Thursday, February 13, 2014

Snow and Podcasts

I have been meaning to get back to the podcast for a long time and finally, this week, it happened. First, I recorded a new episode, NT Pod 67, on John's Gospel and the Historical Jesus. I've been teaching the Historical Jesus here at Duke this semester and the topics are often conducive to podcasting, and this one ran alongside one of my classes on materials for Jesus research (including Paul, the Synoptics, Thomas, John). Then yesterday, Duke cancelled afternoon classes because of the snow, and for the second time this semester, this affected my Historical Jesus class. Instead of just trying to re-jig the syllabus, I decided to use the occasion to record another podcast.

Traffic at a standstill on my four hour
commute home yesterday!
NT Pod 68 asks "Where do we begin Historical Jesus Research?" The topic was less congenial to podcasting because I was planning, in class, to introduce several different approaches to the Historical Jesus, contrasting the starting points of E. P. Sanders, John Dominic Crossan and N. T. Wright.  But I had a go anyway and recorded a kind of hybrid episode, going to twenty minutes rather than the usual 10-12 minutes.

The second half of yesterday's class was going to begin looking at Historical Jesus criteria.  This is something I began podcasting on last time I taught the course, in 2012 (see NT Pod 59: Historical Jesus Criteria, NT Pod 60: the Criterion of Embarrassment and NT Pod 61: the Criterion of Multiple Attestation).  I am planning to continue this series now with an episode on the Criterion of Dissimilarity.  I hope to have that episode online by this evening.

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3 comments:

Richie Dagger said...

I've discovered your podcast some time last month and have been gobbling them up, listening to two or three a day. I'm on episode 63, and am sort of sad that I'm getting to the end of what's currently available.

Jens Knudsen (Sili) said...

Looking forward to hearing these. Historical Jesus divination is obviously something I'm highly skeptical of. It seems to me that every generation indeed does discover what it sets out to find.

Jens Knudsen (Sili) said...

No need to apologise for the longer format. I really like it.

I was shocked by how suppositional supposedly serious scholars are. Sanders in particular sounded like an embarrassing case of begging the question.

I think the only people who sounded like having at least a modicum of intellectual honesty was Morna Hooker and you.