seminary; a B.D., Th.M., from Melbourne College of Divinity, Australia; as well as a B.A. Hons, from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He is an ordained United Methodist Elder and currently on the faculty of Brite Divinity School in Fort Worth, TX. He was formerly Professor of New Testament at Saint Paul School of Theology in Kansas City.

Carter states that:

My work in New Testament studies involves studying three worlds. The world behind the text concerns the circumstances and experiences of the early Christian communities. These socio-historical situations leave their mark on our NT texts just as the NT texts assume familiarity with these realities in addressing these specific situations. Second, the world of the text concerns reading and understanding the texts: their plots, characters, settings, perspectives, themes, language. The world in front of the text focuses on the meaning that contemporary readers formulate from engaging the texts and the scholarly community of interpreters. Meaning involves understanding and discerning a life-giving word of God and a way of life. It is vital that church leaders and ministers be informed about these worlds, skilled in interpreting them, committed to on-going growth in understanding from good scholarly resources, and faithful in living their interpretations.
Much of my own work has centered on the gospel of Matthew. Utilizing an approach called audience-oriented criticism, I have been exploring the experiences, knowledge and competencies that the gospel assumes of its audience. More recently I have been examining the role that the experience of the Roman imperial world plays in interpreting the gospel. This is a completely new area in Matthean studies. Most work has viewed the gospel as being concerned only with a "religious" debate with a synagogue community over the significance of Jesus. But in the ancient world, "religion" was not separated from political and socio-economic structures. I have been proposing that the gospel's story of Jesus, crucified by Rome, is a counter-narrative that resists the claims of Roman imperialism, reveals the presence and future of God's reign or empire, and calls followers of Jesus, then and now, to a non-violent, distinctive, counter-cultural, resistant existence (Warren Carter, www.spst.edu).

Known for exceptional focus, Carter often teaches classes of sixty and returns their five and six-page papers, graded, before he leaves for the day. This means that in one day he has read 300 pages of text, evaluated them, and made critical comments on them. Such focus on his own work is no less impressive. During one sabbatical Carter wrote three manuscripts, all of which are now in publication. Each text was heavily-researched, with bibliographies in excess of a hundred entries--all of which Carter read. Some students and faculty have referred to Dr. Carter as, "the Machine."

[edit] Film Appearance[s]

Dr. Carter recently appeared in Fall From Grace, a documentary by K. Ryan Jones in which the history, theology, culture, and psychology of the Westboro Baptist Church and of Fred Phelps are addressed. Carter appears in the film to offer a different, more contextually sensitive view of the scriptures that the church relies on in order to put forward its radically anti-homosexual viewpoint. Carter explains that homosexuality is only mentioned a total of three times in the New Testament, showing that the scripture was fairly unconcerned with the matter and that Phelp's virulence is out of proportion with its textual sources. Carter goes on to point out that these passages were in reference to pederasty, which would today be rightly identified as child molestation. Carter goes on to point out that loving and mutual homosexual relationships of the sort we see today were either nonexistent or rare in the 1st century.

[edit] Selected works

  • Matthew: Storyteller, Interpreter, Evangelist, Expanded Revised Edition (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2004).
  • Pontius Pilate: Portraits of a Roman Governor, Interfaces (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2003).
  • O Evangelho de sao Mateus (São Paulo, Brazil: Paulus, 2003).
  • Matthew and Empire: Initial Explorations (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2001).
  • New Proclamation: Year A, 2001-2002, co-authored with D. Jacobson, C.J. Dempsey, J.P. Heil (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2001).
  • Matthew and the Margins: A Religious and Socio-Political Reading (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2000).
  • Matthew's Parables: Audience-Oriented Perspectives, co-authored with J. P. Heil, Catholic Biblical Quarterly Monograph Series, no. 30 (Washington DC: Catholic Biblical Association, 1998).
  • Matthew: Storyteller, Interpreter, Evangelist (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1996).