Tuesday, November 22, 2005

What's been on the BBC

I do miss the BBC while I am away; don't think I realized just how fond I was of it until I left England. I am afraid I surround myself with it here in Raleigh, and a few days away leaves me bereft. So, having first caught up on the test match in Pakistan, then Mark E. Smith of the Fall reading the football results on Saturday (wonderful and hilarious), and the very exciting Dr Who special scene featuring Chris Tenant as the Fifth Doctor, counting down to the Christmas special (hooray! I'll be in England to watch it! That alone is worth the trip back), I turned to the new Radio 4 series which premiered yesterday:

In the Footsteps of Jesus
Jesus the Jew looks at the essentials of what can really be said about Jesus with any degree of historical certainty and places Him in the context of the wandering charismatics and faith healers who were about at the time.

It also explores how His Jewish roots were gradually airbrushed out of theology, culminating in Nazi theologians who produced a Bible excised of all references to Judaism and who portrayed Jesus as an Aryan.

Regular readers may recall that I have mentioned my work on this series before (I was the historical consultant for the series). From the link above you can read the transcript and listen to the programme. And there are some photographs too.

4 comments:

crystal said...

Dr. Who! :-)
Thanks for the link to The Footsteps of Jesus - sounds good.

Anonymous said...

I was annoyed to remember at 8:15 that I was meant to be listening to this, and managed to turn on to catch the last 10-15 minutes then, and the first half on the internet.

The final show cuts a lot out of the transcript, and the stuff that ends up on the cutting room floor is often at least as interesting as that which stayed in, so I'll probably read that fully at some point too.

A lot of the program talks about the recent discovery of a temple in Northern Galilee, which was new to me, and quite interesting.

Also interesting was the theory on the origin of the "Aryan" Jesus.

Sadly I have to confess that it was only because of the program that I now know how to pronounce Vermes - I'd only seen it written before Monday night.

Anyway, I enjoyed your contributions as ever Mark.

I don't recall Sanders being featured on the earlier "In the Footsteps of St. Paul" series. Did you manage to swing this coup for them this time around?

Mark Goodacre said...

Thanks for the comments, Matt. I don't know how far my involvement helped to swing getting EPS, not least in that I had the same role on the Paul programme. I suppose it may be that things were a little different with my being at Duke. I'm just proud to have been mentioned by Ed Stourton in the same sentence as EPS!

Anonymous said...

Dear Matt,

Glad to see you are checking out the site. I post up the full transcripts because in an area like this there is always so much more material than we could ever broadcast. And as you say, much of what is left out is very interesting. Making those cuts is the hardest part of the whole production process. Often my favourite sections ahve to go because of time limits, or they don't fit in with the overall structure and sometimes I look back and wonder if I could have done things differently. By posting the full scripts I hope to not only give people more information, but open up the editting process to a wider audience. Work on roughly 3 words a second and just have fun seeing what you would put in to a 28 minute programme. I hope you enjoy the rest of the series.

Phil Pegum
Series Producer
In the Footsteps of Jesus