GOSPEL TRUTH:
Answering New Atheist Attacks on The Gospels
By Paul Barnett
IVP. 220 pages. £9.99
ISBN 978 1 844 745 944
In this comprehensive and brilliantly argued book, Barnett takes the new atheists head on.
He recognises that their strategy is to destroy the credibility of the Gospels, so he destroys their arguments instead. The great thing about the book is that it doesn’t brush hard issues under the carpet. He accepts, for example, that Luke may have got the dates wrong when he mentions Theudas’s insurrection in Acts 5, but then he shows in detail how that was because the source he was using contained an error.
Robust thinking
It’s precisely this willingness to look at the facts so robustly that, far from weakening his arguments, actually shows the weakness of the new atheists’ arguments. It’s new atheism that has ‘unreasonable expectations’ of the text and lacks ‘sympathetic understanding of the limitations’ of certain texts that it uses to make wholesale conclusions about inaccuracy. What this book does is counter the blanket and unfounded polemic coming from the new atheists with reasoned research from the historical texts. All aspects of evidence are studied, including hostile witnesses to Jesus, archaeology, miracles, resurrection, transmission and other gospels. By laying down the evidence alongside the new atheists’ claims, this book is a go-to resource when people say ‘what about x’. For that gift I’m very grateful.
