The Great Baylor Giveaway Part Two: Kelber/Byrskog’s Jesus in Memory and Le Donne’s The Historiographical Jesus—Chris Keith

Today we continue the Great Baylor Giveaway with installment number two.  We continue the theme of new approaches to the Gospels and the historical Jesus that we started in part one with Schröter’s From Jesus to the New Testament.  In this installment, though, you have a chance to win two books.  The first is Kelber and Byrskog’s Jesus in Memory.  This book is a tribute to the work of Birger Gerhardsson.  If you just said, “Who?” quietly to yourself, then you definitely need to enter this contest.  Gerhardsson was one of the fiercest and most vocal opponents of form criticism and one of the very first scholars whose work prominently featured memory.  There’s been much advance in the discussion since then, and this volume tries to capture both Gerhardsson’s seminal contributions and the current state of discussion.  This book is worth it entirely just for Alan Kirk’s chapter “Memory” as well as Loveday Alexander’s chapter “Memory and Tradition in the Hellenistic Schools.”  There’s lots of other gems in here, too, though.  For those who continue to think of Werner Kelber’s work in light of his 1983 The Oral and the Written Gospel, I suggest his chapter in this book (“The Work of Birger Gerhardsson in Perspective”), which shows just how far he (Kelber) has moved since 1983.

The second book is also a memory-themed study and well-known to frequent readers of this blog:  Anthony Le Donne’s The Historiographical Jesus.  We’ve said lots about this seminal book on here and lots more could be said.  It was one of the most popular book giveaways we’ve ever done, so here’s a chance to win it if you weren’t that one person who won it last year. 

Together, these two books go a long way toward introducing newer students of the historical Jesus to the precise ways in which the methodology underlying the current trend of memory studies is both similar to and dissimilar to what has preceded it.

You know the rules.  You can enter in the following ways:  leave a comment; sign up to follow the blog (and leave a comment saying you did); post this on Facebook (and leave a comment saying you did); and tweet this (and leave a comment saying you did). 

In the last installment, I introduced a wildcard entry category in the form of your favorite Royal Tenenbaums quote.  This time, you can also enter again with your favorite quote from the years-ahead-of-its-time Leslie Nielson classic Naked Gun.  I’ll start again:  “Doctors say that Nordberg has a 50-50 chance of living, though there’s only a 10 percent chance of that.”