Customer Reviews

Conversations of Jesus, The: Learning from His Encounters

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Professor Kistemaker provides a summary of many of the conversations of the Messiah. The conversations are classified into categories such as those whose faith Messiah praised, those who Messiah healed, and those who opposed Messiah. Each section gives appropriate Scripture references, flowing narrative, and short applications. The book is pretty light reading, with each conversation not more than a few pages.

The conversations of the Messiah make for an interesting study but this book falls a bit short, in my opinion. The author gives the origins of each of the important names in the conversations, something which I found helpful. But some of the comments in the application section left me wondering, such as "Yeshua (Jesus) continues to heal through medicine etc." Now does he man that God only or sometimes heals through modern medicine? I couldn't tell. In some ways, the application section should have been built up more.

Personally I found the book to be somewhat useful as a devotional. The outline of the book (i.e. looking at all of the people Messiah healed, etc) makes for a useful jumping point in a Bible study, but I think the Bible itself would be a better choice than the conversation summaries.

The analysis of the conversations is often grossly oversimplified. It was nice for the author to try to make the conversations "more real" by adding some comments to fill in the text. But many of the added comments are many times either not obvious or gross assumptions. I frequently found myself asking "now why does he think that?" It detracted me from the flow of the book.

Thus if you are new to the gospel, and are seeking a devotional-style look at the conversations of the Messiah, this is a good book and I would give it 4 stars. But for someone who has studied the gospels, this book won't add much and I would give it 3 stars.