Major News for The True Myth Blog

A new format, a new book, and a new podcast.

We have been writing a lot lately. If you subscribe to the site, you have likely noticed the increase in email notifications. We don’t want to clutter your inbox or become the sender you instinctively archive without reading.

So, we are changing the rhythm.

Instead of an email every time we hit publish, we are moving to a single weekly update. We’ll send it out once a week (Saturday mornings). It will contain three things:

1. A status check on the book draft.

2. Links and descriptions to every article we posted that week.

3. A preview of what we are researching next.

Speaking of the book, it is time to make it official.

Between the Whip and the Cheek

We are writing a book called Between the Whip and the Cheek.

The premise comes from a specific feeling of dislocation many of us have when we read the Gospels. We walk into the text expecting a coherent person, but we often feel like we are meeting two incompatible figures.

There is the Jesus of the Whip (John 2). He braids cords into a weapon. He drives merchants out of the temple. He yells “Woe to you!” at religious leaders. He seems dangerous, judgmental, and fierce.

Then there is the Jesus of the Cheek (Matthew 5). He tells us not to resist the evil person. He eats with the marginalized. He absorbs violence rather than inflicting it. He seems safe, inclusive, and endlessly tolerant.

The modern reader usually tries to solve this by editing the file. We pick the Jesus we like and ignore the one who scares us. But if you can’t reconcile these two pictures, you are left with a disintegrated Christ.

Our book argues that the problem isn’t with Jesus. The problem is that we are using a ruler made of water to measure a fire. We are using thin, modern categories of “nice” and “mean” to measure a God who is defined by Qodesh (Holiness)—a weight and a density that consumes what is unclean and protects what is vulnerable.

We want to show that the Whip and the Cheek are not contradictions. They are the systole and diastole of the same heart. They are both acts of Holy Love.

We are deep in the drafting phase right now. We are looking at the acoustics of the temple courts, the smell of the first-century tannery, and the physics of holiness in Leviticus to understand how Jesus moves through a profane world without being contaminated by it.

The Podcast

To go along with the writing, we are launching a podcast.

Writing a book leaves a lot of material on the cutting room floor. The podcast is where we are going to process the research in real-time. We will talk about the articles on the blog, the theology we are wrestling with for the book, and the general state of the church in a profane age.

It will be a space for the conversation before it gets polished into text.

Stay tuned for the first episode, and look out for the first weekly digest coming soon.

— Joshua Buzzard and Dr. Matthew J Coombe