Saturday, May 16, 2009

New book(let): Can we trust what the Gospels say about Jesus?

Christians place great weight on the stories about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. There are four accounts of his life that are universally accepted by the church across the ages, named after the four figures traditionally considered to be the authors: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. These are known as the Gospels, since they present the "good news" (gospel) about Jesus.

However, a spate of recent popular documentaries and publications have thrown up all kinds of questions about these writings and others like them which are much less well known. For many people, the appearance of contradictory viewpoints is enough to provide an excuse to avoid the whole deal, since what can we really know anyway? Can we trust what the gospels say about Jesus?

Andrew Errington thinks that we can. He has written a very useful little introduction to the historical issues around the Gospels. At 32 pages long, it is very readable for the non-expert and yet avoids gross oversimplification. You can order it here.

3 comments:

andrewE said...

Hi Byron,

Thanks very much for the plug. I'm calling it a booklet though - I don't think it really qualifies as a book. (And it's a lot cheaper!)

ae

Unknown said...

Cool recommendation. Must order it some time.

By the way. Might be a good idea to remove that taiwanese spam from the comment before mine.

byron smith said...

Done. Unfortunately, a couple of months ago a spambot came through and published that comment on every single one of my posts in a matter of minutes. I am gradually removing them, but were about 1,000 posts affected.