Let’s Talk About Jesus

There are two new interviews with me that both feature me talking about Jesus. The focus of each is different. First, I spoke with Shirley Paulson for her podcast The Bible and Beyond, about my next book which will be published by Cascade: What Jesus Learned From Women. Have a listen:

Sara Parks is one of several people who kindly read a draft of the manuscript for my book What Jesus Learned From Women and provided feedback on it. She wrote the following on Twitter:

I had a sneak peek at @ReligionProf‘s upcoming book and it is a DELIGHT. It breaks the wall between academia and imagination, a bit like @adele_reinhartz did with “Alexandra” in Cast out of the Covenant, and I’m all for it. As ESF and Brooten have said: history *is* imagination.

The other conversation was a video one with Matthew Baldwin, what I understand to be the first of a new series called the Ideas of Jesus Video Podcast. In it we talk about mythicism and why historians are persuaded that there was a historical Jesus, what the public gets wrong about Jesus, and how historians draw the conclusions that they do:

Also related to the topic of mythicism is this recent YouTube video from New Testament Review. The expressions on the hosts’ faces captures well how most scholars feel about the denial of mainstream historical scholarship that seems to prevail in certain fringe corners of the internet:

Here’s another video interview from Matthew Baldwin featuring Erin Roberts on the Gospel of Matthew.

For those who want to participate in an even wider conversation about Jesus, there is a conference planned for November that looks very interesting, called Christ Among the Disciplines. It will bring together those who work on matters that intersect with subjects like Christology and the historical Jesus but approach them from different angles or study them in the context of different (if related) fields. The conference is structured around an array of important authors and books, including Daniel Kirk’s A Man Attested By God which I blogged about and consider an extremely important contribution; and Kathryn Tanner’s Christ the Key which made a visible impact on Tripp Fuller’s new book Divine Self-Investment which I hope to have a podcast conversation about with him soon, since he seeks to bring historical and theological interests in and approaches to the person of Jesus together in interesting ways. Tripp and I have been having conversations about Christology since the early days of podcasting, in which he was a pioneer, and I am glad that we’ve stayed in touch and continued to have interesting conversations.

There is always a steady flow of output on blogs related to the person of Jesus, and whenever I notice a lot of them, or have something to say on the subject myself, I try to gather them in a round up. To that end, here are some other recent posts that may be of interest. Let me begin with Helen Bond’s fantastic article in The Bible and Interpretation, “Mark’s Gospel as the First Biography of Jesus – and 10 reasons why it matters.” This is obviously closely related to her book The First Biography of Jesus which I am eagerly looking forward to reading in its entirety, having dived in just a little at this point.