Matthew Thiessen - Jesus and the Forces of Death

Episode: Was Jesus opposed to the purity system? Was he a revolutionary who challenged religious anxieties over uncleanness? Matthew Thiessen joins us to discuss these questions, and to help us rethink assumptions about the relationship between Jesus and Israel's longstanding purity system. This episode discusses Jesus' confrontation with demonic impurity and ritual impurity, his relationship to the Sabbath, and much more from Thiessen's new book Jesus and the Forces of Death (Baker, 2020).

Guest: Matthew Thiessen (PhD, Duke University) is associate professor of religious studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. He is the author of Contesting Conversion: Genealogy, Circumcision, and Identity in Ancient Judaism and Christianity (awarded the Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise), Paul and the Gentile Problem, and Jesus and the Forces of Death. He is also the coeditor of several volumes.

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