The Fourth Gospel
Tales of a Jewish Mystic

Spong has never warmed to the historicity of the Fourth Gospel. In fact, he never warmed to that gospel much at all, until the last few years, when he decide to make a study of it. I’m glad he finally did; I thoroughly enjoyed reading Spong’s analysis. He begins his book by admitting that the older h......more

Except for when I am traveling by air, I read few books these days, but a few weeks ago I received The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic by John Shelby Spong. It was intended for my bedside table along side half-a-dozen other volumes awaiting my attention. I decided, however, to read the Prefa......more

A summer Zoom Bible Study was the occasion for my reading Bishop Spong’s book on the Gospel of John. In general my approach to the study of the Christian Gospels is to prefer the Gospels which were written earlier in time, because they may be more likely to portray the historical Jesus. My bias is t......more

After reading this book, my opinion of it hovered between three and four stars. But one should never read a book such as this without immediately checking its assertions against the scripture it is discussing. After rereading John's gospel, I couldn't help but enthusiastically rate this book as a fi......more

Hoo-boy! I had never read anything by Spong before so I thought I'd try this one, which I purchased along side of Ehrman's book, Did Jesus exist?. I seem to have the same problem with John that he did. Spong avoided this gospel and attacked any antisemitism or other weirdness he thought was caused by......more