Thecla is one of the strangest characters from Christianity's past. She falls in love with the apostle Paul's teaching on continence, twice faces martyrdom, fights with beasts in the arena, cuts her hair, cross-dresses, baptizes herself, and becomes a preacher. Tertullian tried to silence her story ...

Thecla is one of the strangest characters from Christianity’s past. She falls in love with the apostle Paul’s teaching on continence, twice faces martyrdom, fights with beasts in the arena, cuts her hair, cross-dresses, baptizes herself, and becomes a preacher. Tertullian tried to silence her st...

This collection of essays explores the impact of Jesus within and beyond Christianity, including his many afterlives in literature and the arts, social just and world religions during the past two thousand years and especially in the present global context. This third volume focuses on the diverse ...

Buried for more than a thousand years in the sands of Egypt, the Secret Revelation of John has stayed a secret far longer than it should have. Even now, more than seventy-five years after its discovery in 1945, it eludes easy understanding even as it shines with the message of God’s loving presenc...

There are many fine philosophical and theological engagements with the works of John Caputo. He is one of our most serious philosophical theologians. But he’s also hilariously funny. To read Caputo is to encounter someone who wants to move you, to grasp your attention, your humor, your creativity,...

Thecla was one of the most venerated saints in late antiquity. One of her followers created the Life of Thecla as an act of devotion in the fifth century, rewriting the popular Acts of Thecla and transforming it into the heroic saga of a saint. Replete with long speeches, dramatic flourishes, an...

The New Testament contains four accounts of the life of Jesus. To some people in antiquity, four was too many. Disagreements in the Gospels over what Jesus said and did triggered debate between insiders and drew criticism from outsiders. To other people, four was not enough. As early as the first ce...

The Protevangelium of James tells stories about the life of the Virgin Mary that are absent from the New Testament Gospels: her miraculous birth to Anna and Joachim, her upbringing in the temple, and her marriage at the age of twelve to the aged widower Joseph. The text also adds significant details...

The Martyrdom of Daniel and the Three Youths is a Christian legend based on canonical and apocryphal traditions about Daniel and his three companions. These texts share a unique and intriguing plot: Rather than dying in peace, these righteous men are persecuted by a wicked Persian king named Atti...

The Doctrine of Addai tells the story of how Christianity came to the Syrian city of Edessa. It incorporates and adapts a correspondence between Jesus and the Syrian king Abgar, who wrote to Jesus requesting healing from a long-term illness. In his response, Jesus promises to send him an apostle, ...

John Dominic Crossan is the most important scholar on the historical Jesus since David Fredrick Strauss in the nineteenth century. Both his scholarly The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (1991) and the more popular Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (1994) made the bestsell...

The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew is one of the most important witnesses in Western Europe to apocryphal stories about the lives of Mary, Joseph, Jesus, and Mary’s parents, Anna and Joachim. As a bestseller of mainstream medieval Christianity, this Latin apocryphon is a keystone in the explosion of a...

The Protevangelium of James tells stories about the life of the Virgin Mary that are absent from the New Testament Gospels: her miraculous birth to Anna and Joachim, her upbringing in the temple, and her marriage at the age of twelve to the aged widower Joseph. The text also adds significant detai...

[ MP3 CD Format ] From the creative minds of the scholarly group behind the groundbreaking Jesus Seminar comes this provocative and eye-opening look at the roots of Christianity that offers a thoughtful reconsideration of the first two centuries of the Jesus movement, transforming our understanding...

This issue of Forum marks the first in a two-part series on Christian Nationalism. Four distinguished authors set the table for a robust discussion. They trace the movement's roots back into antiquity and help the reader sight the troubling future at which Christian Nationalists aim. A slim volume w...

This is our second issue on the topic of confronting Christian nationalism. In the previous issue, our authors set the historical and theological parameters for this important conversation. With this issue, our authors dig deeper into theory and media—both archival and contemporary—to help us un...

The pioneering work of The Jesus Seminar has come in for high praise as well as searing denunciation from the press, the clergy, the scholars. Now a veteran member of the Seminar, Robert Miller, examines its agenda and its inner deliberations, dissecting the rationale of the Seminar's historical wor...

Literary Nonfiction. Religion. First we have to talk about the elephant in the room--though that might not be the most polite term for Jesus! For many millions of people around the world, Jesus is the Son of God, the divine source of their salvation, his story told in the familiar four gospels of th...

A Mennonite Boy's Odyssey is a story of courage and discovery. Some individuals are fully content to embrace answers provided by their own elders to life's great questions. For others, their elders' way proves untenable. They must forge their own path, awakening through assimilation from alternate s...

Jesus saw the extraordinary in the ordinary. His extraordinary vision comes to us in bits and pieces, in random stunning insights, embedded in the everyday language of his parables, aphorisms, and dialogues. In A Credible Jesus, Robert Funk sorts and assembles these fragments and examines ways in wh...