While Some of the Chapters focus on systemic issues, others probe the depths of individual Gospel passages. The author's keen eye for textual detail, archaeological data, comparative materials, and systemic overviews make this volume a joy for anyone interested in understanding Jesus in his own context. The volume is organized into three interrelated parts: 1) political economy and the peasant values of Jesus, 2) the Jesus traditions within peasant realities, and 3) the peasant aims of Jesus. "Anyone who has ever wondered why the Lord's Prayer asks for the gift of bread and the forgiveness of debts has got to read this book. Anyone who has never wondered has even more cause to read this book. Anyone curious about the real value of a denarius or Jesus's take on the morality of money or how many calories were necessary to keep from starving or how Jesus advised to resist an economic system geared for devouring widows' houses---anyone, in short, eager to learn of the day-to-day realities of first-century Palestine as the matrix for Jesus's message can't get and read this book soon enough. "Behind the rich information on the peasant world of Jesus and his appeal to first century peasants is a constant hermeneutical question humming in the background: what does this mean for us today? What are those `general human concerns' that suggest some link or bridge between ancient Israelite farmers and urban yuppies? How might a `realist' stance of reading find in the biblical experience and its symbols voices that speak about `the essentially human'? "The information that Oakman provides in these essays is essential for understanding the world of Jesus and his peasant perspective. The moves Oakman suggests for bridging the gap from past to present are essential for keeping a reading of the Bible from becoming an exercise in canonical archaeology or an illusion that the Bible is hot off the divine press."---John H. Elliott, University of San Francisco, Emeritus author of Conflict, Community, and Honor

Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Dario Fo is one of the world's most important contemporary playwrights, forging subversive wit and unusual linguistic experimentation into a comedy of complete originality. The Peasants' Bible is a collection of five monologues drawn from Italian folklore but filtered through Fo's delightfully singular lens-for example, an Adam and Eve who are passionately entwined like peas in a pod; a race between two classes of men struggling for power that resembles the legend of the Hare and the Tortoise-to form a Bible of the common man. In The Story of the Tiger, we find a Fourth Army soldier injured fighting Chiang Kai-shek's army, saved from starvation by being suckled by an enormous tiger, who then comes back to defeat Kai-shek by using model tigers in combat. Together the pieces are an extraordinary addition to Fo's body of work.

Methodology - Analysis of four parables - Exegesis of Luke.

While some of the chapters focus on systemic issues, others probe the depths of individual Gospel passages. The author's keen eye for textual detail, archaeological data, comparative materials, and systemic overviews make this volume a joy for anyone interested in understanding Jesus in his own context. The volume is organized into three interrelated parts: 1) political economy and the peasant values of Jesus, 2) the Jesus traditions within peasant realities, and 3) the peasant aims of Jesus.

Beginning with the Gospels, interpretations of the life of Jesus have flourished for nearly two millennia, yet a clear and coherent picture of Jesus as a man has remained elusive. In Rabbi Jesus, the noted biblical scholar Bruce Chilton places Jesus within the context of his times to present a fresh, historically accurate, and revolutionary examination of the man who founded Christianity. Drawing on recent archaeological findings and new translations and interpretations of ancient texts, Chilton discusses in enlightening detail the philosophical and psychological foundations of Jesus’ ideas and beliefs. His in-depth investigation also provides evidence that contradicts long-held beliefs about Jesus and the movement he led. Chilton shows, for example, that the High Priest Caiaphas, as well as Pontius Pilate, played a central role in Jesus’ execution. It is, however, Chilton’s description of Jesus’ role as a rabbi, or "master," of Jewish oral traditions, as a teacher of the Cabala, and as a practitioner of a Galilean form of Judaism that emphasized direct communication with God that casts an entirely new light on the origins of Christianity. Seamlessly merging history and biography, this penetrating, highly readable book uncovers truths lost to the passage of time and reveals a new Jesus for the new millennium.

Disciple-making is a passion of many, as it should be. It is, after all, our great commission. But much of contemporary discipleship is informed by instinct, and as such it is vulnerable to the whims and trends of the broader culture, which can take us further away from our biblical model and mandate. Drawing on a 2015 Barna Group study of the state of discipleship in the United States commissioned by The Navigators, bestselling author Preston Sprinkle provides a holistic, biblical response for discipleship, providing accessible tools for all those who are engaged in making Christ-followers in the 21st century. Sprinkle points pastors, church leaders, and frankly, all Christ-followers, to a discipleship that is responsive to this most current research and accountable to the model of Jesus and his earliest followers, who counted making disciples as their most important work. In an extremely practical fashion, Go helps us to discern, from the Scriptures and from exemplary disciple-making ministries, what discipleship is and is not, what it has become and what it can still be.

The Radical Jesus offers a companion to the author's previous article collection Jesus and the Peasants. Even more than in Jesus and the Peasants, these eleven chapters sharpen the focus on the political-economic meaning of Jesus then and the deeper values embodied in him that perhaps are still pertinent for now. Part One considers his activities and aims within the political economy of first-century Galilee. Part Two offers perspectives on the critical hermeneutical task of linking the values of Jesus and the Bible to a world that has undergone what Karl Polanyi called the Great Transformation. Polanyi argued suasively in his 1944 book that economy in the pre-industrial age was embedded in social relations and served necessary social purposes, while society after the Great Transformation became embedded within market capitalist economy to the detriment of social relations. This book finds in sustained critical dialog with the Radical Jesus another transforming force and a guiding light toward a more humane economy and society that will serve human need rather than selfish greed.

Noted New Testament scholar Bauckham challenges the prevailing assumption the accounts of Jesus circulated as "anonymous community traditions," instead asserting that they were transmitted in the name of the original eyewitness.

From the end of the thirteenth century to the first decades of the sixteenth century, Guyart des Moulins’s Bible historiale was the predominant French translation of the Bible. Enhancing his translation with techniques borrowed from scholastic study, vernacular preaching, and secular fiction, Guyart produced one of the most popular, most widely copied French-language texts of the later Middle Ages. Making the Bible French investigates how Guyart’s first-person authorial voice narrates translation choices in terms of anticipated reader reactions and frames the biblical text as an object of dialogue with his readers. It examines the translator’s narrative strategies to aid readers’ visualization of biblical stories, to encourage their identification with its characters, and to practice patient, self-reflexive reading. Finally, it traces how the Bible historiale manuscript tradition adapts and individualizes the Bible for each new intended reader, defying modern print-based and text-centred ideas about the Bible, canonicity, and translation.

Featuring the latest archaeological and historical discoveries, this guide illustrates the people and events that shaped the life of Jesus, from his birth in Bethlehem to his death in Jerusalem.