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ISBN 979-8385224593
Creating Jesus
The Earliest Record of Yeshua of Nazareth
A book for general readers on the gospel of Mark as the earliest surviving witness of the life of Yeshua of Nazareth. Dennis Kennedy applies his expertise in literary and performance studies to examine Mark as a literary and historical document, and describes in straightforward style how it differs from the other gospels, what it meant in its time, and how it has been used in history. He investigates the oral Jesus tradition before Mark, the radical act of writing about a crucified preacher from the hinterland, the expansion of the Messiah cult in the Roman empire, and the character of the faith that the earliest gospel proposes. Interspersed with incidents from Kennedy’s own education, Creating Jesus seeks to reveal why Mark was written, the great influence it has had, and how it might question the nature of Christianity in the present.
“Creating Jesus is one of the most amazing books I have read in a long time. Just a masterwork.” –David Dault, Things Not Seen radio and podcast
Interview on BBC Ulster Radio, Sunday Sequence 22 December 2024
“As uniquely different as any book about the gospels . . . All our listeners should read—and maybe re-read—Creating Jesus by Dennis Kennedy.” –Pat McMahon, The God Show radio and podcast:
This Is Not Church podcast episode 240:
“A compelling book.” –Fred Stella, Common Threads radio and podcast:
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Fossil Light
A Novel in Films
A book about immigration and return, about leaving Ireland and coming back to it. Set over three generations from 1886 to the present, its centre is an anthropologist and filmmaker who is caught between countries, cultures, and love and loss. It is an elegy of memory and lost time, written in language that is clear, terse, and humorous, its darkest places lit by the fossil light of forgiveness and understanding.
Fossil light: light reaching the earth from stars that are long dead.
Fossil Light: light from the past captured on film and shown again.
Fossil light: the world of the past brought alive through memory.
“Fossil Light spirals out to Delia’s life, bringing us back from a two-story house in Cincinnati to the shores of Lough Mask in County Mayo, before she immigrates to Ohio at the end of the nineteenth century. Weaving his way in and out of the story is her grandson Dan, who becomes a filmmaker and finally returns to the shores of the same Lough Mask. His eye-of-the-camera view becomes a narrative technique that makes Fossil Light such a distinctive novel. To craft a novel that works in a fundamentally cinematic way is a considerable achievement. It is also, quite simply, a very good read.”
Christopher Morash
Seamus Heaney Professor of Irish Writing, Trinity College Dublin
Dennis Kennedy 