As iron sharpens iron,
one person sharpens another. (Proverbs 27:17)
I’d had this book on my wishlist for a while; it seemed like the prosperity gospel was as popular as it was egregiously wrong—and it was increasing in both respects. It seemed so impossible to take it all seriously; I was hoping someone could help me understand its origins and teachings.
“The John Richard Allison Library in Vancouver … has now made available their entire rare Puritan collection to be read online for free. What a gift of modern technology to help us recover these gifts from the church of the past.
Reprinted with permission from As I See It, which is available free by writing to the editor at dkutilek@juno.com.
“I think his inability/refusal to read good solid Christian books is a symptom of a much greater problem. And it’s why I’m immediately concerned for someone who, in an uber-spiritual tone, tells me they only read the Bible.” Bible-Only Man
“This idea is that we can achieve a perfect world through the government. While this idea has had many names—liberalism, progressivism, collectivism, communitarianism, socialism—Cleveland argues the real name for each of these movements is utopianism.”
“Neither of these ideas is connected with any religious notion, much less any orthodox version of Christianity, in which pride is the sin of preferring a self-chosen world to a God-made world and where sin itself consists in rebellion against and alienation from God.” AC
Philip Wesley Comfort is well known to students of the text of the New Testament. He has produced some informative works on the subject such as Early Manuscripts and Modern Translations of the New Testament, and Encountering the Manuscripts. Both productions, as well as the one under review, are marked with a clarity of style which makes them accessible to interested readers. He has produced, with David P. Barrett, The Text of the Earliest New Testament Greek Manuscripts, of which the present book is the companion. Along with these efforts Comfort has edited several helpful books, of which the The Origin of the Bible is perhaps the most noteworthy.
This commentary is divided into three main parts. After an introduction and a listing of the earliest Greek mss. lying behind each verse in the NT, what I will call Part One deals with a brief survey of the manuscript tradition. Unsurprisingly, the author favors the Alexandrian tradition as found in the papyri; with special exemplar status given to P75 through Codex B (Vaticanus) (24-26).
One of my favorite evangelical jokes showed up in a Christianity Today a number of years ago. It was an ad for a (fake) new book called The Collected Blurbs of J. I. Packer. The joke, if you don’t already get it, is funny on two counts: Packer is always blurbing books, and he’s always having his occasional works collected by editors.
Discussion