Christianity is often misconceived as a Western/white religion Europeans imported to Africa. In contrast, this chapter outlines Africans’ participation in the story of Jesus from the first century to the twenty-first. Four episodes from Acts serve heuristically in surveying Christ-devotion in African Christianity, integrating formal and informal expressions of Christology. With Africa now a heartland of the gospel, the contributions of African Christians demonstrate the universality of the gospel translated into African thought-forms and contextual realities.

The presence and power of Jesus in early Christian material culture are mediated through texts, visual depictions, and other objects, representing and re-presenting Jesus across various contexts. Focusing especially on the first five centuries ce, the analysis addresses Jesus in the materiality of text, liturgy, relic, and symbol, revealing early Christian theologies and practices that resonate in later historical periods and highlighting the complex dialectic of Jesus’s presence and absence in material forms.

In exploring ancient apocryphal traditions, we uncover a tapestry of Jesus’s portrayals both converging and contrasting with canonical gospels. These “Jesus books” – infancy, ministry, passion, and dialogue gospels – showcase early Christianity’s narrative dynamism. Apocryphal texts reveal Jesus as a wise or petulant child, challenging Jewish norms or Torah-observant, literate, philosophical, mythological, hell-conquering, and anti-apostolic. These diverse depictions, addressing sociocultural and theological questions of the era, provide alternative or supplementary perspectives on Jesus’s identity and teachings, significantly contributing to our understanding of early Christian diversity and doctrinal development.

Jesus’s Jewish identity offers fresh insights into Christian–Jewish relations and historical Jesus research. Although often obscured in Christian tradition, this recognition has been emphasized by Jewish scholars to counter anti-Semitism and challenge Christian theological narratives. Memory of the Jewish Jesus serves as a critical tool in rewriting the history of Jewish–Christian relations and understanding the evolution of both Judaism and Christianity. It can energize a reevaluation of exegetical methodologies and dogmatic discourses, thus reshaping Christian theology and fostering mutual understanding.

Jesus of Nazareth, deeply rooted in Second Temple Judaism, lived and taught within its religious and cultural traditions. He observed Jewish customs like the Sabbath and dietary laws, while offering fresh interpretations in light of the kingdom of God. His teachings, often in dialogue with different Jewish sects, emphasized a relational approach to Torah, prioritizing love and ethical conduct over ritual precision. Jesus saw himself as a messenger for this inaugurated kingdom, foregrounding his own and his followers’ relationship to God as a compassionate Father.

Claims for Jesus’s real presence in Israel’s Scriptures sometimes focus on angelic theophanies, running counter to the more elusive presence of the pre-incarnate Logos with Israel, and to the New Testament’s emphasis on the newness of the Logos made flesh. Instead, a widely attested interpretive tradition sees the Old Testament as transfigured to speak of Christ in a new way: A hidden, or even absent, meaning is brought to light by the paschal events.

The New Cambridge Companion to Jesus serves as the most up-to-date guide and resource for understanding Jesus’s multifaceted legacy, enduring impact over time and space, and relevance in today’s world. Integrating textual, historical, theological, and cultural perspectives, the chapters, specially commissioned for this volume, also offer a fresh and diverse overview of Jesus’s significance in contemporary global contexts. Key features include insights into Jesus’s life and teachings, his role in different religious traditions, and his influence on art, music, and global cultures. The volume also addresses contemporary issues of poverty, race, and power dynamics, making it especially relevant for today’s readers. The Companion offers a diversity of perspectives from which to approach the unique identity and importance of Jesus beyond the 2020s, whether in relation to Christianity’s cultural and existential crises in the Americas, its precipitous decline in Western Europe, or its unprecedented growth and proliferation in Africa and Asia.

In the Islamic tradition, Jesus is revered as a prophet to the Israelites, not as divine himself. The Qur’an selectively adopts Christian narrative lore about Jesus and Mary, omitting key gospel narratives like the passion. Jesus’s miraculous conception is acknowledged, paralleling Christian tradition without implying divinity, while his death on the cross is recast as a divine deliverance of Jesus from his enemies. The post-Qur’anic tradition portrays Jesus as a world-renouncing ascetic and stresses his humanity and subordination to God.

As this volume’s other chapters demonstrate, the primary material for accessing the person and character of Jesus of Nazareth will always be the New Testament texts. But the last two thousand years have witnessed a profusion of non-textual media rendering this endlessly absorbing figure. This chapter attends to the ways that artists through the ages have chosen to present him in modes other than words alone, considering visual art and music in particular.

Newly available evidence has shed new light on the inner workings of the socialist state in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. In a “campaign against modern revisionism” in 1964 the militant faction within the Vietnamese Workers’ Party led by Lê Duẩn sidelined those members who favored a more cautious approach to the struggle for the reunification of the country. After the outbreak of the war, the propaganda machine in the DRV including writers and other artists had to foster popular support for the war and keep morale among civilians and soldiers high. The DRV Ministry of Public Security enforced ideological conformity and after 1965 intensified its efforts to track down and eliminate any party members and individuals who dissented from the aggressive line of the party leadership. Thus, in 1967, in the wake of the Tet Offensive the security apparatus lashed out against those who did not fully support Lê Duẩn’s risky plan for a general offensive and were not deemed fully reliable. The fact that many of those arrested or put under house arrest were close to General Võ Nguyên Giáp shows that the “Antiparty Revisionist Affair,” as the purge came to be known, was also part of internal factional infighting in Hanoi.

The environmental history of the Vietnam War is unique in the twentieth century for the unprecedented scale of aerial bombing and use of incendiaries such as napalm, as well as the United States military’s use of tactical herbicides to destroy forest cover in combat zones. Drawing on recent trends in environmental and military history, this chapter aims to provide a more comprehensive sketch of the environmental legacies of the Vietnam War. Besides the effects of bombing and herbicides, these include inquiries into the footprints of warfare in urban and industrial development, in ethnic and demographic shifts in former warzones, in the dispersion of invasive species, and even in the creation of wilderness or conservation areas.