Category Archives: Harmony of the gospels

Harmony of the gospels, Short Stories, Writing

Barely Writing

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Yes, this week I did even less writing than last week. After making a good start on that short story I mentioned in my last post, I haven’t written at all on it this week. It stands at around 400 words, waiting on me to come back to it.

One reason I backed off was I wasn’t sure that the woman whose name I’m using for the heroine, with her permission, still wanted me to continue using it. Changing the name would be difficult on the third story in. After waiting several days I finally contacted her, and she says it’s fine to keep using her name. So, as time allows, I shall be charging onward with “Sierra, Kilo, Bravo”.

The other main task I’m doing which could be considered a writing task is editing my A Harmony of the Gospels. I’ve mentioned this work in previous posts, but not for some time. I began this in 2002 (if memory serves me correctly), and finished it in typed form 2009; I finished it in manuscript somewhere around 2006 or 2007. It was always a project to be fit in, never a priority. After that I’ve been reading through it, mainly for devotional and study purposes, but catching typos along the way.

The Harmony is in three parts: the actual harmony of the four gospels; a section of passage notes that includes overlapping gospel passages side by side, with my notes on how I harmonized them; and appendixes that include lengthier discussions on some sections, passages, and events for which I wanted to clarify my approach.

Over the years since I finished everything I’ve read the Harmony part a half-dozen times. The last time through I didn’t catch many typos. A month ago I finished reading the parallel scripture portion of the Passage Notes for the second time. I caught more typos, but not as many as I expected. Currently I’m reading through the Appendixes. Here I’m catching a few typos, but more so edits needed to clarify what I’m trying to say.

I should finish reading the Appendixes by the end of the year, maybe before. I never did finish the last appendix, and one of the earlier ones is sort of left hanging, as if I meant to come back and add something, something of which I have no idea now. I’ll get through these, then do the typing, re-print a copy for work and a copy for home. Then, what?

My text for the Harmony is the NIV version of the Bible. This is a copyrighted work, with Zondervan owning the exclusive right to publish it. My putting it into a harmony didn’t change enough words to make this something I could publish myself. It could only be published through Zondervan. Given the very low chance of that ever happening, I don’t ever plan on submitting it.

No, this is for me only. I also gave copies to my current and previous pastors, with a warning that they are not to copy and distribute it. That should keep me out of trouble with copyright laws.

Harmony of the gospels, Headshots, Writing

Typing Edits

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The last two nights the only writing work I did was type edits on my novel-in-progress, Headshots. The manuscript is currently at 220 pages, 62,000 words. About three weeks ago, maybe even a month, I printed the file and began reading through it, trying to remember all the plot lines and figure out what I needed to do to make sure nothing was lost.

I finished that reading and editing a week or so ago. Two new scenes were obvious to me to continue one plot thread that I had left hanging. I wrote them, and that brought the manuscript up to 225 pages and 64,360 words. But there it sat as I worked on book covers and other things, not necessarily writing-related.

Finally, Wednesday evening I found a little time to begin typing the edits. I think I got about 50 pages done then, and another 70 last night. That’s good progress, but it also means I have another 100+ to go. It’s tedious work. The edits are marked on the manuscript. I have to find the place in the computer file, type the edit, and mark it out on the manuscript. It’s not at all hard; it just takes time.

Then today, in my pre-work time, I decided to type edits to another book I wrote, A Harmony of the Gospels. I recently re-read this, for my morning devotional time. In doing so I found a few typos, and realized I had never changed the format of some footnotes as I’d intended to do. This morning I got all that done, a number of changes over 100 pages. I see that I also have some edits to type in the Passage Notes and Appendixes. I’ll perhaps begin work on those next week.

Edits typing is somewhat mindless work. Sometimes it takes a little more concentration, such as when the reason for the edit isn’t obvious, and I have to re-read the manuscript to gain some context. Occasionally, with my novel, while typing the edit I notice something else that should also be taken care of, and the edit is more extensive. Still, even with those times, typing edits isn’t likely to stimulate the brain to think great thoughts.

Last night I was interrupted by a Facebook contact from a high school friend of my sister, and we talked a bit. Otherwise I concentrated fairly well. A hundred some odd pages to go, and the edits will be done. I should be able to do that tonight and tomorrow. then I can begin writing the ending. Much of that has run through my mind in detail, so I don’t think I’ll have too much trouble getting that out—depending on whether I feel the need to add a little more to any given plot thread. Except for a trip that’s coming up, I’d say I should be done with the book in three weeks. Let it sit a couple of weeks, edit it again, type the edits, get feedback from beta readers, type that, and I’ll be ready to publish. Hopefully that can all happen before the end of June.

 

Harmony of the gospels, Operation Lotus Sunday, Writing

Change of Writing Plans for the next Two Weeks

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I had a meeting to go to this morning at the City of Bentonville Planning Office. As expected it lasted about 45 minutes. The City library is pretty close, and since my colleagues and I took separate vehicles (because they both had other meetings to go to afterwards), I went to the library.

A library is almost as good as a used book store. In some ways it’s better, because it will be better organized. Rarely do I visit a library and wind up disappointed. Today was no exception.

I had two purposes I wanted to accomplish there: 1) see if my inter-library loan books had arrived; and 2) see if they had the index to National Geographic magazine that included the 1970s and 1980s. I went straight to the reference desk, where the lady was alternating her gaze between books and her computer. On her desk were several books that looked like inter-library loan books, and, though most of the covers were obscured by the paperwork wrapper on each book, one looked like the cover of a book I was expecting.

They were indeed both of my books. She had just processed them and only needed to scan the bar code before she could give them to me. It took less than a minute. The books are harmonies of the gospels published in 1988 and 1996. I haven’t done much research into modern harmonies, relying instead on harmonies from the 1700s, 1800s, and early 1900s that I could access on-line. These two will help to flesh out my research.

At the reference desk I also learned they had the exact NG Index I was looking for. One more minute and I was at a table, with the index open, looking at the entries for China. Perhaps I should explain more.

We have a ton of NG mags in our basement storage room. When we moved to this house in 2002 I tied them up for transport, and haven’t looked at them since. From time to time I’ve bought a few newer ones, or had them given to me, and put them loose on the shelf. I have a recollection of one or two articles in NG in the late 1970s or early 1980s about the terracotta soldiers buried in Xian, China. We visited those in 1983, and I have a fairly vivid memory of them. One of the characters in China Tour, the tourist husband Roger Brownwell, mentions this NG article and has it with him. I figured, as some last minute research, I should re-read the article. It’s been thirty or so years since I first read it.

Last night I went to the shelves with the mags. Kn0wing only that it would be somewhere between 1974 and 1983, I began looking. What I found was that: many of the strings I tied them with eleven years ago had come loose, making handling difficult; they were stacked two-deep on two shelves, making for 10 feet worth of shelves to go through; the lighting was so bad I couldn’t read the words on the binder (except for the date); and the bundles of mags, such as they were, were not necessarily all of one year—except I found duplicates, so maybe other bundles were all of one year, and I just couldn’t find them in the poor light on the ten feet of shelves. I gave up.

Thirty minutes of on-line searching revealed that the National Geographic Society does not have an on-line index, and it seems no one else had created one. Hence, knowing I would be near the library today, I decided I would see if they had the index I needed. I knew if I could just find the month and year of the magazine I needed I could find it in the storeroom.

Sure enough, I found it in the index: April 1978, with an earlier, briefer article in December 1974 that I should also look at. As well, I found articles in 1982 and 1983 for two of the cities we visited and which are scenes in the book. Tonight, God willing, I should be able to find them and set them aside for reading.

I may not learn anything new in these articles, but it’s absolutely essential that I not include in the book anything that wasn’t true in 1983, which is when the events in China Tour took place. Plus, in these articles I may find a few ideas I can use to enhance the authenticity of the book.

So, since I have a way to find specific NG issues needed, and since I have these two books for only two weeks from inter-library loan, I figure my reading and writing priorities have changed. Tonight I will:

  1. first find the NG issues on the storeroom shelves and bring them upstairs.
  2. second begin reading in one of the two harmonies.
  3. edit at least 40 pages of China Tour. I’m currently through 78 pages of the 250 page book.
  4. if time allows, begin reading the key NG article.

This may be too much for one night, even with leftovers needing only a generous dose of micro-waves before eating, and even dessert prepared. But we’ll see. For sure most other writing projects, either in the works or on the mental to-do list, will be shoved aside for the two weeks that I have these two books.

How great is a library?

Carlyle, Harmony of the gospels, Operation Lotus Sunday, Writing

Three-part Writing Problem

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Or four parts if you include my two blogs as another part, or if you count them as two then actually five parts.

I continue to read in Carlyle’s works, even going so far as to prepare my own bibliography of his works, and to purchase a printed bibliography. I found the ones on-line to be very inadequate. Even the one I downloaded from Google books, published in 1881, had a lot of gaps, as did the 1919 one I also downloaded. The 1989 one I ordered came, and it seems to be quite complete. From it I’m completing my bibliography, trying at the same time to figure out how to structure it. Each evening I try to read a few pages in Correspondence Between Goethe and Carlyle. This is going well, despite many formatting problems with the e-book. I should finish this by this coming weekend.

I need to resume my work on China Tour, and bring that to completion. As I think I said previously I have only 3.7 chapters to go, and I know pretty much what I want to write. Scenes from these chapters dance in my head. I believe I have the method worked out whereby the goals of both the CIA couple and the Bible smuggling couple are achieved. Even the denouement is clear to me. About ten days ago I realized I had a major omission in an early chapter, dealing with when the two couples meet and how they resolve a particular problem. The additions to a specific scene have at last come to me, and now I need to write it.

Then today, in my before work hours, I resumed work on my Harmony of the Gospels. It’s been a while since I wrote about that on the blog, and I haven’t touched it since last June. This is more a labor of love and a self-study aid. I’m down to having one appendix to write, that of the crucifixion. Today I wrote a few words in it, and pulled up a reference I downloaded many months ago and began reading it. I refreshed my memory of what needs to go into this appendix. I basically have about 30 minutes a day to work on this. I suspect it will take me two weeks, at that rate, to write this appendix.

I’d really like to add a couple of essays to the Harmony, not necessarily tied to specific chapters or times in Jesus’ life, but to some general topic, such as why try to harmonize the gospels at all. I started one of those over a year ago, and must see where it stands.

Then my blogs demand to be worked in. I’m trying to post at a six-per-week frequency: three to each blog, with one day off. I haven’t arrived there yet, generally achieving four per week, sometimes even three. I want to keep working on that schedule.

But for right now, here is how I plan on dividing my writing time.

  • Spend 30 minutes a day before work on the appendices and essays of the Harmony.
  • Spend 30 minutes a day (max) during the lunch hour on my Carlyle research, though toward what end I’m still not sure. This will never end until I make an end of it.
  • Spend the rest of my writing time, which is whatever minutes I can carve out of the evening and weekend monoliths, on China Tour until it is finished.
  • In whatever moments I can further find, perhaps in the pieces chipped away from the monoliths, to write six blog posts a week.

This is a worthy goal, one which I will work hard to make into a reality.

Harmony of the gospels

Writing Progress: Harmony of the Gospels

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So I come to work much earlier than I need to, mainly to miss the traffic. I leave the house about 06:20 and pull into the parking lot about 06:45. I make coffee, put my lunch in the fridge, have a brief devotional and prayer time, get my first cup of coffee, then begin work. Not office work, but writing work. Before 08:00 I’m on my own time, not office time. Of course, if anyone needs me for expert engineering advice, or should a desperate client or irate property owner calls, I’m here to take the call and tend to office business. But most of the time for that hour is my own.

My current project during the first 20 minutes of that hour is completion of my Harmony of the Gospels. I began this back in 2001, when I was in the early stages of writing Doctor Luke’s Assistant, and gave lots of thought to how Luke gathered his information, how his was different from the other gospels, etc. So I began taking some notes. This eventually grew into three spiral notebooks, stenno size. Beginning with the Triumphal Entry, I wrote out the parallel texts, discussed how to harmonize them, and wrote the harmony. All long hand. Okay, some of it is in my own special shorthand. On occasion, the discussion was long, mainly when the gospels appeared to have different timelines and I worked out the apparent discrepancies.

I finished the Harmony somewhere around 2005. My goal was to make one seamless text out of the four. There are a lot of parallel column harmonies around, both ancient and modern. I didn’t figure we needed one of those. I wanted to do the unified text kind. Why? Partly as my own Bible study tools, but also because I thought such a text would be useful. I had no real intention to seek publication of this. It was a labor of love, not profit. Some might think it a waste of time, and perhaps it was, or still is.

I told my former pastor about it (he’s since moved to another church), and he wanted to see it. The problem was, it was all still in handwritten manuscript. So I typed it. 104 letter-sized pages in 12 point font. I decided I should go ahead and type my notes as well. I divided them into two types: passage notes, which dealt with blending specific portions of the text; and appendices, which dealt with larger issues and timelines. I identified nine appendices needed, and quickly produced three of them. Then I jumped to the passage notes.

I quickly discovered that what I had written in the notebooks would not do for typed material. Sometimes I made flip comments, things only I would want to see, or at least I wouldn’t want someone else to see. Some were not correct. Most were in my grammatical shorthand. So I took the notebooks and began typing passage notes from them, but mostly I re-wrote them as I went along, putting them in correct grammar, expanding on concepts I must have had in my head but didn’t write in the notebooks, sometimes changing my mind. All this time I also kept re-reading the Harmony itself, looking for typos or things that seemed could be improved.

I came to a point where I had about forty or fifty pages of appendices and passage notes, printed a proof copy for me and one to give to my pastor. He later made approving comments of it.

Lately (last three weeks) I have spent those fifteen or twenty minutes each weekday morning working on an added appendix, about the trial(s) of Jesus by Jewish officials, including Peter’s denials of Jesus. The time between the arrest in Gethsemane and handing Jesus over to Pilate. It is a fascinating study to see how these harmonize, and to try to work out one or two apparent discrepancies. I completed that appendix, which ran to eight pages, yesterday, proofed it at home last night, and made the corrections this morning. I also got a start on the passage notes for this section this morning. I estimate those will take me a week or a little more to do.

So if this is not a commercial project, and carving out writing time every day and week is so difficult and never winds up with enough writing time, why do I do this? Because I sense I should. Because it gives me more satisfaction, in a way, than the commercial projects I work on. Because I’m learning a lot as I do it. Because it presents me with many springboards for Bible study and research. Because it is very fulfilling.

At twenty minutes a day, I’m sure completion of the passage notes and a few more appendices will required another year, maybe more. I’ll let you know. Meanwhile, since this is a harmony of the NIV, which is a copyrighted work, I can’t really share it with people. The pastor’s copy was for his personal study, not review and comment, and I dare not give away any more.

Fifty Thousand Screaming People, Harmony of the gospels, Writing

Getting into a Writing Routine

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Okay, excuses have to stop. My tick-borne disease is on the mend, if not fully reduced to antibodies. Grandson #1 is gone back to Oklahoma. Blogs are linked, and I can put different content on each and feel okay about it. So the time has come to get to work and write.

Last night I began the task of re-establishing a routine, and perhaps tweaking what I’ve done in the past. With my wife out-of-town, and with my aches and pains under control, I had no excuse but to be B-I-C for a significant number of hours yesterday. That’s “butt-in-chair” for you non-writers, implied that it’s either in front of a working computer screen and keyboard or at a writing desk with paper and manuscript.

I was at the computer from about 3:30 PM to 9:30 PM, with a 45 minute break for supper. During that time I worked on In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. I wrote about 1900 words. Why not more in 5 1/4 hours, you might ask? First, I re-read the chapter I wrote last week, making a couple of small, though important, changes that should add a little intrigue as to what the mafiosos are doing. Then I remembered one enhancement I wanted to make to the first chapter, a simple six word sentence fragment by a radio announcer that will add nuance throughout the book.

Then, I set to work on Chapter 14. But, I hadn’t really planned or thought out this chapter, about spring training in my protagonist’s first full season in the major leagues. So it was a struggle to get into it. I kept “shelling out”, as I call it—to a computer game or a web site or Facebook or turning the TV on and off to hear some of the raging political news. I’d spend five minutes writing, get stuck, shell out to a game for fifteen minutes, think of something else to write and come back and write it. Then I’d get stuck again, shell out again, this time to a publishing industry blog, figure out what to do next, and come back to writing.

After my supper break, I had less and less of the shell out time and more time in the book as the needs of the chapter and the words of the characters gelled in my mind. In 5 1/4 hours I should have been able to write 3,000 or even 4,000 words. Maybe, if I was in a chapter I had already thought through, I could have done that. Or maybe, if I had a better way to think of what to write next, I could have produced more. But I completed the chapter, and think it’s not bad, and I enhanced two other chapters with not more than a hundred words. So I’m not displeased. Tonight I’ll be working on a chapter I have thought through, so hopefully I’ll get more done.

This morning I arrived at the office at the usual time, about 6:45 AM, beating the main commuting traffic. My devotions are from the Harmony of the Gospels that I wrote. Then I sit with my coffee and spend about 20 minutes adding to the passage notes section of the Harmony and twenty minutes formatting the letters of John Wesley. These I downloaded from The Wesley Center at the NNU website. I format them in a form I like that is tight for printing yet still very readable. I’m on volume 6 out of 8 volumes, the first five fully formatted and printed and residing in 3-ring binders, sometimes read, often waiting to be read.

Are these smart writing pursuits? I don’t know. The Harmony is not, I think, a commercial project. It’s more of a labor of love and a self-study guide. The Wesley letters might be a legitimate writing activity if I ever get my act together and pursue the Wesley study series I pitched at the Write-To-Publish Conference. That idea isn’t dead; I just haven’t figured out the exact form the series should take, and developed the idea enough to present a proposal to the publisher. But this is sort of a labor of love as well, and will lead to excellent reading matter for me once it’s all done.

So my routine is coming together. I don’t know how long it will last. I’d like for three months of it, with not too many interruptions. That will give me a completed novel, completed Harmony, completed Wesley letters, and some time to work on other projects. I might even feel like a productive writer.

Harmony of the gospels

The Ephraim Factor

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This week I have been writing with the flow, on my Harmony of the Gospels. I completed passage notes for several passages, about one a day and sometimes two. I worked on the events of Tuesday of Holy Week, and pretty much finished them. This led me to the problem of the dinner held in Jesus’ honor at Bethany. Was it six days before the Passover as John said, or was it two days before the Passover at Mark and Matthew say? Or was it two separate dinners with amazingly similar actions, except for the day?

When I wrote the harmony originally I decided on one dinner per John’s timing, and I still agree with this. This, however, I had always planned to discuss in an appendix, which will have significantly more discussion than would the passage notes. So, going with the flow, I wrote the portion of that appendix that goes with dinner. The appendix will be a fair amount larger, and I’ll work on that later. However, writing this appendix required more work than the passage notes, and I’ve spent the last two days reading other commentators for agreeing and disagreeing opinions on this. It’s amazing what I found on Google Books.

Between this writing and Ephraim’s arrival on Thursday I’ve neglected this blog. Yes, Sara and Ephraim drove here from Oklahoma City on Thursday to spend a few days with us. Sara is busy conducting Mary Kay parties, so grandma and grandpa have been baby-sitting. Yes, this blog will wait while Ephraim’s here. He’s down for a nap right now, which has allowed me to finish the writing in the appendix for the present, and write this blog.

Better go proofread what I wrote in the Harmony, then head upstairs to await Ephraim’s wakening.

Harmony of the gospels, Writing

Still Thinking About Writing With the Flow

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Yes, I’m still thinking about that. I wrote my post from yesterday at work, e-mailed it to myself at home, and posted it in the early evening. After that, I got to work on the passage notes and completed one passage. That still gave me time to read a literary agent’s blog, and achieve my reading goals for the night. Oh, and I got caught up on my personal finance budgets and on the checkbook. So I would call it a successful evening, if only there were more left in the checkbook and the budget balanced.

Tonight I decided to continue with the passage notes in the Harmony of the Gospels. I’m at the place where Jesus warned his disciples, and the crowd, to beware of the teachers of the law and the Pharisees (Mark 12:38-40, Matthew 23:1-12, and Luke 20:45-47). I originally worked on this 2 October 2001, and appear to have completed it in one evening. Now, however, as I was writing the passage notes “with the flow,” I saw a number of places where my original harmony missed some key information. So I took time to break the passage down into smaller chunks, something I didn’t do before, and reworked the harmony. I’m more pleased with it now, as it is more complete.

Maybe this writing with the flow is better. My mind is still engaged on these passages and on the passage notes. The way I’m writing them is to go back to my hand-written notebooks–three of them–where I wrote out the passages, discussed the similarities and differences, then wrote the harmony. Sometimes I began with chunks too big, and had to go back to the beginning with smaller bites. I should have done that with the passage in question. What I’m doing now is typing those notes I made as I harmonized the four gospels. However, I’m expanding my personal shorthand, and adding a few extra comments I didn’t before–the laziness of writing by hand when you’re used to typing seventy words a minute.

But I find I’m adding quite a bit more to the passage notes. After I reread my old notes, and the harmony, and the gospels again, and think some more, more words flow, giving a more complete picture of the process I went through and the nature of the finished product.

So maybe this writing with the flow does work. I’m writing these passage notes kind of fast, yet at the same time adding to them and improving the Harmony. I don’t know how long this inspiration will continue, but I’ll go with it for a while. Maybe I’ll actually finish the project in a couple of years. Since it’s probably non-publishable, no hurry.

I still need to work on the discipline part of writing with the flow, which will involve writing where the flow stops so as to finish a project. I’ll figure it out someday. Otherwise I’ll never get a book published.

Meanwhile, the flow to do my taxes has not yet come.

Harmony of the gospels, Writing

Change of Plans — Inspired?

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The only writing I planned to do this weekend was write a follow-up article on Earth Day for Suite101.com. My article on the 40th anniversary of the first Earth Day is doing quite well, page view wise. And it should do better as the day approaches. A figure another follow-up article couldn’t hurt. Beyond that, I planned on finishing the Chuck Colson book.

But my weekend plans went awry. Friday night I got some good reading done, essentially on-pace to finish the book by tonight. Saturday, though, was fully consumed with chores and comings and goings, until the evening left little opportunity to read. Well, I did read. I re-read a chapter in The Shack, the book we are studying in our adult Sunday school class, and prepared to teach it in case the teacher was out today (he was, so I did). And I read a Nazarene missions book that we’ve had for too long (just 94 pages; easy read). Then it was bed time.

This afternoon I had to meet with the trustees at church to talk again about our parking lot rehab project. We had some money unexpectedly come our way, and have the opportunity to redo the lot according to my master plan. Looks like that will happen. But that meeting, and waiting for it to start, took a good chunk of the afternoon. No time for reading.

But the thing that really changed my plans was reading yesterday morning and today in the gospels. As I usually do this time of year, I began reading again the stories of Jesus’ passion, beginning with the triumphal entry. But I decided to read it in my Harmony of the Gospels. The part I read this morning, Jesus’ ministry and encounters early in the week, led me to realize I may have been off in a couple of things. Plus, my mind seemed really engaged in the subject, and I thought this might be a good time to get some passage notes written.

So this afternoon and this evening I took time to work on some passage notes. I did this for the passages that are titled, in my study Bible, Question About Paying Taxes, About the Resurrection, and The Greatest Commandment. My mind was sharp, and focused. The words of the Harmony seemed to jump out of the page as I read. This is usually a sign that I’m reading the right thing for my current state of mind. So I got to work on the passage notes.

Perhaps I should briefly describe these. They are the notes that I wrote in my notebook as I harmonized the four gospels. I would first write out the text for each gospel covering that passage, in very short pieces (usually a sentence, sometimes two). I would then write a few notes about the differences and similarities in the text; what appeared to be conflicts and what appeared to be simple differences in wording. Then I would state some basis for harmonizing the text, say “Use Mark for the basic text, work in the extra information in Matthew and the word difference in Luke”, or something like that. Then I wrote the harmonized text in the notebook.

So I went to the notebook, found the part about paying taxes to Caesar, and began. I should also say that I’ve tried working on several of the passage notes before. I had little success, for whatever reason. But today I had good success. I took my handwritten notes and began typing. I expanded my private shorthand to full words and grammar. I added a few things that came to mind now. Most importantly, I found a few places where I could make my harmony better, and more faithful to the original text. I also found a few places where I did not adequately state the basis for my decision. I added that to the passage note.

This was not even on the radar screen when I set March goals. Consequently, I’m not sure what this will do to my goals. I may need to lay something else aside, or spend more time on writing than I anticipate having. Well, it seems that I need to write where my mind is going, not force it to write something that it is not interested in at that moment. So I’ll see what tomorrow brings, be it a Suite article, a little more on my novel, editing my article for BiblioBuffet, or even another passage note.

book reviews, Harmony of the gospels

Book Review: A Harmony of the Gospels for Students of the Life of Christ

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No, this is not the harmony that I’m writing. This is the one prepared by A.T. Robertson, published by Harper & Row in 1922. The book I picked up at a thrift store (for a dollar) was printed by H&R in 1950.

Dr. Robertson’s work was based on that of Dr. John A. Broadus, published in the mid-1890s. Robertson was a student of Broadus, and took over and expanded on his work whenever some discovery of a new Biblical text came to light, or when new textural criticism better explained the difference between the different gospels.

I bought this book after I had finished my own harmony, while working on appendixes and passage notes (still an on-going, off and on effort). The is a parallel-column harmony. Neither Broadus nor Robertson believed that the texts should be interwoven, for to do so would eliminate the distinctness of the language each gospel has. My harmony is the interwoven type, with each gospel compared to the others and the different texts blended into one (hopefully) seamless narrative. But I thought this would be a good book to review to see how the chronology of the professors compared to the chronology I came up with (with the assistance of some study Bibles).

The book does a couple of things I like. First, it is not based on the King James Version, but rather the Revised Standard Version. This is still difficult to read compared to my preferred NIV, but it’s an improvement. Next, it gives the Gospel of Mark the left hand column, believing, as I do, that Mark’s gospel was the first one put in final form, and that Luke and Matthew used Mark as one of their sources. Next, it does not waste a lot of blank column space when less than four gospels cover an event. If only one covers it, the text of that one utilizes the full width of the page. If two cover it, wide columns are used. If the number of lines needed to show parallel passages differs greatly, narrow columns start out and then wider or full width is used later. This is all done in such a way that the reader has no problem figuring out which gospel contributed which text. Not only does this save paper, it makes reading much more enjoyable.

The end of the book contains a number of discussions, equivalent to the appendixes I’m writing, to explain decision making that went into the Harmony. This is in addition to many footnotes added to passages to clarify, cross-reference, and explain something in a way that doesn’t require a long note at the end. In these end discussions, Robertson explains not only the way he thinks the harmony should be but also the main competing theories, and explains why he chose the route he did.

I did find a couple of negatives with this book. First, the font is small, very small by today’s standards. The main text is probably an 8 point font, Robertson’s footnotes 6 point, and the RSV footnotes 5 point! Too small on many evenings for my $5 reading glasses from Dollar General. Next, Robertson (probably after Broadus’ example) is overly concerned with exact dates. One of his notes goes into considerable length to discuss what year Jesus was born in; another into what year he began his ministry. I’m not really concerned about the exact year so much as the exact order of events in Christ’s life. Then, the footnotes and end discussion are perhaps too brief. Many decisions on order of the gospels, for example how Matthew seems to be non-chronological whereas Mark is chronological, could have been much better developed.

I found this book most useful in explaining Jesus’ movements. When was he in Galilee? When in Jerusalem, or Judea? How does Jesus’ statement in Luke chapter 9 about going to Jerusalem make sense in light of all the rest of the material in Luke 10-21? How did Jesus’ trip to Tyre and Sidon happen relative to other departures from Galilee? These relative movements are nicely explained. I will have to review my chronology and see if I need to make any adjustments. Of course, Robertson doesn’t agree with some of the decisions I made. I probably should re-think those areas, but I won’t. I feel pretty strongly about some of those.

This is a keeper for me. It would be a good book for anyone who is a serious student of the Bible to have.