The Life of Christ

This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
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This short work is extracted from the 1922 work A Brief Bible History: A Survey of the Old and New Testaments by Machen and James Oscar Boyd, and it felt similar to portions of Machen's New Testament Introduction: An Introduction to its Literature and History. I think I've heard of the former, I've read the latter a couple of times. So, that took a little bit away from the experience for me.

But that doesn't take away from the value of it—a concise summary of the Life of Christ (harmonized) and the beginnings of the Church in Jerusalem. I'm guessing this was some of the Sunday School curriculum material written by Machen while teaching at Princeton Seminary, and it includes study questions. There's not a lot of interpretation or application (except in the questions), it's largely just a boiled down run-through of the gospel accounts.

Machen's possibly my favorite twentieth-century theologian – he's definitely the clearest and crispest (with the possible exception of R. C. Sproul). All the things people like to say about C. S. Lewis' popular apologetics apply to Machen (without the stumbling into troublesome weirdness), and his more academic apologetic work still holds up. This isn't Machen at his best, but it still displays his style and approach (even if only a little).

Really not much to say about this, so I'll just recommend it for a nice refresher.