This special issue of Open Theology dedicated to digital humanities (DH) belongs to, and in many ways represents, a new step in the digital development of biblical studies and theology – the start of a general diffusion of digital research, digital tools, and digital culture in theology. This new step has come to the fore through the recent publication of books like Networked Theology (Campbell and Garner 2016) and Creating Church Online (Hutchings 2017), and also by the creation of the first research centre focused on Christian digital theology in 2014, the CODEC centre in Durham, UK, presented in the first article of this issue.1 This introduction to this special edition briefly traces some of the significant steps that have influenced the development of the digital humanities as it relates to the critical study of the Bible and theology, and contextualises the articles in this fascicle within this larger conversation.