Book Reviews: Extended Easter Reading

I briefly reviewed our main book giveaways this Easter in the last post. we've also had some alternatives available and I wanted to briefly review those in this post.

Your Verdict on the Empty Tomb

Your verdict on the Empty Tomb is a look at the evidence for the resurrection written by a lawyer. In fact, it's written by a lawyer who was a lay reader at the church I grew up in! The truth is there is always scope for this kind of book, because people want to know if the Easter story is true. The book lays out the different kinds of evidence for the empty tomb and how that evidence should be assessed ending with a challenge to the reader to come up with a verdict on that evidence.

I think this is one of the best giveaways for this kind of person for three reasons. The first is that it is relatively short (80 pages), which means you're not asking someone to commit a huge amount of time - they can always go into more detail later. Second, it is credible, in that it is written by someone who understands evidence and how to assess it. Third it is clear, i.e. it's easy to read and to follow the author's argument.

So I find having a book like this available really useful, especially around Easter.

Is Easter Unbelievable?

Is Easter Unbelievable? is another short book addressing question about the plausibility of the Easter story. In the book, the author, Rebecca McLaughlin answers 4 questions people might commonly have:

1. Is Jesus' Life Historical?
2. Is Jesus' Death Ethical?
3. Is Jesus' Resurrection Credible?
4. Is Jesus' Offer Desirable?

Again it is only a short book. In this case the resurrection only gets one chapter of a 64 page book. However, I think this makes it an ideal giveaway for someone to pick up at an Easter service to help them think about their objections (or perhaps the objections of friend). It's manageable in terms of a quick read, it's accurate in terms of pointing us to good answers to the questions and it's written in a very easy-to-read style.

Might someone need more to answer their questions? Yes, of course (and there are some pointers in the footnotes as well as the author having written a number of other helpful books). However, this is a good place for lots of people to start.

The Cross

I've noted before that I'm often looking for books to get people into daily Bible reading and I think that special seasons of the Christian year (whatever we might think of their importance!) can be useful for that. The Cross is a set of 30 readings from messages at the Keswick Convention are a really good devotional for that purpose and that they focus on the cross make them ideal as a set of Easter readings.

The readings tend to spend a few days on a passage looking at an aspect of the cross and they are expository in nature, given their roots. To my mind, they are solid food, packaged very accessibly. Even better they are part of a series, so if someone gets started with them and enjoys them, then there is much more they can get stuck into.

There is a qualification with these that I hadn't picked up when I bought them, which is that one of the days seems to have been from a talk by Liam Goligher, who has since had to come out of ministry.

The Resurrection

The final book on my list this year is The Resurrection by Mark Meynell. The idea of this book is fairly simple. The author takes three of the resurrection accounts (Matthew, Luke and John) and expounds them in a chapter. So we end up with another short book (64 pages), but with rich biblical content.

I found the expositions really helpful and enjoyed the way that the author thought about how to structure and present the material to highlight what each gospel author was focusing upon. I really like the tables at the end of each chapter to summarise the material.

This is an ideal book for a Christian to think through the resurrection accounts from the Bible and grow in their understanding of the climax to the gospel accounts and it would also be a useful introduction to almost anyone who is asking what Easter Sunday is all about.

There's a companion book call The Cross, but I haven't managed to get around to that one yet - maybe next year.

Anyway, I hope those little reviews/tasters might encourage you to have a look at some of those books or to find ways to give them away to people who would find them useful.