The Story of my Books #14 - The Gospel of the Lord

Book #14 was about how the Gospels got made: The Gospel of the Lord: How the Early Church Wrote the Story of Jesus (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014). I wrote this book because I taught courses on Jesus and the Gospels and there’s so much stuff you need to cover about the oral tradition underlying the Gospels, the Synoptic Problem (i.e., why are Matthew, Mark, and Luke so similar?), the Johannine Question (why is John so different?), and why four Gospels (why not just a Gospel harmony or add the Gospel of Thomas?). I didn’t want to spend too much time in class on those technical and somewhat academic topics. I’d rather walk students through Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

So I wrote this book as my answer to all those preliminary questions about the Gospels, so I could focus in class on studying the actual Gospels themselves.

I’m glad to say that this book won the 2015 Christianity Today book award for biblical studies. Plus, it has been very popular as a textbook in college and seminary courses about the Gospels. So it’s done very well. It’s a quiet achiever of a book.

You can read my interview with Eerdword about the book and the TGC review of it.

If you like Jesus and the Gospels, you’ll enjoy it!