NT Pod: The Extended Episodes

When I started the NT Pod, my general idea was to provide condensed comment on  the New Testament and Christian origins, in the ten minutes or so format.  Well, it started as six minutes or so and grew, but it has settled on ten-twelve minutes.  To my surprise, listeners would often ask for more and for longer episodes.  So a few weeks ago I began an experiment.  Duke has been automatically recording some lecture courses, though to call it "recording" is somewhat passé and the term now is "capture", in our case via Lectopia. I was offered the chance to include my current course, Introduction to the New Testament, under this arrangement and decided to go for it.  It then occurred to me that I could use the raw recordings as the basis for extended episodes of the NT Pod, as an experiment.

In a 75 minute class, there is a fair bit of extraneous material, including discussion of assignments, the five minute break in the middle and so on, but my idea was that I could edit the feeds to produce a 45-50 minute episode, with a short intro and outro to orientate the listener.  There is a precedent for this too.  Phil Harland's Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean Podcast is this kind of podcast, an edited lecture capture with added intro and outro (though a much longer intro. than I give).

So I edited and uploaded three back to back extended episodes on the Synoptic Problem, NT Pod Extended Episode 1 (The Synoptic Problem, Introduction and Data), NT Pod Extended Episode 2 (Marcan Priority), NT Pod Extended Episode 3 (Q and the Case against Q).

The episodes seem to have been popular with listeners.  In fact, I received more feedback on these episodes than I had done on the normal episodes, even though they are downloaded less often than the standard ones.  I have therefore decided to go on with these extended episodes from time to time and the fourth (on the Messianic Secret in Mark) is already in the can and will be uploaded soon;  and the fifth (on Mark's Passion) is almost ready too.