I just got finished doing some edits to the complete and final version of The Real Jesus DVD.
I was happily surprised when I began production on this in 2005 that “The Real Jesus” has become an apologetics buzzword of sorts. Lee Strobel’s The Case for the Real Jesus and Luke Timothy Johnson’s The Real Jesus are two books I highly recommend.
I used Johnson’s book as a reference in the video and I just got Strobel’s book as I was finishing up the video. I was surprised to see that the format of Strobel’s “Six Challenges” and my “Seven Myths of the Higher Critics” were so similar.
The final version is now finished! Really! The total running time with all the extras is now 2 hours and 20 minutes — up from the hour-long project I announced was almost finished earlier this year.
The DVD just needed a few cosmetic edits (nothing the average viewer would even notice) and we even added seven minutes of a “Bonus Feature” entitled: “Who is Jesus?”
It’s the best feature of the DVD and adds a lot of appeal especially as an introduction when it will be show to small groups as a five to ten week seminar. The video is divided into ten parts for this reason.
The final version is available now!
Check out the YouTube clips at TheRealJesus.com website. Then you can order it if you like what you see. The final version has over an hour of additional materials, interviews, a bonus feature and is re-edited with Eric Holberg as the host and narrator.
I’ve been doing a weekly radio show on Tuesday nights with Pastor Joe Dunn of Metro Praise Church in Chicago. It’s a Skype-based web-cam/chat-room/radio-show with two pastors in Chicago and Indiana. A lot of diverse people show up in the chat room — witches, atheists, nihilists, etc. — and ask crazy questions.
I sent Joe Dunn an advance copy of The Real Jesus DVD. I was really pleased to hear his comments. He opened the show by holding it up to the web cam and saying, “I just got done watching the best video on Jesus that I’ve ever seen! This is the greatest thing ever! I’ve seen all kinds of stuff by Ankerburg and other guys like that and this is by far the best thing I’ve seen on the topic of The Real Jesus.”
He loved the interviews with the experts, the graphics, the music, everything. He said he wished he had 100 to give away, and so on. He said he likes all the “charts” and was going to go back and study them on still mode. That, of course, speaks to me about what is needed in a future study guide, not just text, but the same visuals I used in the video.
This is a good review because I have all kind of ideas about how I want to continue. I have enough script material to do at least two more of these in the next few years. I was thinking that that there are at least 10,000 Joe Dunn’s out there, pastors who are training young Christians in their churches how to stand up against postmodernist reinterpretations of Jesus and militant atheist attacks on the Bible. This video is the perfect training tool.
The big question is how to reach these pastors.
Obviously, we need to get about a dozen endorsement quotes from pastors and a few well-known church leaders on The Real Jesus — then we need to advertise this to thousands of church leaders throughout the world.
