Recommendations from our site
“He’s the most creative Biblical scholar of my generation, so he had to be on this list. The particular book I’ve chosen is amazing. Jesus never appears, it’s just the shadow of the Galilean. It’s getting at the truth of Jesus through a novel. But it’s absolutely loaded with scholarship and theological reflection. Some of the scholarship you’ll see in the footnotes. But those who know what to look for will see layers of theological reflection in there as well. It’s a wonderful book that one can go back to, and read at different levels. It’s a book I put in everyone’s hand when I get the chance.” Read more...
Robert Morgan, Theologians & Historians of Religion
Even if you’re an atheist, it’s hard, as a historian, not to be interested in Jesus. The Christian religion he gave rise to dominated events in Europe—and other places—for close to two millennia and has more than two billion adherents today (just under a third of the world’s population). The Shadow of the Galilean is an absolutely fascinating (and sympathetic) fictional account of Jesus’s life as an itinerant preacher by the German theologian Gerd Theissen. Though you never actually meet Jesus, you feel you’re absolutely there with him, in the dusty desert, hearing about his ministry to the poor.
