The Winner of the Great Baylor Giveaway Part 2--Chris Keith

As the below indicates, the winner of the Great Baylor Giveaway Part 2 is the owner of comment 24:

True Random Number GeneratorMin:Max:Result:24Powered by RANDOM.ORG

Comment 24 is from Judy Redman:

judyredmanOctober 28, 2013 at 2:26 PM

I have been following this blog for a while, and I *really* want to win these books. Even so, I have altruistically posted the link to my FB profile. :-)

ReplyDelete

Judy, you'll receive copies of Kelber/Byrskog, Jesus in Memory, and Le Donne, The Historiographical Jesus from Baylor University Press.  You can send me an email at chris.keith@smuc.ac.uk to arrange delivery!

Candida Moss on Jesus and "The Jews"

Worthwhile read from Candida Moss. It is high time that we had this discussion again. It would behoove us to do better this time around.

-anthony

Author's Reception for The Wife of Jesus - Le Donne

If you happen to be in or near Sonoma County and you are not busy wine tasting or playing a sitar, you are warmly invited to a book event this Thursday (Nov 7, at 7pm) at Redwood Covenant Church.  I will give a short lecture related to my newest book followed by Q&A and book signing.  My thanks to Copperfield's Books and RCC for sponsoring this event.

*Spoiler Alert*

I am the wife of Jesus.  So the reception is not only for the book by this title, but also for me. It's all about me... and a few million other people.

-anthony

The Bloody Business of Redemption - Le Donne

Here is the last installment of my guest posts over at Redemption Road. I am proud to have been involved in the promotion of a such a fine book. If you're looking for a good too-real-to-be-fiction spy novel this holiday season, look no further.

-anthony

Jesus, Death, and Taxes: My Review of Killing Jesus - Le Donne

My review of O'Reilly's Killing Jesus for the Los Angeles Review of Books is now posted. Linked here.

Excerpt:

"Set against this Sallmanesque portrait of Jesus, almost every person associated with Rome is painted with a black hat. Caesar Tiberius has created a depraved society from the top down. The “moral depravity of Tiberius cannot help but seep into the fiber of even the most far-flung province, causing an erosion of discipline and justice.” Thus the authors apply a large dose of pop psychology to Tiberius and set Jesus in a country choked by evil." 

-anthony




_______________________________
Anthony Le Donne (PhD) is the author of The Wife of Jesus: Ancient Texts and Modern Scandals.

"Bible Secrets Revealed" on History Channel--Chris Keith

The History Channel has a sneak peek video of an upcoming documentary series called "Bible Secrets Revealed" here.  The preview features Bart Ehrman, Candida Moss, Francesca Stavrakopoulou, and the voice of Reza Aslan.  Yours truly was interviewed for it as well, on a ridiculously hot day here in London.  Over at XKV8R, Bob Cargill provides a fuller list of the contributors and it's clear that they've included people from all over the spectrum of Biblical Studies: 

Reza Aslan (University of California, Riverside)
Gary Burge (Wheaton College)
Robert R. Cargill (University of Iowa)
Bart Ehrman (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)
Lori Anne Ferrell (Claremont Graduate University)
Israel Finkelstein (Tel Aviv University)
William Fulco (Loyola Marymount University)
Jeffrey C. Geoghegan (Boston College)
Bryan Givens (Pepperdine University)
Mark Goodacre (Duke University)
Bradley Hale (Azusa Pacific University)
James Hoffmeier (Trinity Evangelical Divinity School)
Amir Hussain (Loyola Marymount University)
Alvin Kass (NYPD)
Chris Keith (St. Mary’s University College)
Peter Lanfer (University of California, Los Angeles)
Jodi Magness (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)
Dale Martin (Yale University)
Candida Moss (University of Notre Dame)
Bob Mullins (Azusa Pacific University)
Elaine Pagels (Princeton University)
Yuval Peleg (Israel Antiquities Authority)
Pnina Shor (Israel Antiquities Authority)
Jordan Smith (University of Iowa)
Daniel L. Smith-Christopher (Loyola Marymount University)
Francesca Stavrakopoulou (University of Exeter, UK)
James Tabor (University of North Carolina, Charlotte)
David Wolpe (Sinai Temple, Los Angeles)
Jennifer Wright-Knust (Boston University)

I look forward to seeing the full episodes and was honored to be a part of it. 

$10 Kindle Price for my The Wife of Jesus

*Not sure how long this offer will last.

So you prefer Kindle? So you prefer less expensive? You're one of those people, eh?

Click here:











-anthony

The Best New Jesus Book that You Haven't Heard Of Yet - Le Donne

Today I received my copy of John, Jesus, and the Renewal of Israel by Tom Thatcher and Dick Horsley. My thanks to Eerdmans for publishing such a fine product. With all of the hype that Tom Wright is receiving these days, this title might be overlooked.  But ignore this book to your own deficit.  Here is the first page:

The title of this book, John, Jesus, and the Renewal of Israel, indicates both its focus and its thesis. We offer a new reading of the Gospel of John as a story of Jesus’ mission in the historical context of early Roman Palestine. We will argue that the Gospel of John portrays Jesus engaged in a renewal of the people of Israel against the rulers of Israel, both the Jerusalem authorities and the Romans who placed them in power.
           This book began in a conversation about the potential value of the Gospel of John as a source for the historical Jesus. We share a conviction that the relationships between John, the other Gospels, and the historical Jesus need to be rethought in the light of recent research. For some time interpreters have assumed that the Gospel of John sheds light on the history of Johannine Christianity and the development of early Christian theology but very little light on the historical Jesus. For access to the historical Jesus, interpreters focus mainly or exclusively on the Gospels as ancient texts. A more appropriate understanding of the Gospels and of how any of them can serve as sources  for the historical Jesus will require a substantial reconsideration of many standard assumptions, analyses, and approaches that have guided New Testament studies – many more, in fact, than we could possibly address here. For this project, therefore, we have narrowed the focus to John’s portrayal of Jesus’ mission. 

I'm hooked. Sometimes I wonder whether our grandchildren will look back on the history of Gospels research and call the period from 2005 to 2020 the "Tom Thatcher Era".

-anthony

Kelber's Collection of Essays

Just learned about this today:

Imprints, Voiceprints, and Footprints of Memory: Collected Essays of Werner H. Kelber 

Jesus and his followers defined their allegiances and expressed their identities in a communications culture that manifested itself in voice and chirographic practices, in oral-scribal interfaces, and in performative activities rooted in memory. In the sixteen essays gathered in Imprints, Voiceprints, and Footprints of Memory , Werner Kelber explores the verbal arts of early Christian word processing operative in a media world that was separated by two millennia from our contemporary media history. The title articulates the fact that the ancient culture of voiced texts, hand-copying, and remembering is chiefly accessible to us in print format and predominantly assimilated from print perspectives. The oral-scribal-memorial-performative paradigm developed in these essays challenges the reigning historical-critical model in biblical scholarship. Notions of tradition, the fixation on the single original saying, the dominant methodology of form criticism, and the heroic labors of the Quest—stalwart features of the historical, documentary paradigm—are all subject to a critical review. A number of essays reach beyond New Testament texts, ranging from the pre-Socratic Gorgias through medieval manuscript culture on to print’s triumphant apotheosis in Gutenberg’s Vulgate, product of the high tech of the fifteenth century, all the way to conflicting commemorations of Auschwitz—taking tentative steps toward a history of media technologies, culture, and cognition of the Christian tradition in the West. 

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.” 

Facebook Reactions to the Wife of Jesus - Le Donne

My thanks again to Peter Enns for featuring my book on his blog yesterday by way of author interview. Thanks also to Brian LePort for his thorough review at Near Emmaus. See also the kind paragraph in Publishers Weekly by Kristen Swenson. 

As I mentioned to Prof. Enns, I'm not surprised at the various forms of hostility on Facebook. I knew going into this project that there are many who feel threatened by this topic. The topic of the wife of Jesus has typically attracted "cranks" and "sensationalists". Actually, I quite appreciate the honesty demonstrated on Facebook yesterday as it gives me an opportunity to address the most common concerns that people have.

Notice the first comment to Peter Enns post:

My Interview with Peter Enns - Le Donne

Pop on over and read my short interview with Peter Enns.

-anthony

Quarterly Quote of the Month about Jesus for this Week

The unique impression of Jesus upon mankind - whose name is not so much written as ploughed into the history of the world - is proof of the subtle virtue of this infusion. Jesus belonged to the race of prophets. He saw with open eyes the mystery of the soul. One man was true to what is in you and me. He, as I think, is the only soul in history who has appreciated the worth of man.

             ~Ralph Waldo Emerson