Displacing Jesus studies the inner workings of Thomas Jefferson’s editing and shortening of the Gospels of the New Testament, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. It uncovers the immanent moves of his editorial project and shows how he makes judgments on what to include and exclude from the Gospels. As the book analyzes Jefferson’s gospel, it reconstructs his cut-and-paste project as a displacing of the biblical story of Jesus into a war on Jewish authorities. Ignoring nearly all traditional religious themes, the new gospel reframes the story into a battle against the narrow and hypocritical morality of the leaders of Second Temple Judaism. Surprisingly, Jefferson’s editing does provide a robust, if not traditional, theology and a Christology centered in the passion of the Shepherd-Sage who performs his death for Wisdom. Displacing Jesus ends by connecting Jefferson’s creation in The Life and Morals with theological themes, with the history of his views on religion, and with comments on how new insights into Jefferson’s gospel can inform contemporary Jefferson research.

I have designed this book to help Christians who are ready to walk with Jesus. And especially for those who have had some basic training in the elements of NT Discipleship. As you start, if you are extremely blessed, you may become a disciple in 100 days. It took the Apostles over 1000 days in the direct, miraculous, personal presence of God, Himself! That is why 100 days might not be nearly enough time. But, with the Holy Spirit's help, it could be more than enough. And you could even find yourself so blessed that God uses you to start a Disciple Making Movement (DMM), which reaches your entire area for Christ! This has happened before and is happening today. Why not in and through you? God's great love is for you and your region, too!

The focus and theme of this book is Jesus only. The eternal verity taught in Scripture is that Jesus alone saves. Therefore, the central focus of the church must be on Jesus Christ, the One crucified, risen, ascended, interceding, and coming again. This was the secret to the life and power of the apostolic church. Everything about the early church, as recorded in the book of Acts, was due to the presence and power of the Lord in His church. The Scriptures clearly speak about their passion but also about the One who was central to their preaching, teaching, and living as a body of believers: And daily in the temple, and in every house, they ceased not to teach and peach Jesus Christ (Acts 5: 42). Unfortunately, the church no longer measures up to the life that God intended for it. In these final and closing days of earths history, Jesus is anxiously awaiting for a portrait of Himself in His church. The spirit and power of the apostolic period must return. The central focus of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior must return. The dynamic Holy Ghost empowerment of the church must return. The daily growth of the church must return. The self-sacrificing spirit that should mark the life of a true disciple must return. There is no question that we must return to primitive godliness, and for that to happen, the church will have to return to her first love, which is a central focus on Jesus.

Thomas has been researching his family's Jewish background for the last thirty years. Herein he investigates how his Jewish grandparents, and aunt-defined as a nonprivileged Mischling, survived the war while living in the heart of Nazi Germany. This led Thomas to research Hitler's fear of having partial Jewish ancestry and expanded into a full-blown study of following Christianity’s understanding of the Jewish identity of Jesus of Nazareth throughout history. Not leaving matters here, Thomas outlines how Marian dogmatic theology, used at the time of the Shoah, brought to conclusion the Church's long journey in defining the "time" of ensoulment as articulated in the papal document Ineffabilis Deus, promulgated by Pius in 1854. This happened twenty-seven years after the discovery of the human ovum in 1827 by Karl Ernst von Baer. Years later, with the emergence of Nazi racial ideology, many anti-Christian Christians attempted to invert Christianity's core message of salvation through faith toward biological ends. This would not do. Roman authorities had consistently held throughout the centuries that faith is about salvation and not about biology. According to that same end, the "ideal" of ensoulment, since the time of the Church's renewed understanding of it—beginning in 1854—and indeed as it was first articulated through the writings of Aristotle and received into Christianity through the writings of Saint Augustine and later Thomas Aquinas—was newly preserved within the confines of Western civilization. This is the first book, the author knows of, that follows Augustine's concept of ensoulment, as well as Aquinas's thinking on the matter, while linking these to Karl Ernst von Baer's discovery of the human ovum in 1827, up until the events of Shoah and beyond. This study is phenomenological in nature in that it does "not" follow Jesus of Nazareth (the Virgin Mary) throughout history, but rather follows the "image" of Jesus of Nazareth (the Virgin Mary)—a monumental difference. This study supports the Second Vatican Council, the Church's latest and ongoing efforts in affirming the Jewish identities of both Jesus of Nazareth and the Virgin Mary, John Paul II's call for a purification of memory beginning in a year of Jubilee, as well as the many present efforts in Catholic-Jewish relations. This study builds upon the author's past article: "Following the Virgin Mary through Auschwitz: Marian Dogmatic Theology at the Time of the Shoah," published in Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, Vol. 14, winter 2008, No. 3, pp. 1-24.

Movies about the life of Jesus continue to be a fascinating way to consider how the Gospels present an image and a narrative of Jesus. In Jesus, the Gospels, and Cinematic Imagination, Jeffrey Staley and Richard Walsh use their biblical knowledge and admiration for films to summarize eighteen popular Jesus movies and to show exactly where each movie parallels the Gospel accounts of Jesus's life. The authors provide teachers and students easy access to both Gospel and film parallels, enhancing the value of these select films as teaching tools and useful resources for pastors, those leading discussions of films, and libraries.

Two questions are braided together in Luke’s Gospel. Who is Jesus, and what does it mean to be his student and apprentice? The church has spent much of its intellectual energies on the first question, but not so much on the second. We are precise in our Christology and vague in our Discipleology (my new word!). Of the four biographies that open the New Testament, Luke is perhaps the best equipped to answer the question of what it means to follow Jesus along with others, and what we can expect in the process. Luke’s Gospel is dense with story after story about Jesus’s stumbling, goofy, persistent disciples. And his second volume—Acts—continues the tale. There is a deep continuity, as Luke teaches, between Jesus’s original disciples and the ones who later declared their allegiance to him after his resurrection. We walk in the footsteps of pioneers in this new way of living with a Jesus who is always near but just beyond sight. The aim of this book is to plunder the fruits of New Testament scholarship, especially the tools of rhetorical and narrative criticism, to highlight what an incredible adventure came with the call to follow me.