ABC Documentary Features Professor Segal on Apostle Paul
Professor Alan Segal is a featured scholar in an ABC television network documentary, Peter Jennings Reporting: Jesus and Paul - The Word and the Witness. The program airs primetime on Monday, April 5 from 8-11 p.m. ET on ABC.
Segal , the Ingeborg Rennert Professor of Jewish Studies, is a specialist on Judaic-Christian origins and the author of Paul the Convert: The Apostolate and Apostasy of Saul the Pharisee.
In the special three-hour broadcast, Peter Jennings tells the story of Jesus of Nazareth, Paul the Apostle and Christianity in its first decades - a tiny movement that against the odds survived and then triumphed over all the gods and goddesses of the Roman Empire. The program contains a wide array of perspectives from biblical scholars.
According to Segal, the Peter Jennings project began after the anchor's successful documentary on Jesus for ABC. After that special attracted a great deal of interest, Jennings hoped to dig deeper into the beginnings of Christianity by exploring what scholars had to say about Paul.
"My book, Paul the Convert, explores Paul's Jewish identity, which Jennings was interested in portraying," said Segal. "He shot the interview a couple of years ago in the Sulzberger Parlor at Barnard but the special was postponed because of a personal tragedy of one of the producers. He has now used the footage to put together a longer special depicting the first generation of Christians. That puts my contribution to the project very close to the publication of my new book, Life After Death, which will be published by Doubleday this spring."
Segal's other books include: Two Powers in Heaven (Brill), Deus Ex Machina: Computers in the Humanities, Rebecca's Children: Judaism and Christianity in the Roman World (Harvard), The Other Judaisms of Late Antiquity (Scholars Press) for the Brown University Judaica Series.
Click here to read more about the special.
