Teachers are always looking for textbooks, and good textbooks are hard to find. Those two points come from 25 years of teaching. Textbooks have to complement lectures and class sessions, and most of us don’t want to use a textbook that covers the same thing discussed in class. Charles Puskas and David Crump, an editor and a professor at Calvin, now have co-written a textbook that introduces students to the historical context, the methods at work in Gospel-Acts studies, and to the standard critical conclusions about each of these books in the NT. Their book is called An Introduction to the Gospels and Acts.
One of the highlights of this book: bibliographies. Very good ones. Not too much, but not too thin either.
Another highlight: too many introductory books are an endless listing of views and interpretations; Puskas and Crump avoid this temptation. Instead, they dive in and give standard entry points that students need when they begin study of the Gospels and Acts.
Which leads me to the audience: this book is for seminary students who need to understand critical views, for college students who need the same, and for pastors who need a refresher. If I have a criticism it is this: the methods section seems to limit methods to source, form and redaction criticism and avoids many methods at work today, including feminist criticism, sociological and social criticism, and all the dimensions of literary and narrative approaches.