Jesus' story has been retold in various forms and fashions for centuries. Jesus novels, a subset of the historical fiction genre, are one of the latest means of not only re-imagining the man from Galilee but also of rewriting the canonical Gospels. This thesis explores the Christological portraits constructed in four of those novels while also using the novels to examine the intertextual play of these Gospel rewrites with their Gospel progenitors. Chapter 1 offers a prolegomenon to the act of fictionalizing Jesus that discusses the relationship between the person and his portraits and the hermeneutical circle created by these texts as they both rewrite the Gospels and stimulate a rereading of them. It also establishes the "preposterous" methodology that will be used when reexamining the Gospels "post" reading the novels. Chapters 2 to 5 offer four case studies of "complementing" and "competing" novels and the techniques they use to achieve these aims: Anne Rice's Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt; Neil Boyd's The Hidden Years; Nino Ricci's Testament; and José Saramago's The Gospel according to Jesus Christ. Chapter 6 begins an examination of a specific interpretive circle based upon Jesus' temptation in the wilderness. Beginning with the synoptic accounts of that event, the chapter then turns to how Jesus' testing has been reinterpreted and presented in two of the novels. Returning to the Gospel of Matthew's version of the Temptation, chapter 7 offers a "preposterous" examination of that pericope, which asks novel questions of the text and its role with Matthew's narrative context based on issues raised by the Gospel rewrites. The thesis concludes by suggesting that Jesus novels, already important examples of the reception history of the Gospels, can also play a helpful role in re-interpreting the Gospels themselves.

Abstract The present thesis investigated children farmworkers' perspectives on having a job and balancing work and school. It also investigated parents' perspectives about their children's jobs and how they handle work and school. A qualitative approach has been used to investigate children farmworkers' experiences on how they handle work and school. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews with three children farmworkers between the ages of 12 and 17 years old and two adults that were parents of the children farmworkers residing in a rural area in the United States. Due to the current pandemic COVID-19, the research was carried out online through the Zoom platform. A thematic method was used to analyze the data collected. Through a critical analysis of transcripts, key concepts were obtained, decomposed into themes, and then organized into two sections for each theme. The themes were labeled: "Importance of the job," "Economic independence," "Impact on the future," "Job satisfaction," and "Compatible with school." The sections for each theme were labeled children's perspectives and parents' perspectives. There is a misconception that children work only in developing countries. Contrary to what has often been assumed, children work worldwide in developing countries and developed countries like the United States and Sweden. Results of this research showed that these children farmworkers want to work because they want to become personally and economically autonomous. Children and childhood are part of the consumer culture society. The study also found that the jobs of these children farmworkers did not affect their schooling and education. A call is made to consider children’s work as an expression of their agency and refrain from perceiving children as vulnerable beings in need of protection but instead, consider their perspective. Further research is needed in an ethnographic field with a more significant sample, including the teachers’ standpoint.