PITTSBURGH SEMINARY PROFESSOR RELEASES NEW BOOK ABOUT JESUS AND HIS PROMISED SECOND COMING
Dr. Tucker Ferda, associate professor of New Testament at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, has written a new book titled, Jesus and His Promised Second Coming: Jewish Eschatology and Christian Origins (Eerdmans, 2024). Hailed by Dale C. Allison Jr. as “without question, one of the best and most important books on Jesus in the last quarter century,” Dr. Ferda’s acclaimed book makes significant contributions to New Testament scholarship, historical Jesus scholarship, the study of the Bible’s reception history, and the history of Jewish-Christian relations.
In Jesus and His Promised Second Coming, Dr. Ferda challenges the prevailing scholarly consensus that the hope for Jesus’s second coming was a posthumous invention of his zealous early followers. Employing an innovative methodology, Dr. Ferda traces the origin of the expectation for Jesus’ second coming backward through reception history to Paul and the Gospels. The move to locate the origin of the hope of the second coming with Jesus’ early followers, he highlights, was made by Christian critics in the early modern period in an attempt to distance Jesus from a caricature of “Jewish messianism.” By recovering the origin of the second coming idea in Jesus’ own wrestling with the prospect of his death and conviction that the kingdom was near, Dr. Ferda invites readers to a new appreciation for the diversity of Judaism and messianism in the Second Temple period and breathes fresh life into a long-stagnant conversation about the historical origins of Christian eschatology.
Dr. Ferda has also published another monograph the Gospels and the historical Jesus (Jesus, the Gospels, and the Galilean Crisis, Bloomsbury T & T Clark, 2019), and he has published extensively in a variety of prominent biblical studies journals, including the Journal of Biblical Literature, Journal of Theological Studies, New Testament Studies, and Journal for the Study of Judaism. He has expertise in a wide range of areas in biblical studies, including the Gospels, the life of Jesus, the Old Testament in the New, the history of biblical interpretation, Hellenistic Jewish literature, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and theological interpretation of Scripture. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh and additional degrees from Duke University (M.T.S.) and Bethel University (B.A.). In addition to his scholarly accomplishments, Dr. Ferda is a member at Eastminster Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh, Pa., and he frequently leads studies in area churches.