Jesus in Context— The Dialogue Part One

Last updated on: June 8, 2022 at 1:03 am by Ben Witherington

Jesus in Context— The Dialogue Part One 2022-04-23T16:07:51-04:00 Ben Witherington

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Q. David what prompted you to write this book, and particularly at this point in time when the pace of the publication of Jesus books seems to have slowed down considerably now that the Jesus Seminar is long gone and the rebuttal books seem fewer in number?

A. The prompt was a completely unexpected invitation from the editors of the Cambridge University Press series Cambridge Studies in Religion Philosophy and Society – Professors Paul Mose and Chad Meister – to contribute a volume on Jesus to their series. My reaction was something like : ‘I don’t know a lot about religion, philosophy and society! But I do know quite a bit about Jesus’. So I said yes.

Q. A goodly portion of your academic career has been devoted to studying and writing about the Gospels, Jesus and the historical context of both. In a sense, your work has prepared you over many years to write a book like this that helpfully condenses much information and analysis into a useable size and format to introduce people to ‘Jesus in Context’. Did you see this as a sort of capstone project, culminating and condensing much of what you’ve done before?

A. Yes. I had been wondering about writing a book about the Sermon on the Mount, but the invitation to write a relatively short book, bringing together work done over decades of study and teaching, was attractive. What could be a better topic for a Christian New Testament teacher in what is likely to be my last book? And the level and modest size of the book was attractive, since I could not and would not want to compete with the detailed work that has been done on Jesus by brilliant scholars such as J.P.Meier, N.T.Wright and others. Mind you, the word-limit of 80,000 words, though a blessing in one way, was a curse in another way, since my discussion and bibliographical footnoting had to be much briefer than would be desirable, embarrassingly so. Still, working on the book proved an excellent thing to do during the coronavirus lockdown: despite my years of study I learned a lot through reading new scholarly work and trying to sort out my thoughts for the book.

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