Real Live Preacher Dramatized Version, or RLPDV, is my silly name for my dramatic versions of bible stories. I enjoy imagining the stories from the gospels as they might have happened. I use modern language and description in an attempt to capture the humanity in the bible stories

I want to say something to my friends who stand outside of the Christian tradition - atheists, agnostics, and others. You do not need to be a Christian to appreciate the stories of Jesus. These stories have been formative for our culture, and a passing knowledge of them is desirable for any educated person.

The synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, use the same basic framework to tell the story of Jesus. They are also alike in their brevity. The gospel accounts of Jesus are skeleton stories, stripped of the flesh of their immediate context. We do not see the faces or the body language. We don’t see what happened before and after. The gospel writers are minimal, giving us just the facts and trusting that we will flesh out the story.

There was good reason for this. These stories were born of an oral tradition, and only written down when those who knew Jesus began to die. They may have been intended as memory aids in storytelling. They are about as long as they could be and still fit on an average sized scroll. They were pocket stories, meant to be carried around and copied.

When I add dramatized context and flesh, I do this only to bring these bones to life again. The details I add are modernized and absolutely fiction. But there were real, live details once. There was flesh on these bones, and that makes all the difference.