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A Simplified Harmony of the Gospels. By George W. Knight. Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2001, xxvi + 267 pp., $14.99 paper.
The church recognizes four canonical Gospels. That fact, plus recent trends in Gospel research, has caused the concept of a single-line harmony to be much maligned in contemporary scholarship. Nonetheless, given that the Gospel authors themselves purport to represent history (a debated, but still defensible, position), one could conceive of the possibility of reconstructing the order of the reported historical events. This is an age-old endeavor in the history of the Church. Knight's Harmony continues in this tradition, though at times it fails to inform the reader of the pitfalls.
The Simplified Harmony, while aiming at a popular market, provides three distinctive features when compared to other available harmonies or synopses. (1) It is based on the Holman Christian Standard Bible. This translation seeks to be "as close to the words of the Hebrew and Greek texts as...