Tyler Hall

A lot of stuff in this book is inaccurate, misleading, and comes from bad sources. The four messianic miracles the Jews would have expected the Messiah to perform in order cannot be found in Scripture or extra biblical Jewish writings. The correlation between ancient Jewish wedding practices and communion is also entirely contrived. The word cable did not exist at the time of Jesus and to suggest the word Camel was mistranslated casts further doubt on the reliability of scripture not proof of its authority. For a book that claims to understand the context of the gospels it does a very poor job of context. Instead of understanding the context of the original authors it understands the context through charlatans, hucksters, and cult leaders like George Lamsa and Eddie Chumney. I'm not sure if Joe Amaral is ignorant or malicious but he definitely didn't do his homework on the sources he took as truth; and how this book got a recommendation by Craig Evans is beyond me. The problem with many modern Christians is that they will believe anything if it sounds good. We need to be more like the Bereans who search and study the scriptures for truth and stop believing things just because some pastor says so. Lesson to be learned: Don't believe everything a pastor says, or writes. However, if you are into the Hebrew roots movement this book might just be for you. For anyone else, please consider an actual scholar and some peer reviewed work on cultural context. See: Ray Vander Laan, Lois Tverberg, Kenneth Bailey, Gerry Wheaton, and Craig Evans.

I'm still not quite sure how to feel about this Bible. My church uses it from time to time in the children's ministry but mainly for kids to look through before class starts. On the one hand the kids genuinely want to read it because it has 200 Bible stories in comic book version. They love the pictures and they ask lots of questions. On the other hand the text is all in comic book form too. It's definitely not a translation and don't think it could be considered a paraphrase either. Most of the comic book version of the Bible stories are fairly accurate but missing quite a lot of detail. I think all the effort and time was put into the pictures and the text was an afterthought.