Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception

Thanks to a blog post by Dr. Jim West, I found out that the Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception was looking for some contributors for essays for future volumes. As a result--and because of my work both on this parables book and on the reception history of James (James Through the Centuries with Wiley-Blackwell)--I have been tasked with writing four entries for EBR: The Good Samaritan in Visual Art, The Parables in Visual Art, The Epistle of James in Visual Art, and James, Brother of Jesus, in Visual Art.

I turned in my essay on The Good Samaritan in Visual Art last week. I already had a significant amount of research completed on that essay because of writing my current book on the reception of the parables, and it did not take long to write the EBR essay.

That task started me thinking: As a change of pace, I think I will spend the next few weeks on this blog expanding what I found on the Good Samaritan in visual art. Only a small portion of this material will find its way into the book--I want to cover all the parables, not focus on one--and the encyclopedia essay just scratched the surface.

Since I also will be working on the book this summer, I won't go into much depth in these entries, unless I intend to include the work in my parables book too.

Should be great fun. I think I will start in the next post with an illumination of the Good Samaritan parable from the Rossano Gospels.