Jesus and the Gospels Museum

Here at the Centre for the Study of Christian Origins we’re very pleased to launch the Jesus and the Gospels Museum. This exciting project was part of Prof Bond’s Jesus and the Gospels foundation level course and funded by a Principal’s Teaching Award (PTAS). It uses an innovative Omeka platform to allow small groups of students to ‘curate’ various ‘exhibits’ from the time of Jesus. An ‘exhibit’ can be any tangible object – the Galilee boat, a Tyrian shekel, a fragment of papyrus etc. Each ‘exhibit’ is accompanied by three pages: the first gives an introduction to the object, the second covers any other relevant material (e.g. the Galilean fishing industry, or coinage in the first century), and the third discusses its significance for the New Testament. The point of the exercise was to get students to think more historically about Jesus and his context, and to engage with the huge range of archaeological artefacts that help us to recreate his life and times.

The project was trialled two years ago, but we have quite a few more exhibits to add as the result of last year’s course. We’ve launched the whole Museum together, but will showcase various ‘exhibits’ over the next month or so. We hope you enjoy reading them!

The students responsible for each ‘exhibit’ are named on the pages themselves, but we’d like to extend a special thank-you to Dr Jeremy Kidwell (now of Birmingham University) who pioneered the use of Omeka, also to Dr Andrew Kelley and Sarah Agnew who both acted as technical support to Prof Bond.

For the external link, go here: http://gospelsmuseum.div.ed.ac.uk/