Review: The Jesus Book by Stephen Elkins
There are so few good Christian children’s books out there, so I wanted to check “The Jesus Book” by Stephen Elkins out. I was interested because of its tagline, “The Ultimate Who, What, When, Where, and Why Book.” Made me think that it was some sort of CSI like investigative book helping kids understand Jesus better. Having friends with young children also made me interested in finding resources I could give my friends to help them begin the process of teaching their kids about Jesus as well.
I was mildly impressed while at the same time being hugely disappointed.
The great thing about the book was how thoroughly Elkins covers the gospel stories. “The Jesus Book” does provide a great overview of the life of Jesus.
There were several issues I had with the content of his entries. One was the continuity of the articles. Though it reads like a book, the actual entries have no interface with each other; they could very easily have been written in any order. To provide one example, the fourth entry, “John the Baptist said Jesus was the Lamb of God” mentions “sinners” for the first time, but “sin” isn’t defined for another fifteen pages. I appreciated Elkins’ attempt at incorporating Greek in a children’s book, but his Greek was incorrect. On page 40, Elkins notes that “baptism” came from the Greek word “bapto.” Unfortunately, it came from “baptizo,” not “bapto.”
Lastly, the overall message disappointed me. Elkins does a great job of touching on deep subjects like repentance and salvation, but settles for the stereotypical watered down version of those terms that fail to mention anything about the rest of the children’s lives. It is immensely important to change our hearts, to confess our sins, and to tell others about the Good News, and I am encouraged that this book will tell kids about that. But the book fails in the overarching narrative of God’s redemption of His creation and how each of his followers plays a role in that. The “Why it Happened” section was woefully inadequate, in my opinion.
Lastly, I was also disappointed in the illustrations of Claudine Gevry. Though I do not want to diminish her talent, I would have hoped for more diversity in the illustrations as well as having a Jesus that looked more Jewish and less Caucasian.
I was mildly impressed while at the same time being hugely disappointed.
The great thing about the book was how thoroughly Elkins covers the gospel stories. “The Jesus Book” does provide a great overview of the life of Jesus.
There were several issues I had with the content of his entries. One was the continuity of the articles. Though it reads like a book, the actual entries have no interface with each other; they could very easily have been written in any order. To provide one example, the fourth entry, “John the Baptist said Jesus was the Lamb of God” mentions “sinners” for the first time, but “sin” isn’t defined for another fifteen pages. I appreciated Elkins’ attempt at incorporating Greek in a children’s book, but his Greek was incorrect. On page 40, Elkins notes that “baptism” came from the Greek word “bapto.” Unfortunately, it came from “baptizo,” not “bapto.”
Lastly, the overall message disappointed me. Elkins does a great job of touching on deep subjects like repentance and salvation, but settles for the stereotypical watered down version of those terms that fail to mention anything about the rest of the children’s lives. It is immensely important to change our hearts, to confess our sins, and to tell others about the Good News, and I am encouraged that this book will tell kids about that. But the book fails in the overarching narrative of God’s redemption of His creation and how each of his followers plays a role in that. The “Why it Happened” section was woefully inadequate, in my opinion.
Lastly, I was also disappointed in the illustrations of Claudine Gevry. Though I do not want to diminish her talent, I would have hoped for more diversity in the illustrations as well as having a Jesus that looked more Jewish and less Caucasian.
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