Noah’s Other Son Late in the day on 9/11/2001 Brian Arthur Brown, Canadian author and United Church minister, convened Muslim and Jewish colleagues to seek a new approach to interfaith relations. Notes from the meeting led to a series of joint sermons, printed, expanded and published by Continuum (2006) as Noah’s Other Son (the one who drowned in the flood in Quran 17). As a parable for our time, this book offered readers a new kind of interfaith study, culminating in Seven Testaments of World Religions, to be launched 20 years after 9/11, capping off the Seven Testaments Trilogy, a welcome new approach to the study of religion.

 

Forensic Scriptures Forensic Scriptures (Wipf & Stock, 2009) was Brown’s more academic version of the material in Noah’s Other Son. It was released at a three-day launch conference at The Riverside Church in NYC, hosted by 4 seminaries and attended by 200 scholars. The author moderated six panels of six specialists each, discussing aspects of a paradigm shift from “Comparative Religion” to “Interfaith Studies” (from comparing to sharing) in the then new discipline of Scriptural Reasoning.

 

Three Testament Companion Positive responses to Three Testaments led to the 2013 publication of the Three Testaments Companion: Torah, Gospel, Quran & More, a study guide. It remains available from Amazon and in other places only until the release of SEVEN TESTAMENTS, which contains all the salient material, including the highly regarded color chart of the Jewish Torah.

 

Three Testaments: Shalom, Peace, Salam The stage play, Three Testaments: Shalom, Peace, Salam, premiered in upstate New York through June of 2015 staring Emmy Award winner, Fred Owens. With the Companion, these publications and productions had the amplification of Three Testaments and preparation for the publication of Four Testaments as their objectives.

 

Older Testaments: Encounters of the Way Older Testaments: Encounters on the Way by William Thomas succinctly illustrates what the Four Testaments book needed 500 pages to say. Just as the Three Testaments of Western Monotheism may be related to each other through the Zoroastrian Older Testament, the Four Testaments of Eastern Monism share a root system in Vedic Lore. The syntheses are palpable while the differences stand out in contrast which inform all Seven Testaments. Initially conceived as a doctoral dissertation project for Colgate-Rochester-Crosier Divinity School, Older Testaments: Encounters on The Way is set to premier at the Seven Testaments Trilogy conference in Niagara Falls, NY, coinciding with the book launch for Seven Testaments.