This is a prize-winning book, including an award from Christianity Today, and I read it because of endorsements by Lee Strobel (in The Case for the Real Jesus) and N.T. Wright (“a remarkable piece of detective work”). The key theme — as the title suggests — is that the Gospels are based on eyewitness testimony. … [Read more…]
Introductory notes In this post I’ll address the objection to Pascal’s Wager that it somehow encourages people to weigh truth less heavily than they ought to. Is it not an invitation to reify the joke about the definition of faith being when you believe something even though you know it is not true? An initial … [Read more…]
Let’s start with the striking the cover art: It features photos of statues of Achilles and Christ, with remarkably similar (suffering, eyes heavenward) visages. And, again without yet opening the book, there’s a C.S. Lewis quote on the back cover which might have served as an epitaph: “The heart of Christianity is a myth which … [Read more…]
The author is an evangelical Protestant (53, 145) and a professor of humanities at Houston Baptist University. I recall listening to — and enjoying — a lecture series by him on C.S. Lewis, and the title of this book sounded important and its length (271 pages) reasonable. It was a good decision to get it … [Read more…]
Hugh Hewitt is a friend. I met him when we were both lawyers in the Reagan administration; since then he has continued to practice and teach law, but is better known as a political columnist and as a television and radio show host. He’s also written over a dozen books. And he’s a Christian. This … [Read more…]
If Jesus is the Son of God, it is significant, is it not, that He did not debunk the notion of Scripture generally or the Old Testament in particular? And the significance of Scripture is that it is Truth, and the most reliable guide there is to our relationship with God, apart from perhaps personal … [Read more…]
In order to understand the Bible, one needs to know something of the time and culture in which it was written, and so to understand the New Testament in particular, one needs to know something of the Hellenistic age. That’s why, after reading a favorable review of this book in the Wall Street Journal — … [Read more…]
The author, an Australian, is an Anglican bishop. I sought his book out because it was listed among the “[g]ood defenses of the historical reliability of the Gospels” for further reading by Richard Bauckham in Jesus: A Very Short Introduction, and I had been impressed by Bauckham (Barnett, in turn, has a brief citation of … [Read more…]
How unified is the Bible text? At one extreme, you could argue that, since the whole text is inspired by God and since He knew from the beginning what text He would inspire and how it would and should be arranged, then the whole Bible — including every book, Old and New Testament alike — … [Read more…]
This short (only 114 pages of text) book is part of a series on a wide variety of topics published by Oxford University Press. I sought it out because I was impressed by the author’s much longer Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (discussed elsewhere on this blogsite), which I found valuable but daunting in its length … [Read more…]