Dr. Scott's scholarship has always been centered on questions concerning hermeneutics and the historical Jesus. A charter member of the Jesus Seminar, his course offerings in recent years have included New Testament Greek, Introduction to the New Testament, Romans, The Historical Jesus, Theological Issues in Film, and the PTS Borderlinks study tour.
He has written or co-written nine books, including the widely read Hear Then the Parables (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 1989), Re-Imagining the World: An Introduction to the Parables of Jesus (Santa Rosa: Polebridge Press, 2001), Hollywood Dreams and Biblical Stories (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1994), and Reading New Testament Greek (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1993), co-authored with his former PTS students Margaret Dean, Kristen Sparks, and Francis LaZar. Among his current projects is a study of sound mapping, focusing on sound as the communication environment of the ancient world.
A United Church of Christ layman with a Catholic background, Dr. Scott is a member of the American Academy of Religion, Catholic Biblical Society, Societas Novi Testamenti Studiorum, and Society of Biblical Literature, for which he serves as co-chair of its Bible in Ancient and Modern Media section. He joined the PTS faculty in 1988.