The Bible and Beyond Podcast Episode

Learn the Surprising Depth in Jesus the Carpenter-Teacher’s Farming Parables

An Interview with Dr. Ian Brown

Dr. Ian Brown

Jesus was an educator who taught in the Greco-Roman mode the importance of morality, virtue, and goodness. Although his own trade was a carpenter, he used the better-known Greco-Roman farming parables to teach his deeper meaning. Of course, the specifics of Jesus’s education differed, but his common technique made him a recognizable teacher within the context of the educational system of the time. The parables in the Gospels of Mark and Thomas illustrate this point.

Dr. Ian Brown is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Gender, Religion, and Critical Studies at the University of Regina. He finished his PhD work at the University of Toronto Department for the Study of Religion in 2020 and has published articles in the Journal of Biblical Literature and Religion Compass. This podcast conversation came from a paper Ian presented at the Italian Centre for Advanced Studies on Religions annual conference in 2017. His topic is on the cultivation of education through Jesus’s teaching based on farming.

Learn more about Ian Brown on Academia.edu.