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The Gospel vs. Myths and Fiction Unlike myths, the gospel is based on historical facts. It is not “Jesus and the Seven Dwarves.” Its events are attested, chronicled, archived, preserved. They are not fiction, and neither are they a parable that uses fiction to convey moral lessons or wishful thinking. The gospel is not real because it’s intellectually satisfying or because it provides emotional consolation. It is not real because it’s a cherished family tradition. It is not real b …

The first Christians didn’t learn their faith from the Bible because none of the books of the New Testament had been written yet. This is evident in Paul thanking the Corinthians for “maintain[ing] the traditions even as I have delivered them to you” (1 Cor. 11:2), and instructing his disciple Timothy,“what you have heard from me before many witnesses entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also” (2 Tim. 2:2).Paul thanked the Thessalonians for accepting his preaching, not …

One modern distortion stands out in our approach to revelation: our preference for the written word over (and even to the exclusion of) the spoken word. Another modern distortion is that we think of books as private rather than public. As Mary Mills explains in her commentary on Ecclesiastes, “in the modern world much reading is a private matter in which, through the possession of literacy skills, one individual engages with a text in a direct and personal manner.” The combined effect of those …