Priscilla

The Life of an Early Christian

By: Ben Witherington III

Narrated by: Susan Hanfield

Who was Priscilla?

Readers of the Bible may know her as the wife of Aquila, Paul's coworker, or someone who explained baptism to Apollos. Biblical references to Priscilla spark questions: Why is she mentioned before her husband? Does the mention of her instruction of Apollos mean that women taught in the church? What is her story?

Ben Witherington III addresses these questions and more. In this work of historical fiction, Priscilla looks back on her long life and remembers the ways she has participated in the early church. Her journey has taken her to Ephesus, Corinth, and Rome, and she's partnered with Paul and others along the way.

Priscilla's story makes the first-century world come alive and helps listeners connect the events and correspondence in different New Testament books. Witherington combines biblical scholarship and winsome storytelling to give listeners a vivid picture of an important New Testament woman.

©2019 Ben Witherington III (P)2019 Tantor

Brilliant!

Makes me longing for more. Would love to hear the voices of the next generation…

NC STATE VS CAROLINA

Thanks so much for your service to our Lord and Savior. Its gives me great pleasure to say "um yeah this guy is from North Carolina and he's freakin awesome " . l really wished that I would have looked into your books the first time I heard you on the nakedbible podcast. This book was truly amazing.

Namon Hare

Bringing to Life the First Century

I so appreciated how the author weaves historical records of daily life in the first century Rome with biblical texts and a message that resonates through the centuries.

A Unique Approach

Ben Witherington has taken a whole new direction to his theological works. using theological and historical truth, he has weaved a narrative that allows the listener/reader to gain insight into the life of the early church. Well done!

The captivating nature of the conversations and the subjects

Nothing that I can identify at this time this subject is one of my most favorites

Great book - difficult narrator to listen to

The author creatively wove historical research into a story grounded in curious hypothesis about Priscilla. I enjoyed the story but the narrator’s voice was grating.

Not appropriate for audible rendition

The Narration was inclusive of footnotes and references. It was very Distracting. The mix of ancient and modern names was also distracting.

Utter butchery of anything close to actual HISTORY

As an ordained rabbi who has been fascinated by and studying 1st-century (Second Temple period) Jewish life in Palestine for a decade now, in particular the emergence of the sect of "Jesus followers" -- I was SO mortified by all the outright FALSEHOODS and inaccuracies in this "historical novel" -- I literally could not listen longer than 30 minutes. It was SO BAD, I outright couldn't even STAND IT any longer!

As a writer, Ben is solidly average; a "C"-level writer.

But the REAL offense is how little effort Ben made to create a FACTUAL PICTURE of what life, religion, and politics of that time and era actually were! If you are going to write a novel placed in one of the single-most important time periods of the history of Western Civilization -- I think you have a MORAL IMPERATIVE to at least create an accurate picture of what that place was like!

But this "author" apparently couldn't be BOTHERED to actually LEARN ANY OF THAT! And not a SINGLE factual point I'm referring to is about ideological or theological belief; they're just plain FACTS that a writer either knows -- or doesn't!

1. Ben has a character refer to his father using the Hebrew word -- but Jews in that time/place spoke ARAMAIC, not HEBREW. Heeeellloooo! {If you aren't face-planting yet, you should be!}

2. Jews didn't gather into synagogues to "pray and hear the Torah read". For starters, what we today call the first 5 books of the Hebrew Bible and read in shuls as "The Torah" had not been placed into a formal cannon yet! They existed as 5 separate scrolls that prophets or other preachers would recite in gathered outdoor areas. Synagogues were mostly used for ceremonies and use of their mikvehs! As far as actual "liturgy" and "prayer"? All of Jewish prayer we do today evolved AFTER the failure of the Bar Kokhba Rebellion in 125 CE. We don't even KNOW what, if anything, made up their "prayers"!

Why? Maybe because only 3% of Jews in that time period were literate! And you ONLY found such people in main population centers. You can find archaelogical mikvehs of that era in every tiny settlement that existed -- no matter how rural, remote, and ILLITERATE!

2) We don't know what "liturgy" they might have used because there are only 2 quasi-reliable PRIMARY SOURCE HISTORIANS whose writings about Jewish life in that time/place survived history! (DO YOU EVEN KNOW THEIR NAMES, BEN? I'LL GUESS NOT.) They are Josephus and Philo. And for all their reems of words, preserving details on what made up "synagogue liturgy" did not appear to matter! (At least not to the Roman authorities who HIRED THEM TO REPORT ON THAT REMOTE, ALWAYS TROUBLE-MAKING OUTPOST IN PALESTINE!)

3. Then Ben's character, a Roman Jew, claims that when she visited Jerusalem months after Pesach -- she had heard all about "those 3 men who had been nailed to crosses -- all within sight of the Holy Temple!" She even professes to have "run into" a man named "Lazarus" who had been brought back to life by one of these men who were killed. "Oh, how disgusting that the Romans left them up there for days -- have they no respect for the holiest holiday of the year? Blah blah blah?"

OMG, that is just SO BEYOND HISTORICALLY WRONG OR IMPLAUSIBLE, this guy should be EMBARRASSED TO EVEN HAVE HIS NAME ON THE COVER. There are THOUSANDS of biblical scholars, with actual PhDs, who have studied this time period AD NAUSEUM by now -- using all the best scholarly practices we have. And there is not a single statement in that picture he painted (and I summarized) that REMOTELY COMES CLOSE TO PLAUSABILITY.

A) We know for a FACT that crucifixion was the MOST COMMON way Romans killed people who represented a political threat. On average, over centuries of occupation, Roman rulers crucified 125 "criminals" or "threats to the state" EVERY year, just in Palestine alone. It was THEIR version of the electric chair. So those particular 3 killings would have been ENTIRELY UNREMARKABLE to nearly ALL the people who may have witnessed it (or even noticed it!) It was the ONLY method of Roman state justice those people had ever seen -- so why would this one have been any different?

B) The fact "Priscilla" would even be emotionally revolted just HEARING about such a "gruesome scene" MADE ME GUFFAW OUT LOUD --- given in ROME at the time, they forced into arenas to fight to the death human slaves who were slaves for NO OTHER REASON than having been captured and forced into being one!

And just like modern-day Spaniards still (inconceivably) PAY MONEY to watch matadors butcher bulls, who have been maimed and damaged before they even entered the arena -- watching HUMAN BUTCHERY was the No. 1 form of entertainment all across Europe in the middle ages. That's just how they did it in Rome, in a big-ass Colosseum!

Ben isn't just IGNORANT about the history of what REAL LIFE was like in Jewish Palestine in the 1st century CE -- he is ignorant, it seems, of even a high-school understanding of just how much everyday brutality, savagery, misery, and suffering that people witnessed and even walked past, without even offering aid, EVERY SINGLE DAY OF THEIR LIVES. The world was a DAMN BRUTAL PLACE, which is why few people EVER made it past age 40!

C) We have records of Jesus having a growing following for only 3 YEARS before he was killed, according to the NT; and nearly all of that was spent in the Galil (Galilee) -- a rural backwater of illiterate peasants. Jesus shows up during the ONE week of the year that for DECADES, riots had broken out, and stampedes and fights between Jews and Roman soldiers had occurred. And if we are to believe these details of NT text, Jesus did something so frankly STUPID as cause a huge scene and ruckus RIGHT AT THE CENTER OF ALL THE CULT ACTIVITIES on the Temple Mount by upending some money-changing tables -- which all the travelling Jews NEEDED so they could buy the goats or whatever for their annual sacrificial offerings!

Scholars doubt the soldiers even waited a week to arrest him (as NT scripture claims). They upped their military presence over Pesach every year because of the growing unrest and acts of rebellion going on in this REMOTE Roman outpost -- and so every single year, they were ready to POUNCE on ANYONE who showed the slightest sign that they were going to cause trouble! [No, Ben doesn't technically mention this detail, but IF these NT passages are accurate, and Jesus really DID do this and not immediately get arrested? It just shows you HOW SMALL WAS HIS FOLLOWINGS in a place HE WAS NOT FROM, and where PEOPLE DIDN'T KNOW HIM -- especially on the biggest pilgrimage holiday of the year!]

Whether you believe in the FAITH of Christianity or not, EVERYONE should care about what the likely true HISTORY of this seminal, foundational period of modern-day Western Civilization was. And go to any university scholar or expert in this period and they will tell you: Nothing about Jesus' execution was surprising, unusual, or unpredictable. The fact he had SO LITTLE TIME to do his miracles and "grow his following" in JERUSALEM itself means that by the time Jesus died -- probably 99% of all Jews who even LIVED IN JERUSALEM had even heard of him!

Surely some people in the Galilee got pretty upset when the pilgrims returned and news spread. But that a Roman pilgrim visiting months later would have heard people talking about it? Oh, and don't forget -- she managed to meet one of the people he had done a miracle on too! BOTH of those statistically likely "winning of the lottery" events -- and his lead character manages to score both just in the first day or two of her visit!

The FACT, Ben, is that Jesus' remaining disciples and small community of followers were just one of about 13 sects of Judaism that existed in that time. They barely made as much noise as a beehive in the middle of Los Angeles in the decades after his death. VERY FEW JEWS ever converted to Christianity. It was only thanks to DECADES of travelling by Barnabas, and of course, Paul, that any conversions began to take place in a significant number -- and nearly all the converts were pagans.

Even after the Emporor Constantine converted in 325 CE -- "officially" making all members of the Roman empire members of the proto-Orthodox church (aka, what would BECOME the "winning" branch of Christianity we know as Catholicism today) -- that hardly means people just stood up, overnight, and stopped following whatever pagan dieties, holidays, and cult practices they had had their whole lives! Just because word got around (eventually) that the Emperor had converted! No -- it would take a good 1000 years before you can truly say that Christianity had "won over' a sizable portion of the European western and eastern continent.

This author is obviously SO DESPERATE to validate his faith (or -- I can't even FATHOM his motivations for writing something so painfully anti-historical), he wants to imagine this all just switched like the flip of a switch! Wah-la! Suddenly the whole continent is Christian! And all the Jews just can't wait to jump on board!

THAT IS PURE FANTASY.

THIS BOOK ISN'T HISTORICAL FICTION; IT'S FANTASY FICTION!

Unless you want to write Sci Fi Ben, you need to at least have characters and situations be REALISTIC about important TRUE HISTORICAL EVENTS. It's all the MORE true when you are daring to write about a period of history that matters a lot to BILLIONS of people! I SHUDDER TO IMAGINE HOW ARROGANT YOU MUST BE TO HAVE EVEN ATTEMPTED TO WRITE A HISTORICAL BOOK BASED IN THIS TIME PERIOD, given your abject IGNORANCE about it all!

What you have published is a literary, a historical, and a religious TRAVESTY. Do the WORLD A FAVOR, withdraw your CLEARLY SELF-PUBLISHED TITLE -- and maybe go find yourself a PhD program and actually LEARN ABOUT THE TIME/PLACE you presumably care so much about. Because you don't even BEGIN to know how little you don't know!

And if you don't have the luxury of that, then how about reading ANY of the 35 national best-selling books published by world-famous biblical scholar Bart Ehrman, who explains, in VERY easy-to-understand terms, ALL of the millions of nuances of the evolution of the early church in its first 400 years. And he does it ALL from a HISTORICAL perspective, giving readers the best, most neutral, MAINSTREAM SCHOLARLY CONSENSUS on every topic under the sun.

It's been by reading books like his -- watching all of his online college courses, hearing this 100s of interviews on Youtube -- that I have self-learned all of the facts I offered just in this one review of the first 30 minutes of your TOTALLY PAINFUL book!