The Many Gospels of Jesus

In recent years, unless you have been under a rock somewhere, you will have heard the claim, peddled by the Da Vinci Code and such like, that there are many gospels, and that our four Gospels were selected from a huge list of alternatives. How are we as Christians to respond to these claims?

It is in order to help the average Christian reader to sort out this issue that Philip W. Comfort and Jason Driesbach have produced The Many Gospels of Jesus (Tyndale, 2008). In this one volume we have twenty-one different ancient writings that could be called 'gospels' in some sense. By far the longest of these are the four canonical Gospels. The other writings are some of the other contenders. This allows the reader to compare the different writings, and as we do, something immediately becomes apparent - the vast difference between the Canonical Gospels and the other claimants, and the broad similarity between the four canonical Gospels, even between the Synoptic Gospels and the Gospel of John. What is more, the 'lost gospels' all disagree one with another in what they teach. They present a Jesus who is radically different from the Jesus of the canonical Gospels, and a religion that is based on esoteric knowledge and a bizarre metaphysic, quite different from the religion of the Canonical Gospels. This book will be extremely useful for Christians who want to know more about the so-called 'Lost Gospels'. Its value is further enhanced by the essays that introduce the volume, dealing with questions such as 'What is a Gospel?', and 'What is Gnosticism'.

What are the pitfalls of this book? Principally that the Gospel text is given in the New Living Translation, which is a version I am not terribly keen on. Other than that, this is an excellent resource, collecting as it does such important documents in one volume. It has a good cover and is well-presented as well, which is always a bonus.

The Many Gospels of Jesus is available from Christian bookshops.

The Big Book of Textual Variants

Unless you are a rabid King James Only advocate, you will know about the existence of textual variants in the New Testament text. But how do we find out what those variants are, and what they mean? Why does the NIV read differently from the ESV in places? Why do both differ from the Authorised Version? What do you do when someone approaches you and asks about the variants? What about Bart Ehrman's contention that the variants represent radically different theologies?

Philip Comfort's book New Testament Text and Translation Commentary is just what you need in cases like this. I call it 'The Big Book of Textual Variants', as it's a good description of the book. This 900+ -page volume is certainly big, and it's all about textual variants. Comfort goes carefully through the New Testament text, listing the significant variants, which printedGreek Text includes them in the main text, the manucripts that contain them, and which English translation (if any) has each variant. There then follows an explanation of the variant, and the reason why it may or may not be the original text. There are, of course, some variants which no English version contains, and which is found in the main text of no printed Greek text. While the previous standard book in the field, Bruce Metzger's Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, only contained those passages that were included in the apparatus of the UBS 4th edition, this book has all of them. This book does not require a knowledge of Greek, although of course that would help!

This is an important book, written by a good conservative scholar, which ought to reassure Christians that we ought not to be afraid of the textual variants! Invaluable for pastors, seminary students and apologists.

[Readers will understand that I am unable to supply books reviewed. I got this one from the EMW bookshop in Cardiff, and suggest readers do the same.]

The PTS Bookshop in London

In Many Bookshops with Mr. Charmley continues with the Protestant Truth Society's bookshop on Fleet Street in central London. Once the centre of London's newspaper world, Fleet Street is now mostly just another shopping street. I would say that the glory had departed, but calling newspapers glorious might be stretching things a little too far.


The Protestant Truth Society bookshop is, as the name suggests, Protestant. This part of the name means that no ecumenical or Romanist books are found here. Secondly, the word Truth should indicate that no false books are found on the shelves. Sadly, a few years ago I caught them stocking books by Gail Riplinger, a notorious and hysterical King James Only advocate who is not above using any and every for of smear tactic, and telling vast and bizarre lies about anyone she disagrees with. A strongly-worded e-mail followed. This aside, the PTS bookshop is predominantly Reformed in character, and the books stocked are, with the exception of some bizarre KJV-Only stuff, useful and helpful. A lot of Banner of Truth books can be found here, as can books that are quite difficult to find elsewhere in England. The range of stock is broader than the Tabernacle Bookshop, not tht this is difficult. Staff will order in books in the fairly unlikely event that what you want isn't in stock (assuming you are of a Reformed persuasion). Highly recommended.


Future In Many Bookshops posts will follow as and when I visit more bookshops. These will, God willing, include the Heath Bookshop in Cardiff, the EMW Bookshop in Swansea, and Shepherd's Christian Bookshop in Newport.

Harvest Books and Crafts, Pontypridd

Continuing In Many Bookshops with Mr. Charmley, we come to Harvest Books and Crafts, Pontypridd. This little bookshop is located in the centre of the town of Pontypridd in South Wales. As the name suggests, it sells book and crafts.

The character of this shop is best decribed as 'broadly Evangelical'. Anyone who knows anything about the Evangelical movement today will have some idea what that means: it means that The Shack will be found alongside books by R. C. Sproul and Geoff Thomas. This is only to be expected, really, seeing as The Shack has been promoted by 'Evangelical' personalities whatever that means these days), and therefore a lot of books stock it on the mistaken assumption that it muct be all right. The stock is very small, understandably, as the shop is fairly tiny, and of course has to contain the crafts as well as the books. I could have wished that the stock had been selected with more discernment, as is the case in other craft/bookshops, such as that in Droitwich. Nevertheless, an effort has been made to have a good range of books, including good Biblical commentaries. The shop will order in books on demand from customers. I found the staff helpful and friendly, and as this is the only Christian bookshop for some miles, it deserves to be made use of. And of course, a shop's stock is decided in part by demand. If people want certain books, they will be stocked. On the other hand, books that are not bought will eventually not be stocked. I will probably go back there next time I go to Pontypridd. Whenever that is.


Next: Back to London.

'The Word Became Fresh'

It seems that the historical books of the Old Testament seem to intimidate preachers. I have heard quite a number of older preachers speak from these books, but fewer young men. Perhaps one of the reasons some find the Old Testament difficult to preach is that Dispensationalism has made them confused about how to interpret the Old Testament. Also there has been a lot of bad preaching from the Old Testament, namely the rampant and uncontrolled allegorization of narratives. Younger preachers, aware that this allegorical approach is wrong, are left unsure of what to do with these stories. And yet I am assured that this is not a new problem. Even in the past, the majority of sermons were not preached from the narrative portions of the Old Testament. An examination of a volume of sermons from my library, published in 1898, Welshmen in English Pulpits, reveals that, out of 30 sermons in the book, thirteen are from the Old Testament, seven of these from predominantly narrative books, namely Genesis (1), Exodus (1), 2 Samuel (1), 2 Kings (2), 1 Chronicles (1), and 2 Chronicles (1). An eighth, from Deuteronomy 2.3 is essentially narrative as well. Supposing that these sermons are representative of Congregationalist preaching from the late 19th century, we find that 26.7% of the sermons are from Old Testament narrative passages. The actual treatment of the text is not considered here, of course - some of them could be allegorized or taken out of context, though I hope not!

Because of this perennial issue, The Word Became Fresh is an extremely welcome addition to homiletic literature. This is a book written by a man who knows what he's writing about, which is always a good start with a book. Dale Ralph Davis is probably well-known to readers as the author of a number of excellent commentaries on historical books of the Old Testament, something that makes him eminently qualified to write on this subject. Davis does not offer a 'magic bullet' that will make preaching from Old Testament narrative texts a doddle, but a well-written book in which he lays out some commonsense suggestions for understanding and preaching narrative texts. Chapter one deals with the approach to the text. Happily, he opens with the need for the help of the Holy Spirit in opening the Bible. Only then does he go on to the technical elements of the approach to the text. Chapter two is entitled 'quirks', and deals with the peculiarities of narrative. Chapter three is on theology, referring to the theology of the text. Chapter four, 'Packaging', deals with the structure of the text. Chapter five deals with 'Nasties', particular texts that are difficult for us to preach from for various reasons - difficult because they're off-putting for some reason or other. Chapter six is called 'Macroscope', and is about interpreting the passage in light of the whole book in which it is found. Having done all that, we come to chapter seven, in which Davis deals with the question of application, something that is quite important in a narrative text - we can retell the story, but what does it mean? Chapter 8 is 'Center' (sic. Davis is American), in which he points out that we need to have a theocentric focus. Here there is a disagreement. I, with others, prefer to say that it ought to be Christocentric. Not in a shallow, allegorizing way, but in that we approach the texts as Christians, in the light of the New Testament, not as Jews. That is to say, as a Christian, I have to read the whole Bible in the light of the fulness of God's revelation in Christ. But then, perhaps Davis and myself are using the term 'Christocentric' in two slightly different ways. Finally he gives us a worked example in the final chapter. This is a book that every preacher ought to read, and perhaps it will help to make sermons from the narrative books of the Old Testament less of a rarity than they have become of late.

'Conspiracies and the Cross'

We all remember the Da Vinci Code book and movie, and as we look back to 2004, we wonder just how it was that the book and the film created so much hype in the first place. But the fact of the matter is that the book was only part of a whole series of attacks on the nature and authority of the Bible, and the facts of Christ's life. Many excellent books answering the Da Vinci Code were released at the time that the film came out, but now that the Da Vinci Code is a distant memory in the remainder bin of life, that research needs to be put in a more permanent form. Thus Peter Jones' Stolen Identity, and the excellent Reinventing Jesus by Komoszewski, Sawyer and Wallace, were born. Now Timothy Paul Jones, author of Misquoting Truth, the response to Bart Ehrman, has given another book of this type, Conspiracies and the Cross.

This is popular-level apologetics at its best, serious research underpins eveything that Jones says. Not only has he obviously worked hard to understand the ten 'conspiracies' that he deals with in this book, but he has read widely to refute them. The book is structured around these ten 'Conspiracies', widely-popular theories that attack the Gospel. Each chapter begins by simply laying out the 'conspiracy', then giving a list of those who say so. The rest of the chapter interracts with these sources, finally refuting the 'conspiracy'. Jones' prose is lively and often humorous, though without ever becoming crude or insulting. There is a ten-page bibliography, and twenty-nine pages of endnotes that display the scholarship that underlies the answer. This is not a simplistic book, and Dr. Jones is plainly very much aware of contemporary scholarship. He refuses to buy into easy answers or dubious interpretations of facts, rather exposing the reader to the facts as they are. The book will probably be most useful in a more intellectual setting, such as a university, where the Christian faith is under intellectual attack. It contains a study guide for use in small groups, which will again be of most use in a more intellectual environment, such as a Christian Union at university.

I liked this book, and I think that the books that are now trying to put the research that was done to debunk Dan Brown (vastly more than was ever done by Dan Brown) into more permanent form are a great contribution to the corpus of apologetics.

'The Historical Reliability of the Gospels'

As the son of an historian, and a man interested in history myself, I find the question of the historical reliability of the Scriptures, and especially the Gospels, to be of great interest. We have all heard people telling us that the Gospels are not history, but legend, written up later (well, I have, but then I come from a liberal Anglican background). How do we respond to this?

Craig Blomberg's book The Historical Reliability of the Gospels has been a standard work on this subject for two decades. While it has been of great usefulness, these two decades have seen new challenges to the historicity of the Gospels, or rather, new forms of the old challenges. A great deal of material has been written on both sides of the debate. In 2007 a new, completely revised and updated, edition of Blomberg's book appeared, now with references to Bart Ehrman and to the Jesus Seminar, as well as other developments in this field. The book is quite welcome, as it brings togther in a useful single volume a huge amount of important research. For the reader who knows that there are answers to the challenges of the sceptics, but does not know what they are, this book will be extremely helpful. It is my favourite book on the subject - not that the opinion of an assistant pastor in South Wales should count for very much, of course!

Blomberg considers the question of historical methodology, the history of the question, and such questions as miracles, differences between parralell accounts of the same events, and apparent contradictions. This is a very thoughtful book, and at 416 pages, inluding indices and a fifty-six page bibliography, certainly weighty! It is published by IVP Academic in the US and Apollos in the UK.