The Actual Jesus
- Publisher: Cascade Books (Wipf and Stock)
- Published: 2025
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Publisher's Description
This book moves away from the traditional historical and theological studies of Jesus to incorporate a variety of theoretical and material approaches, across centuries and diverse, global cultures. Through fiction and film, the connections are made with contemporary issues--such as borders, asylum seekers, farmworker activism, colonialism, violence, misogyny, civil war, and nuclear proliferation--with a focus on the appearances of the "actual Jesus" in these worlds. The Jesus in this study is explored in particular connections with the stories of baptism, wilderness experience, ascension, and apocalypse. What is found is often confusing, challenging, surprising, and disturbing, like the Jesus of the gospels.
Endorsements (3)
“There is no one better suited to write this book than Professor Tina Pippin. Tina combines the scholarly rigor and insight, the empathy and imagination, and the wit and humor that are required to appreciate the actual Jesus, and she does this brilliantly. This book should be required reading for college courses, study groups of all sorts, and anyone interested in the questions that are Jesus. The actual Jesus is not the assembled fiction of modernist historical biblical scholarship, nor is he (or she) the eternal divine Word of Christian theologians. The actual Jesus is ‘a manifestation of many imaginations,’ a plurality of Jesus Christs, endlessly resurrected into human lives.”
“Through her careful and creative reading of different representations and receptions of ‘Jesus’ in various media (including ancient Gospel texts, contemporary fictions, films, social media, and apps), Pippin helps us see the fascinating questions and surprising openings that searches for ‘the historical Jesus’ tend to ignore and foreclose.”
“The foremost feminist critic of Revelation has long moonlighted in the gospels and their cultural afterlives. Several of the resulting Jesuses are brought together in this book. When it comes to electrifying defamiliarization of the stultifyingly familiar, no one can hold a candle to Pippin. The Actual Jesus is actually a parade of Jesuses, each one a revealer (although not in the hallowed mode).”
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