The Wrong Jesus for the Right Young Graduate

Greg Monette, a young scholar with Logos Bible Software and the Navigators, has written the perfect book for curious minds to sort out fact from fiction regarding who was and is Jesus.

The Internet. YouTube. Your NewAge neighbor. The History Channel. Morgan Freeman’s The Story of God. Youth pastors. Skeptical friends. Parents. College professors…. Our world is simply bombarded with an untold number of conflicting voices, all telling us who Jesus really was. How do you figure out who the right Jesus is from the wrong Jesus?

If you know of a Christian young person graduating high school or college, you should know that they will be facing challenges to their Christian faith in college, the secular workplace, or just with their iPhone, scrolling through the Internet. Would not the best gift to such a person be something that will help to prepare them to better understand and defend their faith?

I recently picked up a copy of Greg Monette’s The Wrong Jesus: Fact, Belief, Legend, Truth . . . Making Sense of What You’ve Heard. Monette helps the reader to navigate many of the challenges to what the Bible teaches about Jesus, including questions about His existence, His divinity, and His message to a skeptical world.

In past years, I have recommended Truth Matters: Confident Faith in a Confusing World, by Andreas Köstenberger, Darrell Bock, Josh Chatraw. This is another excellent book along the same line (Hey, if Veracity co-blogger, John Paine, had dinner with co-author Andreas Köstenberger, it has to be good, right?). In Truth Matters, the authors focus on the popular writings of former evangelical scholar turned skeptic, Bart Ehrman. However, Monette’s book is broader in focus, looking also at archaeological issues, the miracles of Jesus, and how Jesus treated women.

Monette brilliantly defends the faith, but he is also refreshingly candid. The Bible is historically reliable, but the truth of Christianity is not dependent on our ability to figure out every detailed Bible discrepancy and fitting it in with some simplistic view of inerrancy.¹ What ultimately matters is that if Jesus really is resurrected from the dead, then this changes everything.

A healthy perspective. A highly recommended book.

Notes:

^{1. I have written about this topic before, but I feel like this point needs to be repeatedly stressed.↩}