Dr. Craig Keener

Special guest

Craig has authored 28 books, six of which have won book awards in Christianity Today, of which altogether more than one million copies are in circulation. His IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament (1993), now in its 2nd revised edition (2014), has sold more than half a million copies (including editions in several languages, including more than fifty thousand copies in Korean). The NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, for which Craig authored most of the New Testament notes (and which John Walton and Craig edited), won Bible of the Year in the 2017 Christian Book Awards, and also won Book of the Year in the Religion: Christianity category of the International Book Awards.

His recent books include Galatians, New Cambridge Bible Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Spirit Hermeneutics (Eerdmans, 2016); The Mind of the Spirit: Paul’s Approach to Transformed Thinking (Baker Academic, 2016); Acts: A Exegetical Commentary (4 vols., 4559 pages; Baker Academic, 2012-2015); Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts (Baker Academic, 2011); The Historical Jesus of the Gospels (Eerdmans, 2009); The Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary (Eerdmans, 2009); Romans (Cascade, 2009); 1-2 Corinthians (Cambridge, 2005); The Gospel of John: A Commentary (Hendrickson/Baker Academic, 2003).

He has written for various journals, both academic (e.g., Journal for the Study of the New Testament; Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus; Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism; Bulletin for Biblical Research; A.M.E. Church Review) and popular (e.g., Christianity Today; Charisma; Christian History; regularly, A.M.E. Zion Missionary Seer; Christian Trends). He has published more than 70 academic articles and more than 170 popular ones. He wrote “2 Corinthians” in The New Interpreter’s Bible One Volume Commentary, the article on the Holy Spirit for The Oxford Handbook of Evangelical Theology, and has published other popular materials with Abingdon, InterVarsity, and Zondervan. He is coeditor of the New Covenant Commentary Series and of Global Voices: Reading the Bible in the Majority World, is a consulting editor for the Africa Study Bible, and is the New Testament editor for The NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible (Zondervan, 2016). He is editor of The Bulletin for Biblical Research (2015-2019) and recently served as program chair for the Institute for Biblical Research (2010-12).

Craig is married to Médine Moussounga Keener, who holds a Ph.D. from University of Paris 7. She was a refugee for 18 months in her nation of Congo (their story together appears in the book Impossible Love, Chosen Books, 2016), and together Craig and Médine work for ethnic reconciliation in the U.S. and Africa. Craig was ordained in an African-American denomination in 1991 and for roughly a decade before moving to Wilmore was one of the associate ministers in an African-American megachurch in Philadelphia. In recent years he has taught in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and in connection with various denominations.

Dr. Craig Keener has been a guest on 1 episode.