Binding: Hardback
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Nelson
ISBN#:
9780785212942
Availability
: Usually Ships the Same Business Day
Description: The wild success of Dan Brown's
The Da Vinci Code
has spawned a thriving cottage industry of both supporters and critics. One of
Brown's more controversial assertions is that the emergence of Christian
orthodoxy was based not on its merit but on the politics of the winning side.
Here, Bock sums up the evangelical perspective as he challenges the idea that
orthodoxy "emerged" at all. Rather, he argues, it survived its many challenges
in the early centuries of the Christian church because it best reflected the
thoughts and teachings of Jesus and the apostles. The author, who teaches New
Testament at Dallas Theological Seminary, considers the idea that Christianity
needs to be "reimagined"—reformed in the image of recent archeological and
literary discoveries—to be an ill-advised attempt to rewrite history. He takes
on those scholars who want to reinterpret Christianity in light of early Gnostic
teachings that denied the oneness of the Father and the Son and spiritualized
the gospel stories into myths. Bock recognizes this is pretty sophisticated
stuff, and offers the reader a helpful chapter outlining times, names and ideas,
providing a useful framework for the rest of his book. While not conclusively
proving his thesis, Bock does provide a lively and readable survey of competing
beliefs in Christianity's earliest days.
(Aug. 8)
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Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights
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Book Description
What others are saying about
The Missing Gospels
"Darrell Bock has written a timely and valuable study for anyone curious
about the question of lost or missing gospels. The Missing Gospels is a
breath of sanity!"
-Philip Jenkins, Professor of History and
Religious Studies, Penn State
"Those who don't want their prejudices disturbed will want to avoid this
book. Those with an open mind and readiness to learn from scholarship . . . read
with profit."
-Larry Hurtado, Professor of New Testament
Language, Literature, and Theology, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
"Darrell Bock patiently, and accessibly, sifts through all the relevant
issues and offers much-needed guidance to those who want to discern fact from
fiction. If you read only one book on this issue, this is
it!"
-Andreas J. Kostenberger, PhD, Professor of New
Testament and Greek, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary
"The Missing Gospels is a unique resource for those who wish to
respond to the 'new school' with accuracy and confidence."
-Frederica
Mathewes-Green, National Public Radio's
Morning Edition
Commentator
"A necessary book that corrects many still fashionable but even more
questionable hypotheses about the origin of the Gospels, the Nag Hammadi texts,
and the development of Christian theology in the first two centuries
AD."
-Prof. Dr. Martin Hengel, Professor Emeritus of New
Testament and Ancient Judaism, University of Tubingen, Germany
