Yutaka Maekawa

Major research activity

My research interests are mainly three points: 1. literary-critical study on the New Testament; 2. textual criticism of the NT; and 3. sociology of religions in general.

1. I am using a narrative critical method on the Gospels, especially the Gospel of John. My basic motive comes from: what power does the Bible have on modern readers? Traditional methods tend to use the Bible as a historical material through which we can find the historical facts. However, those methods cannot always explain the value of the Bible on us. Literary methods apply critical methods on secular literature on the Bible, and try to find the power that the two ?thousand-years-old book moves us in the twenty-first century.
2. Today there is no autograph of the New Testament documents. We have around 6,000 manuscripts from the second century, and most of them contain different texts. Textual criticism examines these manuscripts and exploring the original text as far as possible. This does not seem to be a spectacular research, but it is actually an exciting one, and the indispensable study for the Bible text.
3. I am most interested in so-called “pseudo-sciences,” which are claims or beliefs which are presented as scientific but lack scientific evidences or plausibility. This phenomenon is seemed to be, I suppose, a kind of religion. From religious perspectives, I am trying to clarify an impact or a power which makes people to believe these claims.

Major relevant publications

1. Yutaka Maekawa, "The Salvation Narrated in John 9: A Narrative-Critical Approach," New Testament Studies (JSNTS) 41, 2013, 27-45.
2. Yutaka Maekawa, "The Salvation Narrated in John 1：19-51: A Narrative-Critical Approach," Shingaku-Kenkyu　(School of Theology, Kwansei Gakuin Univ.) 61, 2014, 39-51.
3. Yutaka Maekawa, "Jesus Sitting: Jesus' physical movement in the Gospels," VIA MEDIA (The Bishop Williams' Theological Seminary) IX, 2014, 3-14.