Join biblical culturalist Krisi McLelland as she takes you back to Jesus' first-century world, explaining the historical and cultural climate of His day. This 7-session Bible study is a look at several of Jesus' interactions with women.

Scholars have long understood that the texts we now know as the Gospels were read aloud in the Greco-Roman world, but few have actually envisioned what a performance of the Gospel of Mark would have been like in the first century and how it would have shaped the experience of its audience. Proclaiming the Gospel shows us. Oral performances in the New Testament world were lively affairs. In the performance of Greco-Roman theater, readers lose their voices from the stress of emotional passages. Audiences cheer for philosophers as if at a rock concert, and in law courts, they are paid for their responses. Storytellers compete for attention with jugglers, and some speakers must fend off hostile crowds. Congregations at churches and synagogues cheer as if at the theater. Shiner reveals the ways that Mark wrote his Gospel to compete in this arena and how his audiences would have responded: applause for the miracles of Jesus, then an altogether different response at the cross. Whitney Shiner is Assistant Professor of Christian Origins at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, and the author of Follow Me: Disciples in markan Rhetoric.

The publication of the King James version of the Bible, translated between 1603 and 1611, coincided with an extraordinary flowering of English literature and is universally acknowledged as the greatest influence on English-language literature in history. Now, world-class literary writers introduce the book of the King James Bible in a series of beautifully designed, small-format volumes. The introducers' passionate, provocative, and personal engagements with the spirituality and the language of the text make the Bible come alive as a stunning work of literature and remind us of its overwhelming contemporary relevance.

This bold, fresh look at the historical Jesus and the Jewish roots of Christianity challenges both Jews and Christians to re-examine their understanding of Jesus’ commitment to his Jewish faith. Instead of emphasizing the differences between the two religions, this groundbreaking text explains how the concepts of vicarious atonement, mediation, incarnation, and Trinity are actually rooted in classical Judaism. Using the cutting edge of scholarly research, Rabbi Zaslow dispels the myths of disparity between Christianity and Judaism without diluting the unique features of each faith. Jesus: First Century Rabbi is a breath of fresh air for Christians and Jews who want to strengthen and deepen their own faith traditions.

An informed, scholarly approach to the study of the historical Jesus that takes the Gospels seriously as a source of historical information.