Divinity School professor contributes to international collection of scholarship on the Minor Prophets

Dr. Barry Jones, professor of Old Testament and Hebrew in the Campbell University Divinity School, has contributed a chapter in a new collection of international scholarship on the Minor Prophets of the Old Testament. 

Jones’ essay, “The Book of the Twelve in the Septuagint,” was published in June 2020 in The Book of the Twelve: Composition, Reception, and Interpretation. The volume was edited by Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer of the University of Aberdeen and Jakob Wöhrle of the University of Tübingen, and published by Brill, an academic publisher founded in 1683 and based in the Netherlands.  

“The Greek translation of the Minor Prophets is enormously important for understanding the meaning and impact of these biblical books,” said Jones.  “The Greek translation known as the Septuagint preserves the oldest existing copies of these books of the Bible. The translation is the earliest interpretation of these prophets that we have in written form and it was also the translation of the Bible that was used by the writers of the New Testament.  It is a major resource for biblical studies and for Christian theology.”

The volume in which Jones’ essay appears surveys the results of research on the Minor Prophets collection conducted over the past 30 years. It contains 30 chapters written by scholars from the United States, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom and South Africa. “This new volume is the most comprehensive and up-to-date collection of scholarship on the Minor Prophets,” said Jones. 

Jones just completed his twentieth year of teaching in the Divinity School. He is active in churches across North Carolina as a teacher, preacher and interim pastor. He is the author of The Formation of the Book of the Twelve: A Study in Text and Canon(1995) and Gaining a Heart of Wisdom: A Model for Theological Interpretation of Scripture (2019).