Readers Reply

Beautiful Covers

The covers of BR are always the most beautiful of the 40-some journals that come into our home each month, and the picture of Eve on the December 1997 cover (see BR 13:06) is the best ever. BR’s art and design directors are to be commended for their increasingly excellent work.

Eve, by the way, is my favorite personage of the Bible. She was eager to learn, unwilling to be limited in what she was allowed to know, and brave in the face of potential punishment. God, in his response to her yen for knowledge, shows his true colors for the first (but certainly not the last) time in the Bible. Eve possessed the best of human qualities; she was curious, courageous and irrepressible. God, on the other hand, was arbitrary, fearful (Genesis 3:22), cruel and vaguely unhinged.

How Did the Gospels Get Their Names?

I was somewhat amused and yet shocked to find that in your December issue you had an ad for Randel Helms’s Who Wrote the Gospels? I realize that it can be difficult for a magazine to make financial ends meet without accepting the revenues that ads bring, and that one wouldn’t want to engage in any sort of prior censorship. However, I also believe that the spirit of fair play (not to neglect sound, thorough and reasonable scholarship) should also have come into play.