Category Archives: Gospels

Man-Made Religion at Its Best: Review of a “New New Testament”: Part 3

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Note:  The previous posts in this series can be found here, here, and here.

This will be the last installment of my extended review of Hal Taussig’s A New New Testament (Houghton Mifflin, 2013) which attempts to create a new canon, with 10 “new” apocryphal books added to the traditional 27-book corpus.

In prior posts, I have examined the overall purpose of the project, the promotional language on the cover flap, and the apologetic offered in the introduction.  In this final post, I will make some observations about the last part of the book entitled, “A Companion to A New New Testament.”

The problems in this section …

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Ten Basic Facts about the NT Canon that Every Christian Should Memorize: #5: “The Four Gospels are Well Established by the End of the Second Century”

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Note: This is the fifth installment of a blog series announced here.

When it comes to basic facts about the NT canon that Christians should memorize, one of the most critical is the statement by Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, around A.D. 180: “It is not possible that the gospels can be either more or fewer than the number they are.  For, since there are four zones of the world in which we live and four principle winds… [and] the cherubim, too, were four-faced.”[1]

Here Irenaeus not only affirms the canonicity the four gospels, but is keen to point out that only these four gospels are recognized by the …

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A Further Response to Brice Jones

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P1 Matthew

In a prior post, I responded to Brice Jones’ original critique of my chapter in The Early Text of the New Testament.  He has taken a moment to respond on his website here.  I want to thank Brice for this interesting and stimulating interaction.  Certainly anyone should be thanked who is willing to read and interact with a $140 book!  I will offer just a few final reflections here.

I only want to address the following paragraph where Brice summarizes his complaint:

The main difficulty that I find with your essay is your move from a few select passages that do not refer to attitudes toward reproduction

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A New ‘New Testament’ is an Old, Old Idea

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My email inbox has been flooded over the last day or so with queries about the recent book by Hal Taussig called A New New Testament (Houghton Mifflin, 2013).  I have to admit, I love the title.  When it comes to sensationalistic claims about the New Testament canon, modern publishers know what sells.  This volume has bypassed the normal catchwords found in the titles of such books—words like “lost”, “forgotten”, “secret”, or “banned”—and has set a new standard for marketing apocryphal writings.

This volume also sets itself apart by the grandiosity of its claims.  Here is the promo for the book:

To create this New New Testament, Hal Taussig called together

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