In this bonus, I launch a new mini-series. My co-hosts are Steve Guerra of the History of the Papacy show (https://www.atozhistorypage.com/), and Scott Mcandless of the Retelling the Bible podcast (https://retellingthebible.wordpress.com/). In these bonus episodes, we will discuss one of Scott’s re-tellings. In this show we revisit Scott’s show on Joshua and the day the sun stood still.

In this bonus, John Brooks of the “Pod Only Knows” podcast interviews me about the genesis and making of my show. I think it turned out pretty well.  This episode formed the last show of John’s former podcast, “Hard to Believe”. It is published here with his kind permission. With his new podcast, “Pod Only Knows”, John is off to fresh ventures, along with Dr. Kelly J. Baker. They are both from the serious world of religious studies. In their new show, they take a sometimes serious, sometimes irreverent, and always curious, look at the way religion shows up in our world. Kelly and John invite other people from the wide and wild world of religious studies to talk to them about why and how they do what they do and why their work matters to us all.

Irenaeus died around the year 200. In his final decades, pagan intellectuals first turned their sights on the Christians. The first was Celsus. Christians counter-attacked with more apologies. They also produced homilies, such as the 2nd letter of Clement.  Fans also produced some fanciful acts and gospels of the various disciples, and two biographies of the young Jesus: the Paidika, and the Protevangelium of James. I finish with a look at two accounts of local persecutions during the period, in Lyon and Scillium. Did they actually happen?

Gil Kidron and I discuss how a small rural priest called Mattathias started an insurgency against Judea’s overlords, the mighty Seleucid kingdom, heir to the empire of Alexander the Great. His descendants became rulers of the tiny region. They are known to history as the Maccabeans. In this period, we see the emergence of two political or social groups. First, the Sadducees, or Tsadokites. Second, the Pharisees. 

After Irenaeus rescued Paul from the Marcionites and Gnostics, Paul’s letters were honoured and uncontroversial documents, testaments to a great missionary and theologian. Martin Luther weaponised them to attack the established church, and so birthed the Protestant movement. In the 1970s, the New Perspective on Paul movement tried to rescue Paul from Luther. I also finish up my discussion of the Acts of Paul, and make an assessment of Paul’s real significance to Christianity.