'This richly engaging study vividly conveys how opening our hearts to Christ can release the transformative power of love to flow through our lives and into our broken and needy world. I pray that many will be touched by their encounter with Christ in Living Jesus.' Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu 'I'm with John Pritchard - unashamedly and incurably obsessed with Jesus. As I read his beautiful new book, I felt both my mind and my heart being enriched and challenged - to ponder the life and meaning of Jesus with my mind, and to respond from the depths of my heart. Whether you're a long-term follower of Jesus or just beginning to explore what he's about, you'll find in Living Jesus a dependable guide . . . gracious, intelligent, balanced, and generous with insight.' Brian McLaren, author, speaker and activist 'What a fantastic book! Jesus Christ is the centre of human history, but who is he? John Pritchard shows us the Jesus who jumped off the pages of the Bible and into his life. I encourage you to read this book, whether you're a follower of Jesus or just wanting to find out more. You will be moved, you will laugh and you will cry. In those moments when you wonder why you are a Christian, Living Jesus will remind you. An inspirational book written by a man who loves Jesus and loves people.' Mark Russell, Chief Executive, Church Army

A companion volume to Telling the Bible. Bob uses the Gospel of Luke as a basis for 70 stories about Jesus, his birth, life, teaching, death and resurrection. Bob uses a wide variety of narrative forms to produce stories that will delight new Christians and Bible veterans alike. Each story is accompanied by an introduction explaining its particular place and function, with telling tips and questions. Some require audience participation: all are designed to entertain and inform. The book is produced in large clear print and strongly bound for prolonged use. The price includes a license to photocopy.

INSCRIBED UPON THE CROSS WHEN JESUS WAS CRUCIFIED were the latin words "Jesus Nazarenus Rex Iudeorum." Pontius Pilate was the author of that famous inscription. Latin was Pontius Pilate's mother tongue. Authorities competent to translate and pass upon the correct translation into English agree that is "Jesus the Nazarene Ruler of the Judeans." There is no disagreement among them of that. THE WORD "JEW" did not occur anywhere in the English Language until the 18th Century. Jesus referred to himself as a Judean. The modern day "Jews" were historically Khazars or Chazars, a Mongolian Nordic tribe who roamed northern Europe.

The emergence of the Dead Sea Scrolls, carefully kept quiet, has opened Pandora's Box and has shown how much dogma and censorship there is in the Church. This book gives a detailed account of Jesus as a person, of his acts as they were, and of the daily realities of Israel of that time. This extraordinary document represents a new form of historical research, and straightens out many open questions and misinterpretations. It marks the beginning of a new revelation of the life and work of Jesus, a person who has had a larger role than many in the building of our modern world.

At the turn of the twentieth century, American popular culture was booming with opportunities to see Jesus Christ. From the modernized eyewitness gospel of Ben-Hur to the widely circulated passion play films of Edison, Lumiere, and Pathe; from D. W. Griffith's conjuration of a spectral white savior in Birth of a Nation to W. E. B. Du Bois's "Black Christ" story cycle, Jesus was constantly and inventively visualized across media, and especially in the new medium of film. Why, in an era traditionally defined by the triumph of secular ideologies and institutions, were so many artists rushing to film Christ's miracles and use his story and image to contextualize their experiences of modernity? In The Disappearing Christ, Phillip Maciak examines filmic depictions of Jesus to argue that cinema developed as a model technology of secularism, training viewers for belief in a secular age. Negotiating between the magic trick and the documentary image, the conflicting impulses of faith and skepticism, the emerging aesthetic of film in this period visualized the fraught process of secularization. Cinematic depictions of an appearing and disappearing Christ became a powerful vehicle for Americans to navigate a rapidly modernizing society. Studying these films alongside a multimedia, interdisciplinary archive of novels, photographs, illustrations, and works of theology, travel writing, and historiography, The Disappearing Christ offers a new narrative of American cultural history at the intersection of cinema studies and religious studies.

Was Jesus a Nazi? During the Third Reich, German Protestant theologians, motivated by racism and tapping into traditional Christian anti-Semitism, redefined Jesus as an Aryan and Christianity as a religion at war with Judaism. In 1939, these theologians established the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life. In "The Aryan Jesus," Susannah Heschel shows that during the Third Reich, the Institute became the most important propaganda organ of German Protestantism, exerting a widespread influence and producing a nazified Christianity that placed anti-Semitism at its theological center.

Based on years of archival research, "The Aryan Jesus" examines the membership and activities of this controversial theological organization. With headquarters in Eisenach, the Institute sponsored propaganda conferences throughout the Nazi Reich and published books defaming Judaism, including a dejudaized version of the New Testament and a catechism proclaiming Jesus as the savior of the Aryans. Institute members--professors of theology, bishops, and pastors--viewed their efforts as a vital support for Hitler's war against the Jews. Heschel looks in particular at Walter Grundmann, the Institute's director and a professor of the New Testament at the University of Jena. Grundmann and his colleagues formed a community of like-minded Nazi Christians who remained active and continued to support each other in Germany's postwar years.

"The Aryan Jesus" raises vital questions about Christianity's recent past and the ambivalent place of Judaism in Christian thought.

Jesus the Jew is the primary signifier of Christianity's indebtedness to Judaism. This connection is both historical and continuous. In this book, Barbara Meyer shows how Christian memory, as largely intertwined with Jewish memory, provides a framework to examine the theological dimensions of historical Jesus research. She explores the topics that are central to the Jewishness of Jesus, such as the Christian relationship to law, and otherness as a Christological category. Through the lenses of the otherness of the Jewish Jesus for contemporary Christians, she also discusses circumcision, natality, vulnerability, and suffering in dialogue with thinkers seldom drawn into Jewish-Christian discourse, notably Hannah Arendt, Julia Kristeva, Martha Nussbaum and Adi Ophir. Meyer demonstrates how the memory of Jesus' Jewishness is a key to reconfiguring contemporary challenges to Christian thought, such as particularity and otherness, law and ethics after the Shoah, human responsibility, and divine vulnerability.

There is no writer in the evangelical world that I admire and appreciate more. Billy Graham Philip Yancey helps reveal what two thousand years of history covered up What happens when a respected Christian journalist decides to put his preconceptions aside and take a long look at the Jesus described in the Gospels? How does the Jesus of the New Testament compare to the new, rediscovered Jesus---or even the Jesus we think we know so well? Philip Yancey offers a new and different perspective on the life of Christ and his work---his teachings, his miracles, his death and resurrection---and ultimately, who he was and why he came. From the manger in Bethlehem to the cross in Jerusalem, Yancey presents a complex character who generates questions as well as answers; a disturbing and exhilarating Jesus who wants to radically transform your life and stretch your faith. The Jesus I Never Knew uncovers a Jesus who is brilliant, creative, challenging, fearless, compassionate, unpredictable, and ultimately satisfying. No one who meets Jesus ever stays the same, says Yancey. Jesus has rocked my own preconceptions and has made me ask hard questions about why those of us who bear his name don t do a better job of following him. "

In July 1876 three eight-year-old girls from Marpingen, a village in the west German border region of Saarland, claimed to have seen an apparition of the Virgin Mary. Their visions attracted tens of thousands of pilgrims and prompted numerous claims of miraculous cures. They also led to military intervention, the dispatching of an undercover detective, parliamentary debate, and a dramatic trial. This book examines an episode that contemporaries dubbed the 'German Lourdes', its background and its repercussions. David Blackbourn sets out to recreate the Catholic world of Bismarckian Germany through a detailed analysis of the changing social, economic, and community structures in which it was embedded, and a sensitive account of popular religious beliefs. He powerfully evokes the crisis-laden atmosphere of the 1870s, and offers a subtle interpretation of the interplay between politics and religion in newly unified Germany. The book ranges boldly across the fields of social, cultural and political history, in an engrossing story with many contemporary resonances.

What would it have been like to know Christ during His life on earth? What was He really like? How can we live more Christlike lives? This Self-Study Guide follows Christ's footsteps from birth to death and gives us a clearer understanding of His purpose for the world and for each of us as individuals. It shows us how to apply Christ's teachings to our daily lives.
The books in the Jensen Bible Self-Study Guide series are designed to provide you with a broader understanding of God's Word. Offering historical context and background, author information, charts, and other helps, these books will equip you with a comprehensive reference tool you'll return to often. Each study includes an opportunity for analysis, response, and further study in a response-oriented format. The thirty-nine books in this series are suitable for both personal and group use.

The public are inundated with untruths about Jesus of Nazareth, the greatest figure in human history and the one by whom we date everything. Sometimes these truths emerge from the media and sometimes from specific assaults on Jesus by special interest groups and writers. Michael Green thoughtfully and robustly takes on the most important of these untruths. Was Jesus just a mythical figure who never lived? Were the Gospel accounts of him corrupt and written long after he lived? Can we trust the text of the New Testament? Was Mary Magdalene Jesus's lover? Were the Gnostic Gospels just as good evidence as the four Gospels which Christians read today? Did Jesus really die on the cross? And surely nobody these days believes in the resurrection? After all, hasn't the tomb of Jesus and his family been discovered? These are some of the issues addressed in this book. The author is an ancient historian as well as a New Testament scholar. He is not ashamed to call the misrepresentations about Jesus what they are - lies, lies, lies!

Jesus changed our world forever. But who was he and what do we know about him? David Wenham's accessible volume is a concise and wide-ranging engagement with that enduring and elusive subject. Exploring the sources for Jesus and his scholarly reception, he surveys information from Roman, Jewish, and Christian texts, and also examines the origins of the gospels, as well as the evidence of Paul, who had access to the earliest oral traditions about Jesus. Wenham demonstrates that the Jesus of the New Testament makes sense within the first century CE context in which he lived and preached. He offers a contextualized portrait of Jesus and his teaching; his relationship with John the Baptist and the Qumran community (and the Dead Sea Scrolls); his ethics and the Sermon on the Mount, his successes and disappointments. Wenham also brings insights into Jesus' vision of the future and his understanding of his own death and calling.

The Eldest Brother and New Testament Christology explores the origin of cultural representations of Jesus as an eldest brother. Through ethnographic surveys, author Harald Aarbakke shows that the role of the eldest brother in different African societies is often accompanied by additional roles, among them mediator, protector, and leader. Aarbakke also searches for an exegetical basis for this understanding of Jesus, and argues that an eldest brother Christology can be substantiated by the cultural and literary context of certain New Testament texts (Matthew 25:31-46 and 28:10, Mark 3:31-35, John 20:17, Romans 8:28-30, Colossians 1:15-20, and Hebrews 2:10-18).

Concise: Each book gets straight to the heart of its subject

An award-winning author reveals the real-life Da Vinci Code fraud that rocked the establishment. An ancient manuscript is discovered claiming that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. The religious world is thrown into turmoil. It sounds like the plot of a conspiracy thriller, and is one of the biggest scandals of modern scholarship. In 2012, Dr Karen King, a star professor at Harvard Divinity School, announced a blockbuster discovery at a scholarly conference just steps from the Vatican: she had found an ancient fragment of papyrus in which Jesus called Mary Magdalene 'my wife'. The tattered manuscript made international headlines. Biblical scholars were in an uproar, but King had impeccable credentials as a world-renowned authority on female figures in the lost Christian texts from Egypt known as the Gnostic gospels. As Ariel Sabar began to investigate the mysteries surrounding the papyrus, he embarked on an indefatigable globe-spanning hunt that ultimately uncovered the forgery and the identity of the forger, reckoning with fundamental questions about the nature of truth and the line between faith and reason.

Two billion people today identify as Christians, with the implication that Jesus is the focus of their relationship with God, and their way of living in the world. Such followers of Jesus are now more numerous and make up a greater proportion of the world's population than ever before. Despite its decline in the West, Christianity is rapidly increasing in areas such as Africa and China. Richard Bauckham explores the historical figure of Jesus, evaluating the sources and concluding that they provide us with good historical evidence for his life and teaching. In order to place Jesus in his proper historical context, as a Jew from Galilee in the early first century of our era, Bauckham looks at Jewish religion and society in the land of Israel under Roman rule. He explores Jesus' symbolic practices as well as his teachings, looks at his public career and emphasises how his actions, such as healing and his association with notorious sinners, were just as important as his words. Bauckham shows that Jesus was devoted to the God of Israel, with a special focus on God's fatherly love and compassion, and like every Jewish teacher he expounded the Torah, but did so in his own distinctive way. With a discussion about the way Jesus understood himself and what finally led to his death as a criminal on a Roman cross, he concludes by considering the significance Jesus has come to have for Christian faith worldwide. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

The greatest Christian mystery resolved! Of all the stories about Jesus, the transfiguration has been the most difficult to understand. It contains improbable, miraculous elements: a secret meeting on a mountain with Moses and Elijah - both long since dead, God speaking from a cloud, Jesus with his face and clothes transfigured by heavenly light. The story sits, with curious inconsistencies, uneasily in the gospels. There are two current theories: either that it is an allegory or a misplaced post-resurrection account. The author carefully analyses the text to show that neither is right and, in the course of his investigation, causes the pieces of the puzzle to fall dramatically back into place. The underlying Jewish narrative of the first of the four canonical gospels is once more revealed. The transfiguration story is part of the lost ending of Mark, displaced within the text and modified by later Christian editors. It tells of the awesome moment when Jesus, his body scarred through crucifixion by the Romans, came down from Mount Hermon to greet a waiting crowd.

Did the evangelist Mark write two versions of his gospel? According to a letter ascribed to Clement of Alexandria, Mark created a second, more spiritual edition of his gospel for theologically advanced Christians in Alexandria. Clement's letter contains two excerpts from this lost gospel, including a remarkably different account of the raising of Lazarus. Forty-five years of cursory investigation have yielded five mutually exclusive paradigms, abundant confusion, and rumours of forgery. Strangely, one of the few things upon which most investigators agree is that the letter's own explanation of the origin and purpose of this longer gospel need not be taken seriously. Mark's Other Gospel: Rethinking Morton Smith's Controversial Discovery calls this pervasive bias into question. After thoroughly critiquing the five main paradigms, Scott G. Brown demonstrates that the gospel excerpts not only sound like Mark, but also employ Mark's distinctive literary techniques, deepening this gospels theology and elucidating puzzling aspects of its narrative. This mystic gospel represents Mark's own response to the Alexandrian predilection to discover the essential truths of a philosophy beneath the literal level of revered texts.

Who did Jesus of Nazareth claim to be? What was his relationship to early Judaism? When and how did he expect the kingdom to come? What were his intentions? Though these key questions have been addressed in studies of the historical Jesus, Brant Pitre argues that they cannot be fully answered apart from a careful historical analysis of the Last Supper accounts. Yet these accounts, both by the Gospel writers and by Paul, are widely neglected by contemporary Jesus research. In this book Pitre fills a notable gap in historical Jesus research as he offers a rigorous, up-to-date study of the historical Jesus and the Last Supper. Situating the Last Supper in the triple contexts of ancient Judaism, the life of Jesus, and early Christianity, Pitre brings to light crucial insights into major issues driving the quest for Jesus.

In a book that took eight years to research and write, leading Bible scholar Bart D. Ehrman explores how an apocalyptic prophet from the backwaters of rural Galilee crucified for crimes against the state came to be thought of as equal with the one God Almighty Creator of all things.

Ehrman sketches Jesus's transformation from a human prophet to the Son of God exalted to divine status at his resurrection. Only when some of Jesus's followers had visions of him after his death--alive again--did anyone come to think that he, the prophet from Galilee, had become God. And what they meant by that was not at all what people mean today.

As a historian--not a believer--Ehrman answers the questions: How did this transformation of Jesus occur? How did he move from being a Jewish prophet to being God? The dramatic shifts throughout history reveal not only why Jesus's followers began to claim he was God, but also how they came to understand this claim in so many different ways.

Written for secular historians of religion and believers alike, How Jesus Became God will engage anyone interested in the historical developments that led to the affirmation at the heart of Christianity: Jesus was, and is, God.

David Friedrich Strauss is a central figure in 19th century intellectual history. The first major source for the loss of faith in Christianity in Germany, his work Das Leben Jesu was the most scandalous publication in Germany during his time. His book was a critique of the claims to historical truth of the New Testament, which had been the mainstay of Protestantism since the Reformation. As the father of unbelief, his critique of Christianity preceded that of Nietzsche, Marx, Feuerbach, and Schopenhauer. His views imposed a harsh fate upon him - he was persecuted for his beliefs by religious and political authorities and was denied employment in the university and government, forcing him to live as a free-lance writer. He led a wandering and isolated life as an outcast. Here, Frederick C. Beiser studies the intellectual development of Strauss and recounts his fate, which began in faith as a young man but finally ended in unbelief.

In recent years, there has been considerable debate concerning the origin of divine Christology. Nevertheless, the proposed theories are beset with problems, such as failing to address the evidence of widespread agreement among the earliest Christians concerning divine Christology, and the issues related to whether Jesus' intention was falsified. This book offers a new contribution by addressing these issues using transdisciplinary tools. It proposes that the earliest Christians regarded Jesus as divine because a sizeable group of them perceived that Jesus claimed and showed himself to be divine, and thought that God vindicated this claim by raising Jesus from the dead. It also provides a comprehensive critique of alternative proposals, and synthesizes their strengths. It defends the appropriateness and merits of utilizing philosophical distinctions (e.g. between ontology and function) and Trinitarian concepts for explaining early Christology, and incorporates comparative religion by examining cases of deification in other contexts.

Most Jesus specialists agree that the Temple incident led directly to Jesus' arrest, but the precise relationship between Jesus and the Temple's administration remains unclear. Jesus and the Temple examines this relationship, exploring the reinterpretation of Torah observance and traditional Temple practices that are widely considered central components of the early Jesus movement. Challenging a growing tendency in contemporary scholarship to assume that the earliest Christians had an almost uniformly positive view of the Temple's sacrificial system, Simon J. Joseph addresses the ambiguous, inconsistent, and contradictory views on sacrifice and the Temple in the New Testament. This volume fills a significant gap in the literature on sacrifice in Jewish Christianity. It introduces a new hypothesis positing Jesus' enactment of a program of radically nonviolent eschatological restoration, an orientation that produced Jesus' conflicts with his contemporaries and inspired the first attributions of sacrificial language to his death.

Religious relics, defined as "either portions of or objects connected with the body of a saint or other holy person," are among the most revered items in the world. Christian relics such as the Holy Grail, the True Cross, and the Lance of Longinus are also the source of limitless controversy. Such items have incited people to bloodshed and, some say, have been a source of miracles. Relics inspire fear and hope among the faithful and yet are a perennial target for skeptics, both secular and Christian. To research the authenticity of numerous Christian relics, Joe Nickell takes a scientific approach to a field of study all too often tainted by premature conclusions. In this volume, Nickell investigates such renowned relics as the Shroud of Turin, the multiple heads of John the Baptist, and the supposedly incorruptible corpses of saints, first examining the available evidence and documented history of each item. From accounts of true believers to the testimony of the relics' alleged fabricators, Nickell then presents all sides of each story, allowing the evidence to speak for itself. For each relic, Nickell evaluates both the corroborating and contradictory bodies of evidence and explores whether the relic and attributed miracles can be reconstructed. In addition to his own experiments, Nickell presents findings from the world's top scientists and historians regarding these controversial objects of reverence and ire, explaining the circumstances under which each case was examined. Radiocarbon dating and tests to determine the validity of substances such as blood or patina indicate a variety of possible origins. Nickell even reveals some of the techniques used to create archaeological forgeries and explains how investigators have exposed them. Each relic is a mystery to be solved; guided by the maxim, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof," Nickell seeks only the truth.