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This transcript has been edited for clarity and space.
Frank Viola
I am Frank Viola, author and lover of Jesus Christ.
David Capes
Frank Viola, Frank. This is your first appearance on The Stone Chapel Podcast. Glad you’re with us.
Frank Viola
It is, it is David. It’s my honor.
David Capes
It’s a thrill to talk with you and to have a chance to talk a little bit about this book, because it’s a great book. I endorsed it. A lot of other folks have too. This is part one of the two-part podcast, because there’s just so much great content here. We want people to know about the book, know about the project, know more about you. So for those who don’t know Frank Viola, who is he?
Frank Viola
I’ve been trying to figure that out for decades. I’m actually someone who writes books for hungry and thirsty Christians who love Jesus Christ, but who know in their bones that there must be more to the Christian faith, to the Lord, to the Bible and to the church. And I have written 20 books to date, and it’s been a work. They can be divided up into light and shade. Light are books containing the element of the sublime, and shade are books containing a prophetic edge that challenges the status quo, that in a nutshell, would be my introduction. I also speak, and I have a blog, and I have two podcasts as well. And for people who want more, they can go to frankviola.org. Everything is there. It’s a one stop shop. Most of it is free content.
David Capes
You’ve got lots of books there and lots of great content. Now you do two podcasts too. Tell us a little bit about them.
Frank Viola
Yes. We have the “Christ Is All Podcast,” and that is a podcast designed to share messages on the deeper Christian life. These are conference messages. I do interviews, there’s monologs, there’s creative sketches, and that podcast has done very well. It’s recently hit 2 million downloads, which is pretty encouraging.
And then we have another podcast called “The Insurgence Podcast.” That podcast was launched after my book “Insurgence, Reclaiming the Gospel of the Kingdom.” And in it, I have discussion partners. Altogether, I have seven conversation partners. One of them was the late Michael Heiser. We did a number of episodes together, and that’s all about the Kingdom of God and the gospel of the kingdom. And what we’ve been doing is going through every reference to the kingdom of God in the New Testament in chronological order. So we start with Matthew, and then we go all the way to Revelation, and we’re in the midst of that. And when that project is finished, we will have a complete conversation
on every reference to the kingdom in the New Testament.
David Capes
Wow. That’s quite a project when you think about it. People can always go to Apple or Spotify and find Insurgence, right? But can they find it through frankviola.org?
Frank Viola
Yes. All the podcasts are there. All the books are there. I have over 1000 articles there, all free of charge. There are links to our YouTube channels. There’s everything that I’ve ever produced. For better or for worse, it is there on frankviola.org.
David Capes
Well, that’s terrific. Now, the Insurgence book is a more recent project. Wasn’t it one of your more recent books?
Frank Viola
Yes. It came out a few years ago, and it’s been called my signature book because it looks at every place in the New Testament where the kingdom has been discussed. And it arranges it topically. The podcast itself does it chronologically, and it goes into more depth than the book does. They supplement one another.
David Capes
There’s no subject in the New Testament more central to the teaching of Jesus than the kingdom of God.
Frank Viola
That is correct. And I argue, too that it was the major dominating message of Paul of Tarsus, even though he did not use the word kingdom as much as Jesus did. But every time he mentions Lord Jesus Christ, he’s talking about the kingdom, an alternative civilization of God’s reign. We established that in in the book too. And we also make a point that there’s not this difference between the gospel of grace and the gospel of the kingdom. They really all are different aspects of the same glorious, explosive gospel that turned the world upside down in the first century; and that’s still proclaimed today.
David Capes
And it has continued to turn the world upside down. We swim in that environment but sometimes we’re not even aware of it. The kinds of things that happen around us. In a lot of cultures around the world where the gospel has not been preached and taught, you see the difference. There’s a difference in the way people are treated, the acts of forgiveness, the acts of charity, and those types of things. When you see the kingdom, it is just remarkable in its effect here in the world. Now you just released a new book. It’s entitled, “The Untold Story of the New Testament Church,” revised and expanded. I’ve been telling my students for 30 years now, that every book has a big idea. It’s one of the questions I always ask authors. Frank, what is the big idea of The Untold Story of the New Testament Church?
Frank Viola
I would begin by quoting the great scholar, FF, Bruce, who famously said that reading the New Testament letters is like hearing one end of a phone conversation. And what this book does is reconstruct the other end so that readers can understand virtually every word. What this book does is it seamlessly weaves together the narrative found in Acts, with the Epistles.
It provides a free flowing story from Matthew to Revelation, but in chronological order, and then filling in all the details from our knowledge of first century church history. Now the book is non-fiction, but some readers have said it reads like a motion picture on paper. And that was my goal. But at the same time, it’s supported by 2400 footnotes that contain sources, explanations, and further details. I cite some of your work in those notes.
David Capes
Good, good for you!
Frank Viola
So, all your readers need to go out and get a copy.
David Capes
Absolutely, yes!
Frank Viola
And let me say this to your listeners, because I think it might help them to understand the value of this book. Years ago, I had a car that had a CD player, back when cars had CD players. There was a feature on the CD player called shuffle. It was also called random. And one day, I was listening to an audio book on CD, and the story was not making sense. And what was happening was that it was switching from the beginning parts of the story to the later parts of the story, to the middle parts of the story. Finally, it dawned on me that I had the shuffle feature on.
David Capes
Oh, wow. That would drive you mad.
Frank Viola
Exactly, But it’s wonderful, because I thought that’s exactly what reading the New Testament is like. The New Testament that we all have is not arranged chronologically. All the letters of Paul are arranged by length. Paul didn’t write Romans after Acts. It’s the longest letter, and Philemon is the shortest. And so, in my judgment, most Christians and I was someone who fit into this category for years, including pastors and Bible teachers, suffer from what I call acute versification syndrome. It’s a cognitive condition characterized by an inability to comprehend the whole story.
Instead, we look at chapters and verses, and we even take those chapters and verses, we lift them out of their historical context, we paste them together, and then we come up with doctrines. And I don’t have anything against chapters or verses. They help us locate texts. But they came much later. Chapters were added in the Bible in 1227 AD. That’s 1200 years after the New Testament came into being. Verses emerged in 1551 AD, and so what’s happened is we’ve all been conditioned to read the Bible, the New Testament, particularly through this lens of chapter and verse.
And we missed the whole story. And it doesn’t help that the New Testament letters are set on shuffle. It’s random. They’re not in chronological order. So, what this book does, David, is it puts it all together into a free flowing, easy to read story that’s backed up by the most up to date scholarship and history.
David Capes
And it is, as I read it. You talked about the footnotes, you talked about the sources, you talked about some of the scholars that you’d been reading. It’s really a great work. You should get a PhD for just writing this book because it takes that kind of effort to do that. How hard is it to put things in chronological order?
