Classic Christadelphian books for your edification
Nazareth Revisited
By Robert Roberts
What a valuable book Nazareth Revisited has been to the Brotherhood! This book is a masterpiece. It is at once exposition, exhortation, and commentary on the life and works of Jesus Christ.
Robert Roberts wrote the book, not because there weren’t any books on this subject; to the contrary, there were many lauded volumes including those by Edersheim, Farrar, Renan and others. But, as brother Roberts points out in the preface, these authors may present their version of Christ’s life and works with scholarly credentials, with piety, and with pretty language, but they paint a picture of Christ filtered through the distorted lens of orthodoxy. Their’s cannot be a true picture of Christ. “Christ is built into the whole structure of the Bible; and it is essential to a right interpretation of him that the purpose of God as revealed and embodied in that structure be understood”, says Robert Roberts in the preface. As he takes pains to show, he wanted to write a version that was based on that biblical structure through the simple presentation of the four gospel writers. He says that he “… endeavoured to fuse the four narratives of the New Testament into one harmonious story, embracing every particular and adjusting every apparent variation in the four evangelists. He sends forth the result with a degree of affectionate reverence for the subject that words cannot express, and with a desire unutterable that the public mind (starving on all kinds of intellectual inanity) might awake to the feast of fat things which God provided for the world [2000] years ago in the life and work of Christ; and for which he will shortly secure renewed attention in world-wide events that will cause every ear to tingle.”
In this he succeeded. And in so doing, he has left us a valuable and cherished Christadelphian Classic.
