Deus Exodus A Passover Parody

Keep the tradition alive, but with belly laughs! This will be the funniest Passover Seder your friends and family have ever attended. This Passover play will engage all of your Seder guests: old or young; Jewish or Christian or agnostic; been to a million seders, or a first-timer who's just there for the free food. A farcical reenactment of the story of the Exodus, the play covers the entire lifetime of Moses. It runs around half an hour and involves seven speaking characters, as well as the rest of your guests for sound effects (optionally). It is displayed in accessible large print. You can use it in the Maggid section of the Haggadah, or you may choose to use the play as a replacement for the majority of the seder. You only need to buy one copy of the book, since it contains a full set of scripts customized for each of the seven roles. Best suited for teens & adults.

A hilarious parody of the Passover Haggadah from three award-winning comedy writers.

What was the least interesting seder you ever attended? And what was the most interesting? If your experience is like most of ours, your worst seders were dry readings of the haggadah, unoriginal and done by rote. The better seders, on the other hand, were imaginative and thought-provoking. The best may even have included a clever surprise. An incredible 95% of American Jews participate in a Passover seder every year; it's the best-attended Jewish ritual. Yet most participants find the seder dull, repetitive, and incomprehensible. They attend out of a sense of duty, but they don't enjoy it. Passover Parodies is a series of ten-minute plays for the Passover seder table. Families select one each year (or more, if they're ambitious) to read aloud. Like the traditional humorous Purim-shpiel, the plays entertain, educate, and provoke the discussion that is supposed to dominate a seder. A family might choose to examine Jewish tradition through the eyes of Sherlock Holmes ("This cracker was produced by someone in a most urgent rush. Furthermore, it has been broken along one side. A segment has been removed. Why? That is what we must endeavor to find out."), ... or experience the exodus from Casablanca ("I remember every detail: the Egyptians wore skirts, you wore a tallis. But mostly I remember the wow finish. A guy in a basket, floating in the bulrushes, with a comical look on his face because he has a diaper that needs changing."), ... or starring four young Marx Brothers ("Pharoah, you have to let my people go. If you don't, my ancestors would rise from their graves and I'd only have to bury them again."). They might let Hermione Granger explain the magic of the ten plagues, or challenge traditional God-belief on Sigmund Freud's couch. Some of these plays can replace parts of the seder; for example, the Shakespeare play ("Much Ado About Bupkes") tells the Exodus story. Others can complement the rituals, or provide new viewpoints, or simply add humor to what can be a dry ceremony. Readers can choose the themes they like, perhaps reading a different skit each year. The plays also vary in cast size, to accommodate both large and small seders.

Time is integral to human culture. Over the last two centuries people's relationship with time has been transformed through industrialisation, trade and technology. But the first such life-changing transformation – under Christianity's influence – happened in late antiquity. It was then that time began to be conceptualised in new ways, with discussion of eternity, life after death and the end of days. Individuals also began to experience time differently: from the seven-day week to the order of daily prayer and the festal calendar of Christmas and Easter. With trademark flair and versatility, world-renowned classicist Simon Goldhill uncovers this change in thinking. He explores how it took shape in the literary writing of late antiquity and how it resonates even today. His bold new cultural history will appeal to scholars and students of classics, cultural history, literary studies, and early Christianity alike.

Exhaustively annotated and illustrated, this explosive work of history unearths clues that finally demonstrate the truth about one of the world’s great religions: that it was born out of the conflict between the Romans and messianic Jews who fought a bitter war with each other during the 1st Century. The Romans employed a tactic they routinely used to conquer and absorb other nations: they grafted their imperial rule onto the religion of the conquered. After 30 years of research, authors James S. Valliant and C.W. Fahy present irrefutable archeological and textual evidence that proves Christianity was created by Roman Caesars in this book that breaks new ground in Christian scholarship and is destined to change the way the world looks at ancient religions forever. Inherited from a long-past era of tyranny, war and deliberate religious fraud, could Christianity have been created for an entirely different purpose than we have been lead to believe? Praised by scholars like Dead Sea Scrolls translator Robert Eisenman (James the Brother of Jesus), this exhaustive synthesis of historical detective work integrates all of the ancient sources about the earliest Christians and reveals new archeological evidence for the first time. And, despite the fable presented in current bestsellers like Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Jesus, the evidence presented in Creating Christ is irrefutable: Christianity was invented by Roman Emperors. I have rarely encountered a book so original, exciting, accessible and informed on subjects that are of obvious importance to the world and to which I have myself devoted such a large part of my scholarly career studying. In this book they have rendered a startling new understanding of Christianity with a controversial theory of its Roman provenance that is accessible to the layman in a very powerful way. In the process, they present new and comprehensive archeological and iconographic evidence, as well as utilizing the widest and most cutting edge work of other recent scholars, including myself. This is a work of outstanding and original scholarship. Its arguments are a brilliant, profound and thorough integration of the relevant evidence. When they are done, the conclusion is inescapable and obviously profound. Robert Eisenman, Author of James the Brother of Jesus and The New Testament Code "A fascinating and provocative investigative history of ideas, boldly exploring a problem that previous scholarship has not clearly or credibly addressed: how (and why!) the Flavian dynasty wove Christianity into the very fabric of Western civilization." -Mark Riebling, author of Church of Spies: The Pope's Secret War Against Hitler

Vol. 4 covers the late Roman period to the rise of Islam. Focuses especially on the growth and development of rabbinic Judaism and of the major classical rabbinic sources such as the Mishnah, Jerusalem Talmud, Babylonian Talmud and various Midrashic collections.

"As the psalms are a microcosm of the Old Testament, so the Expositions of the Psalms can be seen as a microcosm of Augustinian thought. In the Book of Psalms are to be found the history of the people of Israel, the theology and spirituality of the Old Covenant, and a treasury of human experience expressed in prayer and poetry. So too does the work of expounding the psalms recapitulate and focus the experiences of Augustine's personal life, his theological reflections and his pastoral concerns as Bishop of Hippo."--Publisher's website.

In 1732, a blasphemous burlesque of the Christian Atonement was published in England without comment from the government or Church of England. The author explains this absence of censure through a detailed examination of the parameters of blasphemy in 18th century England.

In Intolerance, Polemics, and Debate in Antiquity politico-cultural, philosophical, and religious forms of critical conversation in the ancient Near Eastern, Biblical, Graeco-Roman, and early-Islamic world are discussed. The contributions enquire into the boundaries between debate, polemics, and intolerance, and address their manifestations in both philosophy and religion.

In the twenty-first century, religion has come under determined attack from secular progressives in documentaries, opinion pieces and international bestsellers. Combative atheists have denounced faiths of every stripe, resulting in a crude intellectual polarization in which religious convictions and heritage must be rejected or accepted wholesale. In the long unavailable Atheism in Christianity, Ernst Bloch provides a way out from this either/or debate. He examines the origins of Christianity in an attempt to find its social roots, pursuing a detailed study of the Bible and its fascination for 'ordinary and unimportant' people. In the biblical promise of utopia and the scriptures' antagonism to authority, Bloch locates Christianity's appeal to the oppressed. Through a lyrical yet close and nuanced analysis, he explores the tensions within the Bible that promote atheism as a counter to the authoritarian metaphysical theism imposed by clerical exegesis. At the Bible's heart he finds a heretical core and the concealed message that, paradoxically, a good Christian must necessarily be a good atheist. This new edition includes an introduction by Peter Thompson, the Director of the Centre for Enrst Bloch Studies at the University of Sheffield.