Having listened to this morning's sermon 'Is the Bible Reliable?' you may be interested in looking a little deeper into the questions that were raised. The following books should help:
1. Ronald H. Nash: 'The Gospel and the Greeks' (Presbyterian and Reformed, 2003). Nash deals in great detail with the allegation that the New Testament is full of borrowing from pagan mythology.
2. Paul Eddy and Gregory Boyd: 'The Jesus Legend' (Baker Academic, 2007). This is a more recent argument against the mythological theory of Christian origins. Boyd has gone into some very bad theology elsewhere, but this book is excellent.
3. Gerald Bray: 'Creeds, Council and Christ' (Mentor, 2009). Bray argues against the idea that Church Fathers corrupted the real Jesus into a mythical figure.
4. Geoffrey Grogan: 'The Christ of the Bible and the Church's Faith' (Mentor, 1998). Similar to Bray, but arguing that the Biblical Jesus is also the Jesus of the creeds.
5. Darrell L. Bock and Daniel B. Wallace: 'Dethroning Jesus' (Thomas Nelson, 2007). A fun book engaging with the Da Vinci Code and related nonsense.
6. Richard Bauckham: 'Jesus and the Eyewitnesses' (Eerdmans, 2006). A serious, scholarly book full of good work, Bauckham argues that the Gospels represent eyewitness testimony.
7. Timothy Paul Jones: 'Conspiracies and the Cross' (Front Line, 2008). This book deals with a range of issues, including textual variation.
8. J.P. Holding (ed.): 'Shattering the Christ Myth' (Xulon, 2008). A collection of essays and articles engaging with the idea that Jesus did not exist but is a mythological figure.
9. Craig A. Evans: 'Fabricating Jesus' (IVP, 2007). Addresses the reasons why distortions of Jesus are so common and popular in modern circles.
10. Craig L. Blomberg: 'The Historical Reliability of the Gospels' (Second Edition, IVP Academic/Apollos, 2007). Addresses the question that it refers to on the title page.
11. James R. White: 'Scripture Alone' (Bethany House, 2004). James White is always a good read. This book addresses many contemporary challenges to the Bible.
12. Daniel B. Wallace (ed.): 'Revisiting the Corruption of the New Testament' (Kregel, 2011). A collection of articles that engage in particular with Bart Ehrman.
13. Peter Jones: 'Stolen Identity' (Victor, 2006). While I did not engage the arguments about the Gnostic gospels, they are out there. This book is one of a number that have been written to explain what these documents really are.
14. Darrell Bock: 'The Missing Gospels' (Thomas Nelson, 2006). Another volume on the Gnostic gospels by a noted scholar.
15. Michael Green: 'The Books the Church Suppressed' (Monarch, 2005). One of the few books produced to counter the Da Vinci Code that is liable to have much of a lifespan, this is an excellent work on the Canon of Scripture.
16. Andreas J. KOstenberger and Michael J. Kruger: 'The Heresy of Orthodoxy' (Apollos, 2010). An excellent book engaging with Bart Ehrman at length.
I make no apologies for putting up this sort of list: Christians need to know that there are answers out there. The listed resources represent only a small sample of the books that are available.
For Egyptian mythology, the two works I would commend to the ordinary reader are:
1. Dimitri Meeks and Christine Favard-Meeks: 'Daily Life of the Egyptian gods' (Pimlico, 1999). Translated from the French, this is an amazing piece of work, both scholarly and accessible, that addresses the ancient Egyptian idea of the divine. It presents quite a contrast to the Biblical view.
2.Richard H. Wilkinson: 'The Complete gods and goddesses of Ancient Egypt' (Thames and Hudson, 2003). A positive encyclopaedia of Egyptian deities, this is a perfect source to refute the claims that Egyptian myths formed the basis for the Jesus of the Gospels.
There are of course many others |
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