A Community Discussion - The Gospels as Community Documents
Led by Bob Royalty, Professor of History and Religion at Wabash College, Indiana
Saturday, June 8, 2024, 9:00 AM
How can we read the Gospels for insights into early Christian communities? Bob Royalty from Wabash College will facilitate a community discussion on Saturday morning, June 8th, from 9-12 on The Gospels as Community Documents. He will introduce and discuss the origins and characteristics of the four Gospels. Then we will look at the ways these texts reflect and create early Christian communities in different ways.
While we cannot know exactly who these people were or how they read (or listened) to the stories about Jesus, we will try to get as close as we can to understanding our connections to them as people who gather to listen to, study, and learn from the Gospels. The format will include interactive presentation as well as readings and discussion.
Bob Royalty is Professor of History and Religion at Wabash College in Indiana, where he has taught for 25 years.He has an M.Div. from Yale Divinity School and a Ph.D. in New Testament Studies from Yale University.In addition to numerous articles, he has written two scholarly books, The Streets of Heaven:The Ideology of Wealth in the Book of Revelation (Mercer University Press, 1998) and The Origin of Heresy (Rutgers, 2013),studying the way heresy formed as a concept in early Christianity.He has also recently published a memoir, Walking Hadrian’s Wall:A Memoir of a Father’s Suicide (Shanti Arts Publishing, 2021).While still teaching at Wabash, he is slowly moving to Greensboro, where he wife Anne is Head of the Economics Department at the Bryans School of Business at UNC-Greensboro.They are frequent visitors to their condo on the Riverwalk in Wilmington.
