In this episode, Scot McKnight and Cody Matchett talk with Dr. Amy Jill Levine.

Amy Jill Levine (“AJ”) is Rabbi Stanley M. Kessler Distinguished Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies at Hartford International University for Religion and Peace and University Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies Emerita and Mary Jane Werthan Professor of Jewish Studies Emerita, at Vanderbilt. 

Her publications include The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi; Jesus for Everyone, Not Just Christians, six children’s books (with Sandy Sasso); The Gospel of Luke (with Ben Witherington III, the first biblical commentary by a Jew and an Evangelical); The Jewish Annotated New Testament (co-edited with Marc Brettler), The Bible With and Without Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently (with Marc Brettler), The Pharisees (co-edited with Joseph Sievers), Jesus for Everyone, Not Just Christians, and thirteen edited volumes of the Feminist Companions to the New Testament and Early Christian Literature. Her Beginner’s Guide series includes Sermon on the Mount, Light of the World, Entering the Passion of Jesus, The Difficult Words of Jesus, Witness at the Cross, Signs and Wonders, The Gospel of Mark, and The Gospel of John.  

The first Jew to teach New Testament at Rome’s Pontifical Biblical Institute, an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas, the first winner of the Seelisberg Prize awarded by the International Council of Christians and Jews, and the 2023 recipient of the H. Walter Award for Reconciliation and Interfaith Cooperation from Archbishop of Canterbury, AJ describes herself as an unorthodox member of an Orthodox synagogue and a Yankee Jewish feminist who works to counter biblical interpretations that exclude and oppress. 

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In this episode, Scot McKnight and Cody Matchett talk with Dr. Rob Dalrymple about his recent commentary, Revelation: A Love Story.

Rob Dalrymple has been a professor, dean, and lead pastor for over 35 years at the college, seminary, and the local church. He currently serves as the Executive Director of Determinetruth ministries, whose vision is to provide a platform of training for pastors, leaders, and members of local churches by providing sound biblical teaching through various mediums to “challenge the church to be the church.” Rob hosts the determinetruth podcast, writes a weekly blog on Patheos, and has scores of videos on the Determinetruth YouTube page on the kingdom of God and justice. He is a leading voice on Scripture and the Middle East in the evangelical world. His writings include Revelation: a Love Story (A commentary on the book of Revelation); Understanding the New Testament and the End Times; Follow the Lamb: A Guide to Reading, Understanding, and Applying the Book of Revelation; as well as Land of Contention: Biblical Narratives and the Struggle for the Holy Land.

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In this episode, Scot McKnight and Cody Matchett talk with Dr. Matthew Bates about his recent book, Beyond The Salvation Wars.

Matthew W. Bates (PhD, Notre Dame) is Professor of New Testament at Northern Seminary with expertise on the gospel and salvation. His book Why the Gospel? (Eerdmans, 2024) won the Christianity Today award in popular theology and was Outreach magazine’s “Resource of the Year” in theology and Bible. His acclaimed academic titles include Salvation by Allegiance Alone (Baker Academic, 2017) and The Birth of the Trinity (Oxford University Press, 2015). He also co-founded and co-hosts the popular OnScript podcast.

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In this episode, Scot McKnight and Cody Matchett talk about Dietrich Bonhoeffer with Dr. Mark Theissen Nation.

Mark grew up in a non-Christian home, the son of a World War II veteran. At age seventeen he became a Christian in a General Baptist church; within a year he became a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. Since then, he has had many vocations: as evangelist, a youth minister, a social worker, the founder and director of a Christian peace and justice organization, a pastor, and the director of The London Mennonite Centre, London, England. For sixteen years he was professor of theology at Eastern Mennonite Seminary. He has written or edited eleven books, two about Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The first, published by Baker Academic Books in 2013, is Bonhoeffer the Assassin?: Challenging the Myth, Recovering His Call to Peacemaking. In 2022 his book, Discipleship in a World Full of Nazis: Recovering the True Legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was published by Cascade Books. His first writing on Christians in Nazi Germany was in 1980. Mark has two adult children and four grandchildren and is married to Mary. He is currently (interim) co-pastor of a Mennonite Church in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

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In this episode Scot McKnight and Cody Matchett reimagine the original Christmas story by talking about the stories of Mary and Joseph.

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In this episode Scot McKnight and Cody Matchett talk with Dr. Jesse P. Nickel about his recent book, A Revolutionary Jesus: Violence and Peacemaking in the Kingdom of God.

Jesse Nickel (PhD, University of St Andrews) is on the faculty of Columbia Bible College in Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada, where he teaches in the biblical studies program. He is the author of The Things that Make for Peace: Jesus and Eschatological Violence (de Grutyer, 2021) and co-editor of It’s About Life: The Formative Power of Scripture (Regent College Publishing, 2023). Jesse is passionate about continuing to get to know Jesus more deeply with both his mind and heart, and teaching others about the already/not-yet, shalom-centred kingdom of God.

Forthcoming publications

• “Eschatological Violence,” in The Oxford Handbook of Bible and Violence, edited by Paul Middleton and Matthew Collins (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

In this episode Scot McKnight and Cody Matchett talk with Dr. Drew J. Strait about his recent book, Strange Worship: Six Steps for Challenging Christian Nationalism.

Drew J. Strait was baptized Catholic, raised United Methodist, discipled as an Evangelical through Young Life, Reformed through Whitworth College, and became a convinced Anabaptist after a transformative re-reading of the Gospels after the Iraq war. This ecumenical background energizes Strait’s passion to bring together diverse coalitions of Christians to bear witness to God’s mission of reconciliation—to reconcile humans to God and humans to one another. Perpetually overwhelmed by how much he doesn’t know, Strait loves to cultivate engaging spaces to learn alongside his students and listeners.

Forthcoming Publications

• Drew J. Strait, “Dominionism in the Trumpocene: Toward a Biblical Hermeneutic of Resistance.” In On Christian Nationalism: Critical and Theological Perspectives. Routledge Studies in Fascism and the Far Right. Edited by Joan Braune and David M. Gides. New York: Routledge, projected 2025.
• Human Animalization and Fascist Politics: Toward a Homiletic of Resistance against the Dehumanization of Immigrants (this is an essay I wrote during my sabbatical on the Canaanite woman in Matt 15, animal metaphors in the Trumpocene, and animal metaphors for dehumanizing people in Greco-Roman antiquity).
• Next book project will focus on biblical interpretation and human security–reclaiming biblical interpretation as a site for peacebuilding through the church.

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In this episode Scot McKnight and Cody Matchett talk with Dr. Beverly Roberts Gaventa about her new commentary on Romans (WJK).

Beverly Roberts Gaventa is Helen H.P. Manson Professor of New Testament Literature and Exegesis Emerita at Princeton Theological Seminary. Her publications include 

When in Romans: An Invitation to Linger with the Gospel according to Paul (Baker Press, 2016), Our Mother Saint Paul (Westminster John Knox, 2007), The Acts of the Apostles (Abingdon, 2003), I and II Thessalonians (Westminster John Knox, 1998), Mary: Glimpses of the Mother of Jesus (University of South Carolina, 1995; Fortress, 1999), and From Darkness to Light: Aspects of Conversion in the New Testament (Fortress, 1986). 

Romans: A Commentary (Westminster John Knox, 2024).

In 2020, Gaventa received the Burkitt Medal by the British Society for Arts and Humanities, she was president of the Society of Biblical Literature. She has lectured widely in the U.S. as well as in Canada, Europe, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.  Dr. Gaventa is a ruling elder in the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. and a member of the University Presbyterian Church, Austin, Texas.

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In this episode Scot McKnight and Cody Matchett talk with Dr. Matthew Novenson about his new book, Paul and Judaism at the End of History.

Matthew Novenson is the Helen H.P. Manson Professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary. He is also an honorary fellow at the University of Edinburgh, where previously he held the Chair of Biblical Criticism and Biblical Antiquities. He is the author of Christ among the Messiahs (Oxford University Press, 2012), The Grammar of Messianism (Oxford University Press, 2017), Paul, Then and Now (Eerdmans, 2022), and Paul and Judaism at the End of History (Cambridge University Press, 2024), among other works. 

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In this episode Scot McKnight and Cody Matchett talk with Dr. James F. McGrath about his recent book Christmaker.

James F. McGrath is Clarence L. Goodwin Chair in New Testament Language and Literature at Butler University.

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