FINDING hope in Africa today is the theological task addressed by Emmanuel Katongole in Born from Lament: The theology of politics and hope in Africa. His main argument is that in the midst of suffering, hope is found in arguing and wrestling with God (Wm B. Eerdmans, £24.99; 978-0-8028-7434-4).

Jerome and His Modern Interpreters: Perspectives on the modern critical reception history of St Jerome’s gospel covers the period from 1880 to 2014. Christopher Knight takes a chronological approach to his analysis, with two introductory chapters on studying Jerome and how he was interpreted in the Early Church (Paternoster, £24.99 (£22.49); 978-1-78078-178-5).

Michael Bird argues in Jesus the Eternal Son that adoptionist Christology, which asserts that God exalts Jesus to divine status through the resurrection because of his faithful life, is a later theory than many allow. He puts forward his case with particular reference to Romans, Acts, and Mark, before seeking to show how second-century texts held its origin (Wm B. Eerdmans, £14.99; 978-0-8028-7506-8).

Using the non-canonical Infancy Gospel of Thomas and Proto-Gospel of James as his source material, Christopher Frilingos sets out how the depiction of a family in crisis in these works leads to a host of new questions about the Holy Family in Jesus, Mary and Joseph: Family trouble in the Infancy Gospels (University of Pennsylvania Press, £33 (£29.70); 978-0-8122-4950-7).

Andrew Malone’s God’s Mediators: A biblical theology of priesthood aims to look at sacerdotal ministry across the whole of the Old and New Testaments, making connections between Israel’s religious leaders, Christology, and the Church today (Apollos, £14.99 (£13.50); 978-1-78359-527-3).

The Anglican Timothy Kinahan and the Roman Catholic Brian Lennon hail from a Northern Irish background. They both assert that the answer to their book’s question Does Christ Matter? is “Yes”, but they are not beyond identifying shortcomings of their Churches set against the standards of the gospel (Messenger Publications, £11.95; 978-1-910248-42-3).

Divine Law and Human Nature is a modernised version of the first book of Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. The hope of the editors and translators Bradford Littlejohn, Brian Marr, and Bradley Belschner is that more people will familiarise themselves with this important work if it is in language more easily recognisable by 21st-century readers (The Davenant Trust, £7.99; 978-0692901007).