Thursday, May 03, 2012

Was Jesus a Magician? - Helen Ingram

I am delighted to see that my former doctoral student, Helen Ingram, has put together an excellent website based on her PhD work at the University of Birmingham:

Was Jesus a Magician? 
Extracts from "Dragging Down Heaven: Jesus as Magician and Manipulator of Spirits in the Gospels" by Dr Helen Ingram

It's packaged to be a little less dense and technical than the PhD itself, with most footnotes removed, and some nice pictures added.  And there are a couple of Youtube presentations of  the thesis by means of audio interviews with another Birmingham PhD, Dr Richard Goode. Here's the first, for a taster:



Thanks, Helen, for making your work widely available in this way!  Also mentioned already on Paleojudaica, Exploring our Matrix and elsewhere.

6 comments:

Reed Hamil said...

Just finished listening to the three currently available videos at her YouTube page. This is interesting stuff! Thanks for posting and letting us know this is going on. Do you know whether her dissertation has been made available in public?

Mark Goodacre said...

Thanks, Reed. No, I don't think it's been made available to the public yet except in this format. It would be good to have a full electronic version; sometimes university libraries do that but I don't know if Bham is yet on board with that.

Steven Carr said...

Wasn't Jesus an apocalyptic preacher?

Helen said...

Hi Reed, at the moment you can only access a hard copy in situ here at The University of Birmingham library, hence why I've uploaded a lot of material onto my blog. I've asked the library to upload a copy to EThOS so an electronic version of the full thesis should be available for download via EThOS by the end of next week (10/11 May).

geoffhudson.blogspot.com said...

Having increased the volume as much as possible, the sound is still so low I can barely hear it. What can I do? My ears pricked-up as soon as I heard the faint words of Honi the circle drawer.

Sabio Lantz said...

Thank you.
In her intro she discusses several things which stopped her from publishing her work:

(1) weird "supernatural" that scared her

(2) fear of offending believer

Do you know anything about this? How does her publishing of the web page avoid these?

PS - I agree, sound level was a problem