WORLD is the Christian magazine where Bob Jones IV (yes THE Bob Jones) is the editor. Bob Jones IV is the son of BJIII. He decided he did not want to be president of his namesake university and works as a journalist. His brother Stephen took the helm at BJU, but resigned in December for health reasons.

Imagine my surprise this morning to find that WORLD has a nice review of The Romance of Religion in today’s online edition.

Longenecker argues that the glory of all romances is that they all point to the great romance, the love story between Jesus Christ and His bride. What the pagan myths pointed to has come true. The Son of God came in the flesh, lived perfectly, died painfully, and rose gloriously. At this point, Longenecker starts an apparently irrelevant new chapter on how much he enjoys conspiracy theories. They take existing evidence for the falsity of their theories as proof of a government cover-up, and the lack of positive evidence as being exactly what one would expect from such clever conspirators. Of course, this is exactly how mainstream scholarship treats the life of Christ. The existing evidence (a document known as “The New Testament”) is discounted as a fabrication, and evidence-free theories hold the field. What an opportunity for the romantic to charge academic windmills!

Read the whole review here.