Mon 1 Nov 2010
Podcast 5.11: Jesus as Teacher, part 1 – Method and Content
Posted by Phil Harland. Categories: Historical Jesus , Podcast[6] Comments
This and the following episode consider the historical Jesus in the role of teacher. Here I discuss the form or method of his instruction, and begin to introduce the centrality of the “Kingdom of God” to his teachings. This is part of series 5 (The Historical Jesus in Context) of the Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean podcast.
Podcast 5.11: Jesus as Teacher, part 1: Method and Content (mp3; archive.org page with various downloading options here).
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November 13th, 2010 at 3:32 am
I’ve tried many times to download this file but it closes down about a third of the way through and saves a partial but unusable copy on my hard drive every time. This is a problem I’ve not had with previous podcasts from here. I know my broadband system is quite slow but the problem for me seems to be unique to this file. Has anyone else had difficulty downloading it?
November 13th, 2010 at 11:44 pm
Hello Peter,
I just tried downloading by clicking on the “here” link to the archive page for this episode and then clicking on “save link as” on the vbr mp3 file and the entire file downloaded properly.
Which method were you finding didn’t work? Maybe archive wasn’t working for a bit, which sometimes happens.
Phil
November 14th, 2010 at 4:51 pm
Hello Phil
I always use one of the links on the RSS feed, which link directly to the mp3 file. This is the first time I’ve had a problem. It’s odd that this particular file starts downloading well enough but then disconnects and closes the file after about 34 per cent.
I’m now trying using the archive access as you suggest and I’ll let you know what happens.
Thanks for your advice – and for the podcasts themselves.
November 14th, 2010 at 7:31 pm
Hello again.
Success at last! Thanks to your recommendation about which file link to use and the expedient of taking my laptop as high up in the house as I can. The wonders of living in rural England!
Many thanks
Peter Roberts
November 28th, 2010 at 6:41 pm
As always your podcasts are full of interesting material.
In this podcast you speak of Jesus’s parables as reflecting everyday life in the ancient near east, and infer that they tell us something about the preaching of the real historical Jesus. But haven’t scholars like Charles Hedrick (“Parables as poetic fictions”) and Bernard Brandon Scott (“Hear Then the Parable”) already shown that the parables do not reflect the realities of everyday life? Example: what shepherd really would endanger his whole flock just to find one errant sheep? The obvious conclusion (although Brandon Scott and Hedrick may not draw it) is that the gospel writers had no clue about life in Palestine, and the parables derive from them, not from a real Palestinian country-dweller.
December 5th, 2010 at 9:31 pm
Hello Mark,
Parables relating to husbandry, tenant farming, farming, sowing and related agricultural analogies would relate to various parts of the ancient Mediterranean, including Galilee. Some analogies may well be specific to Galilee and Palestine, and some of the gospel authors are likewise familiar with this area. So parables could reflect both the context of Jesus and the context of an author of a gospel. I do not believe we have enough knowledge to exclude the likelihood that Jesus could have used such agricultural or pastoral analogies. But in (ancient) history we can never be certain of anything, as I’ve been emphasizing in the podcast. So I wouldn’t grant any scholar (Hedrick, Scott, Harland, etc) the status of having found the truth about what Jesus didn’t say.
Phil