Retelling the Bible

50 episodes listed below

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Ancient stories, retold with moral pressure.

The gist

Retelling the Bible treats scripture as a living story-world, not a museum case. Episodes move from close reading into imaginative reconstruction, asking what overlooked figures heard, feared, misunderstood, or resisted.

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About Retelling the Bible

Retelling the Bible is built around a simple but demanding act: slowing down inside biblical stories until familiar scenes start sounding strange again. The show reads passages aloud, then lingers over the assumptions that readers often carry into them. It is especially interested in people who are reduced by others into symbols, problems, or footnotes. In the episode on the man blind from birth, the central question is not only what Jesus says, but what the man must have heard when others turned his life into a debate about sin. That concern gives the show much of its force. It treats interpretation as an ethical act. Stories about disability, poverty, and public blame are connected to present-day habits of finding fault in people who are already vulnerable. The show also has room for historical caution. In its treatment of Saul, it notes the limits of evidence and lets uncertainty become part of the reading rather than a problem to hide. Paul appears not as a flattened authority figure but as part of a web of letters, communities, co-writers, and later interpretation. Sosthenes matters because the text names him and then leaves him almost entirely unexplained. The show notices that absence. Exodus becomes a story of thirst, fear, leadership, and a community wondering whether God is still among them. John becomes a vast meditation on Word, light, creation, liberation, law, prophecy, and the recurring temptation to turn life-giving teaching into a weapon. At times the format becomes openly imaginative. Herod's story is filtered through the habits of modern social media, turning royal paranoia into a recognizable public performance. The humor is pointed, but the aim remains interpretive. Episodes are paced like spoken essays with dramatic reconstruction threaded through close attention to scripture. W. Scott McCandless serves as the recurring storyteller, guiding the material with curiosity, social conscience, and a willingness to ask why certain readings have become comfortable. The show suits listeners who want biblical interpretation that is literary, morally engaged, and alert to the people standing at the edge of the frame.

Made for: For listeners interested in biblical interpretation that blends close reading, narrative imagination, and present-day social questions. It especially suits people who like scripture treated as story, argument, memory, and moral challenge at once.

What sets it apart: The show stands out by inhabiting overlooked perspectives rather than only explaining doctrine or history. It lets familiar passages collide with issues such as poverty, disability, leadership, oppression, authorship, and public blame.

In their own words

Retelling the Bible seeks to retell Bible stories in ways that allow listeners to hear them and understand more of what the original author intended people to understand. The focus is not on the historical events behind the stories, but on helping us, as listeners to enter into the stories.

Gospel of JohnExodus and MosesPauline lettersoverlooked biblical figurespower and oppressionpoverty and social blameprophecy and kingshipscripture as storytelling

Talks about

Religion & Spirituality Christianity

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Find your next episode

About Retelling the Bible

In their own words

Talks about

Podcasts like Retelling the Bible

Episodes

10.8 What the Blind Man Heard

10.7 Now That's How You Make an Entrance

10.6 Moses Hits Rock Bottom

10.5 Well, Is Saul Also Among the Prophets?

10.4 Who Was Sosthenes?

10:3 The Tale of the Word

10.2 Did Paul Really Teach that Those Who Won't Work Should Not Eat?

10.1 The Tweets of Herod the Great

9.26 The Story Matthew Was Telling

Extra: God's Character, The Renewed Covenant & Moses' Shining Face

9.25 Joseph's Christmas Carol

Extra: Interview with Karen McAndless-Davis

9.24 Get the Door, Rhoda

9.23 Four Men and a Bed

9.22 The Wrong Dinner Guests

9.21 He's a Maniac, Maniac!

9.20 Ten Silver Coins

9.19 Four Eulogies at Two Funerals

9.18 For Your Consideration: Jericho 2.0

9.17 Jezebel Fixes Everything.

9.16 The Un-Neighbourly Judeans

Bonus: The First Passover (with the Word in Black and Red)

9.15 Noah, the Rainbow Guy

Bonus: The Swarms, the Cattle and the Boils

9.14 Joseph & Son, General Labourers

9.13 Zippy and the Snippy

9.12 The Girl Who Was Profit

Bonus: Emergency Circumcision

9.11 In the Shadow of the Ziggurat

9.10 Whose Wedding Was It Anyway?

Bonus: Drawing Up the Liberator

9.9 The Man Who Prophesied to Bones

Bonus: Shiphrah & Puah

Easter Bonus: The First Annual Sunday after the Passover Footrace

9.8 Oops, She Did it Again

9.7 Jumping Jehoshaphat

9.6 A Tale of Two... Tales

9.5 200 Denarii Worth of Bread and Fish

9.4 Disrupting Operations Governing Egypt

9.3 The Question that Could Have Gotten Jesus Killed

9.2 You want me to put my hand where?!

9.1 After Mount Moriah

8.27 How Christmas Radicalized Simeon

6.26 In the Days of King Herod

Extra: CrossCast Interview with Ministry Forum

8.25 What Happened to Rambo?

8.24 The Tale of Frail and Sickly

8.23 Day of the Walking Dead

8.22 Elisha's Killer Stew Recipe

8.21 What About Esther's Plot?