By showing how you can preach the gospel to yourself each day, this book will help you savor the glories of God's love and experience the life-transforming power of the gospel in all areas of life.

This textbook on how to read the Gospels well can stand on its own as a guide to reading this New Testament genre as Scripture. It is also ideally suited to serve as a supplemental text to more conventional textbooks that discuss each Gospel systematically. Most textbooks tend to introduce students to historical-critical concerns but may be less adequate for showing how the Gospel narratives, read as Scripture within the canonical framework of the entire New Testament and the whole Bible, yield material for theological reflection and moral edification. Pennington neither dismisses nor duplicates the results of current historical-critical work on the Gospels as historical sources. Rather, he offers critically aware and hermeneutically intelligent instruction in reading the Gospels in order to hear their witness to Christ in a way that supports Christian application and proclamation.

By the late second century, early Christian gospels had been divided into two groups by a canonical boundary that assigned normative status to four of them while consigning their competitors to the margins. Connecting Gospels: Beyond the Canonical/Non-canonical Divide finds new ways to reconnect these divided texts. Starting from the assumption that, in spite of their differences, all early gospels express a common belief in the absolute significance of Jesus and his earthly career, this authoritative collection makes their interconnectedness fruitful for interpretation. The contributors have each selected a theme or topic and trace it across two or more gospels on either side of the canonical boundary, and the resulting convergences and divergences shed light not least on the canonical texts themselves as they are read from new and unfamiliar vantage points. This volume demonstrates that early gospel literature can be regarded as a single field of study, in contrast to the overwhelming predominance of the canonical four characteristic of traditional gospels scholarship.

How can we connect the Gospels--the fundamental texts of Christian faith--to our own experience of inner and outer life? This is the question that animates Connecting to the Gospel. In it James Boyd White presents a series of Gospel passages, together with the sermons he gave on these passages as a lay preacher in the Episcopal Church, with brief commentaries and questions on each as well. The whole is designed as an aid to thought and reflection about the issues raised by the Gospel passages, as they relate both to our own larger culture and to our internal religious experiences. The texts are old texts, from the past. What relation do they have, can they have, with life in the twenty-first century? One aim of the book is to establish a set of questions, both about the Gospels and about our own lives, which the reader is invited to pursue on his or her own. It can be used both by individuals and groups engaged in study and exploration.

"I bring you good tidings of great joy which will be to all people" (Luke 2:10). The word gospel means good news--and who couldnt use some good news these days? The first four books of the New Testament, called the Gospels, contain the very best news ever heard: the message of how you can have eternal life. Features: Introduction by Ray Comfort Why Christianity? Common Questions About the Christian Faith Principles for Growth Understanding the Biblical Gospel With commentary adapted from The Evidence Study Bible (a finalist for the Gold Medallion Book Award), this pocket-sized edition is designed to carry in your pocket or purse to give to an unsaved person. In addition to the eyewitness accounts of the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth--the greatest Person who ever lived--skeptics can find answers to commonly asked questions such as: How do you know God exists? Who made God? Why do bad things happen? How do you know the Bible is true? How could a loving God create Hell, and more. With a thorough gospel presentation and suggestions for Christian growth, this publication will help readers to understand why the gospel is indeed the very best news ever and how to grow in their new faith.

A robust scholarly defense of the distinctiveness of the canonical Gospels. Do the four New Testament gospels share some essence that distinguishes them from noncanonical early Gospels? The tendency among biblical scholars of late has been to declare the answer to this question no—that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were grouped together by happenstance and are defended as canonical today despite there being no essential commonalities between them. Simon Gathercole challenges this prevailing view and argues that in fact the theological content of the New Testament Gospels distinguishes them substantially from noncanonical Gospels. Gathercole shows how the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John each include four key points that also formed the core of early Christian preaching and teaching: Jesus’s identity as messiah, the saving death of Jesus, the resurrection of Jesus, and Scripture’s foretelling of the Christ event. In contrast, most noncanonical Gospels—like the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Truth, and Marcion’s Gospel—only selectively appropriated these central concerns of early Christian proclamation.

A new translation of the oldest non-canonical Christian gospels In the early years of Christianity, several groups produced 'hidden' or 'apocryphal' gospels, alternative versions of the story of Christ. Sometimes these texts complemented the four canonical gospels of the New Testament, sometimes they subverted them and often they were completely different. Here, in the widest selection of non-canonical gospels gathered in one volume - which also includes two modern forgeries - we see the young Jesus making live birds from clay, hear his secret words of wisdom, discover gnostic cosmologies and witness the Harrowing of Hell. Preserved by their readers and attacked by their detractors, these gospels shine a fascinating light on the early Christian Church. Translated with an Introduction by Simon Gathercole