Customer Reviews

The Remarkable Journey of Jonah

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Unlike the prior two authors, I found Henry's book both well researched and very compelling. If you enjoyed the Genesis Record, the Revelation Record or the New Defender's Bible, you enjoy the Journey of Jonah.

Henry covers the history and background of the scriptures and provides a new insight into the sailors of Tarnish.

Henry also provides a number of new perspectives and corollaries between Jesus and Jonah's perils.

I came to the story believing the factual nature of the Bible story and did not need the evidence that Henry provides in dispelling the unbeliever ideas about it being an old wife's tale or simply a moral lesson. Jesus had the opportunity to dispel any misunderstandings of Jonah's story and instead choose to reinforce the details rather than diminish them.

I found this book to be both informative and yet thought provoking. If you want a better understanding of the book of Jonah, then this is a great source of information and inspiration.

Excellent, technical, detailed. And to those previous reviewers who were critical of the author's "hyper-literal" or "right-wing" style, get a life... A little like criticizing the Bible because you don't believe in God -- you only reveal your OWN religious liberal-bias in doing so. Folks, many Christians - real live Christians - believe the Bible says what it means and means what it says. And to decide for oneself what God must've meant (other than what is plainly written) puts each one of us in the place of rewriting God's Word. If Morris is right-wing or "hyper-literal", so be it. That does NOT make his book bad, merely your personal bias. The Bible cautions us most strictly to neither add-to nor subtract-from God's Word, else we incur terrible consequences. I would rather stand before God one day and be blamed for taking Him "too literally," than to be asked why I insisted on re-interpreting what was plainly written there. Morris is an author who respects this view, and clearly deserves no criticism for it - especially from these "reviewers."

I have enough faith in God to believe He created a fish large enough to hold Jonah for three days without digesting him. Perhaps it took special creation at that moment or maybe back during Creation Week he created this monster along with all of the other sea creatures.

Nonetheless, this is a great story that looks forward to the three days that Jesus would spend in the grave...as safe as Jonah.

Henry Morris has made a career of promoting hyper-literal (read, his own) interpretations of Scripture, especially as it involves the so-called "Creation Science" debate.

Now he turns to Jonah. Morris is so convinced of the literal accuracy of the Jonah account, that he fails to see the forest for the trees.

The POINT of the Jonah account has little to do with what species of fish might be able to swallow a man whole and alive and a GREAT DEAL to do with the love of God for mankind, and the desire of God to see the repentance of the wicked. Morris could have read the last verse of Jonah 4 and not bothered with writing the book in the first place!

Henry Morris is a classic archetype of the right- wing "conservative" group. I've seen so many like him waste thousands of dollars in tuition and learn absolutely nothing -- because they are outright UN-teachable.

They grow up most typically in small cities in the "bible belt", inherit their initial Weltanschaaung (world-view) from their parents and immediate environment -- just as everyone does (read Karl Barth and Paul Ricoeur's material known as "2nd naivete").

Typically in the first couple of years in college, almost everyone is confronted with a concept that doesn't fit into their world-view and enters into the cognitive-dissonace stage (where the old idea and the new idea fight to the death to determine what happens next).

This is the most essential and most critical stage in cognitive development that continues on all the way through life. Now that the person has been forced to form the first part of his own world-view, two distinct groups emerge.

Some are able to "divorce" themselves from pre-dispositions and biases and are able to employ REASON when evaluating the old and the new, and most typically the person incorporates this new thing to varying degrees into their world-view and EVOLVE -- beginning the process of critical-thinking.

Then, of course, there is the other group -- which isincapable of employing REASON in order to evaluate the new thing. For many, anything foreign to their inherited world-view seems so threatening to them that have no choice but to shove the new thing under the rug -- out of sight and out of their mind and remain in stage 1 in the evolutionary process of cognitive development. Most of this type go to the grave without ever incorporating a single thing outside of their inherited world-view.

In this book, Morris utterly huniliates himself (quite unknowingly) by the most completely WRONG perception that anything in the bible not taken as a literal historical series of events invalidates the theological precepts of divine inspiration and biblical inerrancy.

God is not limited in the way He communicates the critical message to us in the bible. Anyone who has taken an introductory course in hermeneutics and can read the biblical languages can easily see that, in addition to literal accounts of real events, there is a myriad of other genres throughout the bible (but almost exclusively in the Old Testament).

The most prominent and credible figures in the branches of theology are mostly in concensus that Jonah is a satire, was written as a satire, and was openly known to not be a literal account. As a satire it slaps Israel across the face by using the parallelism of thesis-antithesis over and over again.

If you want to actually learn something about what the bible is and the incredibly complex journey it has made across the millenia to reach us in the form that we have today, I can recommend no better book than "The Hermeneutical Spiral" by Osbourbe. Lookit up right here in amazon and read the excerpts and back cover. It is a most profound first dtep in the process of becoming a critical-thinker.