Monday with Jesus

Each Monday we email a message with resources for the upcoming Sunday Gospel story as designated by the Revised Common Lectionary, including a link to a YouTube video of the story being told, followed by casual Q&A commentary. If you want to be on the elist to receive “Monday with Jesus” emails, send me a message: amelia@gotell.org

To check out the videos on our GoTell Story YouTube channel, click here:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCh_J-4C0MG6JPek-IGHdUMg

“Young Man!”

Below is a link to the video for Sunday, December 19 for those following the lectionary. In this delightful story of parenting, we are invited to enter into the experience of Mary as she copes with the reality of an adolescent who is distinctively connected to God. This is the story, the ONLY story, of Jesus as a young person, recorded in Luke 1:41-52.

First Century Gospel Storytellers and Audiences

Sometime in 2022 Tom’s latest book will be published by Wipf and Stock. It’s a collection of his essays as described in the introduction:

The purpose of the essays in this collection is to investigate the four canonical Gospels in their original historical context as compositions of sound that were performed for audiences. This introduction will briefly tell the story of some of the influences and experiences that have shaped this body of work over some fifty years and the methodological evolution of what is now being called Performance Criticism. These essays offer a critique that historical critical study of the Bible has been based on a pervasive anachronism read back into the ancient world. That anachronism presupposes that the media culture of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries was basically continuous with the media culture of the ancient world. The Bible has been seen as a library of texts that were read by individual readers generally in silence.

In contrast, the foundational proposal of Performance Criticism is that the Bible was a series of compositions of sound that were performed for audiences of predominantly illiterate persons. These essays in this book are document initial experiments focused on Mark and John that seek to identify the implications of this new paradigm for the perception and interpretation of the Gospels in their original historical context. This collection explores the origins of the Gospels in performance.