Vacation Reading

Back from vacation. In addition to swimming and twisting my ankle playing freeze tag in the surf with my kids, there was plenty of time for reading last week.

Theological works:

• Edward F. Hills, The King James Version Defended (Christian Research Press [original 1956] 2000).

Hills offers a classic defense of the Textus Receptus (the Greek basis for the KJV translation) as the authoritative ecclesiastical text providentially preserved by God.

• Maurice A. Robinson and William G. Pierpont, compilers, The New Testament in the Original Greek, Byzantine Textform 2005 (Chilton, 2005).

I read the Greek text last Spring and finally got around to reading the Appendix, Robinson’s article, "A Case for Byzantine Priority" (pp. 533-86). Robinson argues for the Byzantine text, over against the modern eclectic reconstruction of the Greek text.

• John MacArthur, Because the Time is Near (Moody, 2007).

The subtitle is "John MacArthur Explains the Book of Revelation." This work is intended for a popular audience. It presents MacArthur’s pre-tribulational, pre-millennial, dispensational reading of Revelation. For me it solidified how the dispensational approach super-imposes an end times scheme on the text that does not emerge on its own. I plan to write a longer review later.

Children’s historical works:

• Bruce Blivens, Jr., The American Revolution (Random House, 1958).

Wonderful overview of the American Revolution in the classic Landmark series.

• Hazel Wilson, The Story of Lafayette (Grosset & Dunlap, 1952).

Solid overview of the life of the French patriot in the Signature series.

• Edith Gray Pierce, Horace Mann: Our Nation’s First Educator (Lerner, 1972).

Interesting 1970s propaganda on the virtues of the Unitarian Mann and how he escaped the evangelical preaching of his youth to champion public schools free from religious entanglements. I did not realize that Mann had been the founding president of ultra-liberal Antioch College, which folded this year.

JTR