K. K. Yeo

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K. K. Yeo (Yang Keqin), born in 1960 in Kampong Teriso, a small coastal village in Sarawak, Malaysia, is a Chinese-American New Testament scholar known for cross-cultural hermeneutics and global theologies. He describes his background as a diasporic Chinese with a hybrid Christian Chinese identity, which shapes his work on how the Bible meets different cultures.

Education and early career
Yeo earned a BA in Biblical and Theological Studies from St. Paul Bible College in 1987, an MDiv from Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in 1990, and a PhD in New Testament, Classical and Rhetorical Studies from Northwestern University.

Teaching roles
He taught New Testament at Alliance Bible Seminary in Hong Kong from 1992 to 1996. Since 1996 he has been the Harry R. Kendall Professor of New Testament at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary. He contributed to the joint Northwestern–Garrett PhD program from 1997 to 2008. He is an affiliate faculty member at Northwestern University (since 2015) and has held visiting professorships at Zhejiang University (since 2012), Peking University, Peking Normal University, and Fudan University (since 2006). He has served as an international consultant at the Christian Art Center, Peking Normal University (since 2015) and has mentored PhD and MTh students at the Australian College of Theology (since 2018). He directed the International Leadership Group at Peking University (2005–2016), helping to train nearly a thousand graduates.

Scholarly focus and works
Yeo is an elected member of the Society of New Testament Studies since 1999 and is active in the Society of Biblical Literature and the Chicago Society of Biblical Research. His main contribution is cross-cultural biblical interpretation, which compares the Bible with Chinese classical texts to understand how cultures shape reading the Bible. His books include Rhetorical Interaction in 1 Corinthians 8 and 10 and What Has Jerusalem to Do with Beijing: Biblical Interpretation from a Chinese Perspective. He also wrote Musing with Confucius and Paul and Zhuangzi and James.

Editing and publishing
In 1994, Yeo co-founded Jian Dao: A Journal of Bible and Theology. He helped launch the Jian Dao Dissertation Series and the Bible and Hermeneutic series. He is a co-editor of the Majority World Theology series and other series that promote global, contextual Christian interpretations. He edited The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in China.

Global Faculty Initiative
Since 2020, Yeo has served as vice-president of the Global Faculty Initiative, which aims to connect Christian faith with academic work across universities worldwide. The initiative has begun a book series, Cross-Disciplinary Encounters with Theology. The first volume, Justice and Rights: Nicholas Wolterstorff in Dialogue with the University, was published in January 2025.