TELLING THE GOSPEL
70 stories about Jesus to read out loud
By Bob Hartman. Monarch Books. 239 pages. £10.99
ISBN 978-1-85424-961-6
Looking through this book for a first impression, it is overwhelming seeing the amount of material. Secondly, I was beginning to think that this material is really most suited to the author himself, or at least someone as double-jointed and fast on his feet as him.
Then I got down to reading the material, stories about Jesus to read out loud. I so agreed with what Mr. Hartman says that we need the whole picture. The gospel is part of the whole Bible. So far so good.
First chapter. A run through the Old Testament at a gallop. This is where I started to be concerned, as after it is written that when Adam and Eve had sinned they ran from the Lord and hid: ‘So God came up with a plan — a plan for his hands — to make things like they were, and maybe even better, so that once again all would be good.’
Surely God knew what he was going to do and he was not at all surprised at what had happened.
After the Old Testament was finished, ‘God went quiet, very quiet, for 400 years. It takes time to make a plan — a good plan, that is — and this one was a doozie!’
Again I would say, this is not correct, God knew all along what he was going to do. It is surely not correct to represent the Maker of heaven and earth as someone caught off guard by human behaviour.
The story. ‘The most important thing? Luke 2. Introduction. Just a question. Just an observation. Just a little Chrismas story.’ Two-and-a-half pages of nonsense, no mention of the Redeemer in any way, nine lines of kind of hinting at a special baby.
‘The Tempter’s Tale’, The Lord Jesus being tempted in the wilderness. A whole story is spun here, which in no way makes it more easily understood than what is in the Bible. Again, the Bible is used as a docudrama. People inventing their own story.
And so it goes on. There are too many places where the text is different from anything it says in the Bible. I think we should not invent things which the Lord may have said or thought. There is a lot of invention and I think it is so very wrong to do that. The Bible is God’s Word, not ours to play fast and loose with.
