New Book from D. Clint Burnett, Christ’s Enthronement at God’s Right Hand & Its Greco-Roman Cultural Context

Icon of the Holy Liturgy from the Cretan School (Public domain: Michael Damaskenos)

I am delighted to announce that I have signed a contract with the Berlin publishing house de Gruyter to publish a revised version of my dissertation in its Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft series. This work is tentatively entitled Christ’s Enthronement at God’s Right Hand & Its Greco-Roman Cultural Context. In this book, I probe the reason why one particular verse from the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Psalm 110:1 (“The LORD said to my lord, ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet’”) became the Christian text par excellence for articulating Jesus Christ’s exaltation to heaven. The answer, I argue, lies in the fact that the concept of a sovereign sitting next to a god is a Greco-Roman cross-cultural reward for a beneficent, pious, and divinely appointed monarch, which explicates widespread early Christian use of Psalm 110:1. This book is expected to appear late in 2020 or early 2021, just in time for Christmas 2020!