Working on Some Key Issues March 15.08

I spent this last week at the University of Michigan, speaking to the staff and students of a church on campus, as well as lecturing on Luke in an Introduction to New Testament class and meeting with faculty and graduate students in their religious studies program. Gabriele Boccaccini was my host for the meetings on campus. He is well known for his work in Second Temple Judaism. We have become friends over the last few years. He is well aware I am an evangelical, but in the true spirit of what a university campus should be (a place for conversation about differing views including religion) asked me to be prepared to interact on questions related to my own work on the historical Jesus, the extra-biblical gospels, and other issues tied to origins of what became Christianity. The evening was a fascinating discussion, over some wonderful spaghetti, of a series of key issues that spent a great deal of time asking what we can know about Jesus and his impact on his early followers and how we might determine we know this. There is no way to reproduce all of that discussion, which lasted for well over an hour, but it was one of those delightful, but rare, occasions where people of differing views actually have a face to face meaningful conversation about what they believe and why. My thanks goes to my hosts at Michigan for a memorable evening. I will cover some of the issues raised in the days ahead.