I am delighted to introduce jshj’s final issue of 2024, especially since all four contributions shirk established conventions for historical Jesus scholarship and/or this journal in their own way. When Robert Myles and I took over, we wanted (of course) to continue featuring the excellent scholarship that jshj has become known for, but we also wanted to try some new things—push the envelope, as it were. This issue offers a modest example of what this might look like.

The issue opens with a piece that we expect will garner a great deal of attention. Although it is another contribution to our on-going pedagogy series,¹ this one takes a notably different approach and form than the first two. In it, Robyn Faith Walsh offers a fictitious scholarly essay (an essay-within-an-essay) to use in the classroom to help destabilize students’ assumptions about studying ancient history. The essay imagines how the material culture for a contemporary entertainment venue in Florida (let the reader understand) might be interpreted by scholars working some 2,000 years in our future after various natural and technological disasters have left much of the society in ruin. Historians of Christianity often regard archaeology as a rigorous, no-nonsense, and demonstrably quantifiable method for studying antiquity, and sometimes it is set in opposition to other ‘softer’ approaches that (supposedly) leave more, perhaps too much, room for interpretation. Walsh’s essay forces the reader to reckon with these sorts of methodological assumptions and what we actually do when we reconstruct the ancient world of Jesus.

The essay-within-the-essay attests to a curious cult of the ‘Historical Mouse’ that emerges from the material culture under review. Evidence for how the Mouse was regarded, and even revered, crops up in domestic space, architecture, and a range of visual and iconographic representations. The essay uses typical data and observations to ground the cult in time and space, arguing, for instance, that ‘We have no extant attestation of the Mouse before the era of the documented World Wars.’ It also carefully describes the various rituals associated with these spaces and ends with a vivid description of the ambulatory journey that the ‘Mousetic pilgrim’ would have likely taken when visiting this cultic site.

Walsh’s creative contribution shows just how easily and innocently the historical imagination can go awry, despite our best efforts to define a rigorous and objective scholarly method for studying history, archaeology, culture, etc. For students, her playful essay will impress on them how slippery the annals of history are. Indeed, in its more positivistic guises, the study of the historical Jesus has been predicated on a certain amount of confidence that we can successfully reconstruct the Greco-Roman world, Jewish culture, and even the life of an individual man who would have lived and died nearly 2,000 years ago. The takeaway from Walsh’s article is, to be blunt, that it is not as simple as many have thought—and that we need to be very, very careful.

Readers will be struck by the eye-catching, sometimes humorous images that Walsh uses to illustrate the scholarly essay on the Mouse cult. These images come courtesy of ai. Teachers in higher education (myself included) have had viscerally negative reactions to ai-generated content recently, because in part, over the course of the past 12–15 months, some of our students have tried to pass off ChatGPT analyses as their own—often with glaring signs that it was not written by them. Yet Walsh’s article attests to the productive uses of ai in higher education, in this case, to illustrate a classroom activity that insists upon critical thinking instead of the mechanical reproduction of traditional ideas.

In this spirit, Soon examines a curious (and as he rightly notes, ‘overlooked’) life of Jesus from the nineteenth century. According to Soon, Watson’s Jesus was ‘the antithesis of messianic expectations in the first century,’ and this Jesus focused on internal spiritual problems rather than external matters (such as resisting Roman oppression or supporting disadvantaged/marginalized groups in his society). As Soon demonstrates, Watson was deeply familiar with other antique literature, such as Josephus’s writings and apocryphal gospels, and they influenced her depiction of Jesus.

This article thus underscores the importance of attentive archival work, which, in turn, often uncovers these fascinating instances of reception history. Examining not just Watson’s work, but also how she came to be excluded from the lineup of important authors writing about Jesus in this period contributes to the enterprise of metacriticism, which both editors of jshj strongly support. Metacriticism often requires some distance from the time and place under analyses, and so Soon’s article contributes to a growing body of critical research on these nineteenth-century interpretations.⁴

The final contributions in this issue are Nathan Shedd’s review of Michael Patrick Barber’s recent book The Historical Jesus and the Temple: Memory, Methodology, and the Gospel of Matthew (2023) and Karishma Paul’s review of Michael Vicko Zolondek’s The Quest for the historical Jesus Methodology: Greco-Roman Biographies, the Gospels, and the Practice of History (2023). Publishing book reviews is by no means unconventional, at least not in the way that the previous two contributions were. However, jshj has not consistently featured book reviews across its years of publication, and so the inclusion of these represents a fresh and self-conscious effort to incorporate more into our pages. Book reviews, I maintain, accomplish important work in our field: they help to keep the scholarly conversation going after a book’s initial moment of publication; they offer early career scholars a way to make important and visible contributions to their discipline; and perhaps most importantly, especially in a field where an avalanche of books continues to be published at a voraciously fast clip (which is a good thing!), they aid our fellow scholars in staying up-to-date on the contents of the newest, most important scholarship. Put differently, they help us stay abreast of a field that is saturated with publications.

In short, this issue gently pushes the envelope into new territory. It is not entirely unprecedented, but at the very least, it will be unanticipated by many readers. And hopefully, it will illustrate some of the creative possibilities for future historical Jesus work.