Dave's Reviews > Jesus the Christ: A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy Scriptures, Both Ancient and Modern

I would normally give this book a higher score, but the preponderance of glowing reviews leaves me with an overpowering urge to temper the average. A well-known anecdote in the LDS world claims that a visiting general authority piled a table with popular scriptural commentaries, discussing their different merits, before abruptly flinging them all to the ground with a sweep of his arm and replacing them with the Standard Works...and Talmage.

In popular Mormon culture this book straddles the line that separates the canon from other books. Written in a room within the Salt Lake Temple, ratified by all of the Brethren, and containing a serious quantity of citations and references for its time, JTC is considered by many to be near-scripture. My apologies for the elitism here, but the average rank-and-file Mormon considers reading JTC in its entirety as the pinnacle of acceptable LDS scholarship.

My only contention with the book is its well-noted reliance on the works of Farrar, Geikie, and Edersheim, three Protestant writers from the Victorian era. A lot of time has passed since Talmage, and many lifetimes of serious, but accessible scholarship have taken place since then (and I'm not talking about McConkie's stilted derivatives of nearly every Talmage work). Look up just about anything coming out of BYU in the last 20 years for an updated, albeit orthodox treatment of the life of Christ.