Sofi Abebe

Sofi Abebe, MS, MTh, PhD

Lecturer in New Testament and Greek

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Oak Hill is a place of joyful commitment to our triune God, and I am thrilled to be able to serve here. The quality of teaching and relationships with faculty, staff, and students is a formative joy, and it is an honour indeed to participate in the life of such a significant residential theological college."

Sofanit teaches New Testament and Greek, and her research focuses primarily on 1 Peter and the early Jewish apocalyptic literature. She holds a PhD in the New Testament & Christian Origins from the University of Edinburgh.

Before coming to Oak Hill, Sofanit served as lecturer and Dean of Students at the Ethiopian Graduate School of Theology in Addis Ababa. She believes that the Bible is the foundation of the Christian faith and that it is a gift from God to the church. For this reason, theological training is vital as it seeks to equip people to read the Word of God carefully and in-depth in its original context, teach it and faithfully apply it to their lives faithfully and consistently.

Sofanit is the author of Apocalyptic Spatiality in 1 Peter and Selected 1 Enoch Literature: A Comparative Analysis (forthcoming, Mohr Siebeck) and has published chapters in Beyond Canon: Early Christianity and the Ethiopic Textual Tradition (2020, T&T Clark) and The Blessing of Enoch: 1 Enoch and Contemporary Theology (2017, Wipf & Stock). She is currently working on a commentary on 1 Peter for the Hippo Exegetical Commentary Series (forthcoming, Langham Publishing) and a chapter submission for Theology in Context Vol 1 (forthcoming, Zondervan Academic).

Please find examples of Sofi's work linked below:

Apocalyptic Spatiality in 1 Peter and Selected 1 Enoch Literature: A Comparative Analysis

In this forthcoming book, Sofi analyses the constructions of symbolic space in the later 1 Enoch texts and 1 Peter, and the extent to which their respective vision of reality is constructed on the basis of an axis linking heaven and earth through divine revelation. She argues that the revelatory basis on which the Enochic authors form their text gives their readers access to a new spatial reality. In 1 Peter, through recalling cultic spatial practices and significant events from Israel’s sacred past, she depicts how the addresses form the space where the divine dwells. Such a spatial construal reconstitutes them as the mobile axis linking heaven and earth. In this way, 1 Peter construes the readers’ corporate and corporeal existence in Roman Asia Minor within the Jewish matrix of exile as a mode of existence on an apocalyptic stage newly configured by Christ.

Forthcoming, Mohr Siebeck

Beyond Canon: Early Christianity and the Ethiopic Textual Tradition

Sofi contributes to this book.

This book highlights the significance of a group of five texts excluded from the standard Christian Bible and preserved only in Ge‘ez, the classical language of Ethiopia. These texts are crucial for modern scholars due to their significance for a wide range of early readers, as extant fragments of other early translations confirm in most cases. Yet they are also noted for their eventual marginalization and abandonment, as a more restrictive understanding of the biblical canon prevailed – everywhere except in Ethiopia, with its distinctive Christian tradition in which the concept of a “closed canon” is alien. In focusing upon 1 Enoch, Jubilees, the Ascension of Isaiah, the Epistula Apostolorum, and the Apocalypse of Peter, the contributors to this volume group them together as representatives of a time in early Christian history when sacred texts were not limited by a sharply defined canonical boundary. In doing so, this book also highlights the unique and under-appreciated contribution of the Ethiopic Christian Tradition to the study of early Christianity.

T&T Clark, 2020

The Blessing of Enoch: 1 Enoch and Contemporary Theology

Sofi contributes to this book.

In recent decades the ancient apocalyptic work 1 Enoch has been intensively explored for its historical meaning and its contribution to Israelite and Christ-movement thought and identity. Yet its theological meaning, what it can contribute to understanding of the divine-human interface today, has been neglected by scholarship. This is surprising given that 1 Enoch is Scripture for the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox churches and has been a major influence on Christian theology, experience, and art in Ethiopia since the fifth and sixth centuries CE. This book inaugurates a project in Western scholarship to bring 1 Enoch into theological discussion. It contains a number of essays delivered at meetings in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and Cheltenham, England, involving scholars from Ethiopia, Germany, the UK, and the USA. The papers cover topics such as the appropriate theological response to a text that is Scripture for only some Christians; the role of 1 Enoch in Ethiopian ecclesial and theological tradition; the theological potential of 1 Enoch in areas such as the environment, politics, social justice, Christology, persecution, the problem of evil and how 1 Enoch stimulates artistic expression today. The Blessing of Enoch aims to launch a wider discussion on 1 Enoch and contemporary theology.

Wipf & Stock, 2017