A Sober Word to the Charismatic Movement: an interview with Frank Viola
Raul Mock of The Pneuma Review recently interviewed bestselling author Frank Viola about his new book The Untold Story of the New Testament Church (2025) with Foreword by Craig Keener.
Raul Mock: For PneumaReview.com readers that have not yet encountered you, please tell us about your spiritual journey and your ministry.
Frank Viola: I’m someone who writes books and speaks in conferences for hungry and thirsty Christians who love Jesus, but who know in their bones that “there must be more” to the Christian faith, to Jesus Christ, to the Bible, and to church.
I’ve been part of every denomination and every movement you can name. From the Pentecostals to the Charismatics, all their flavors, as well as most evangelical denominations and camps.
And while I learned valuable things from all of them, they all left me saying, “there’s got to be more than this.” That’s what my books, my articles, and my podcasts are all about.
I’ve written over 20 books to date, and they can be divided up into Light and Shade.
“Light” are books containing the element of the sublime.
“Shade” are books containing a prophetic edge that challenges the status quo.
Your readers can check out my entire book catalog at frankviola.org.
All the books take God’s people into the deeper Christian life.
I also have two podcasts – Christ is All and The Insurgence Podcast. Combined, the two podcasts have almost 3 million downloads.
These two podcasts are designed for Christians who know there must be more.
(Details for each podcast can be found on my website, linked above. We also have a YouTube channel.)
Raul: How do you describe your new book, The Untold Story?
There is a long-standing need within the Charismatic community for deeper and clearer biblical understanding.
However, we live in an era where Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians regularly face criticism for apparent gaps between experiential faith and biblical understanding.
And that criticism is often valid.
My book, The Untold Story of the New Testament Church: Revised and Expanded, resolves this problem. The book transforms how all Bible-believing Christians engage Scripture, including those in the Charismatic world
The book does this by providing a key that unlocks the New Testament, addressing a long-standing need within the Charismatic community for deeper and clearer biblical understanding.
Dr. Craig Keener, the world’s leading scholar in New Testament background and a Charismatic himself, wrote the Foreword to the book. This is how he describes it:
“In The Untold Story of the New Testament Church: Revised and Expanded, Frank Viola brings context and background together, inviting us on a captivating journey through the birth and growth of the first-century church. With a reputation for captivating prose and heartfelt storytelling, Viola brings his unique perspective to reconstruct the events from Matthew to Revelation. The Untold Story offers a plausible chronological narrative that reveals the grand tapestry of God’s kingdom plan and brings the characters of the story to life.”
Respected New Testament scholar Clinton Arnold, who is known for his work on spiritual warfare, powers and principalities, also endorsed the book saying,
“This volume is a creative and fascinating portrayal of the rise of Christianity and the establishment of churches throughout the Mediterranean world. Viola weaves the evidence of the New Testament into a single unfolding and compelling story. Yet he does so not with unbridled imagination, but with a profound reliance on the best scholarship available. The end result is an accurate, engaging and compelling account of this movement that has had a monumental impact on history and continues to do so today.”
The uniqueness of my book is that it blends together the narrative found in the book of Acts with the epistles, all in chronological order, telling one unified story with all the historical details filled in from different parts of the New Testament and from first-century history.
This approach puts you in the dramatic story. You watch it unfold before your eyes sequentially. The result is that you understand the New Testament like never before – accurately, powerfully, and in an electrifying way. The book is a cinematic experience that unlocks the letters of the New Testament.
Raul: The 2025 edition of The Untold Story is “revised and expanded.” What are some of the differences in this edition from the very old edition from decades ago?
Frank: Unfortunately, there is a very old edition from 20 years ago with an ugly orange cover on it. That book is similar to an experimental high school paper. I wrote it in my youth. It was written in a hurry, it wasn’t peer reviewed, and no scholars read it beforehand to ensure its accuracy.
In addition, the scholarship is outdated and most of the best books written on the New Testament didn’t even exist back then.
So it was a “rough draft experiment” from my youth. In this regard, the new book is not exactly a “new edition.” It’s a brand new work. We just kept the same title because it appears in my other books, which represents over 600,000 copies to date.
The Untold Story of the New Testament Church: Revised and Expanded – with the white cover and brushstrokes on the borders – came out this year (2025).
It’s been endorsed by 20 first-rate New Testament scholars. However, the main narrative is highly accessible and “reads like a motion picture on paper” as some readers have described it.
The Christians – including pastors and teachers – who are reading it have reported that they are experiencing a “revolution” in their understanding of the Bible.
Raul: In one of the early footnotes, you say that you set out to write a book that tells “the entire story of the primitive church from Pentecost to Patmos.” But this isn’t merely a study Bible or a textbook on Christian history. Who is your intended audience and what gap do you want this book to fill?
Frank: Correct, the book is not a textbook or study Bible or even a history book. It’s been described as “the New Testament guides of all New Testament guides.”
The intended audience is any Christian who wants to understand the New Testament in a powerful new way. The book also brings the people and places to life.
It’s also for any Christian who wants to understand the early church, what really happened and didn’t happen.
Therefore, the book was written for pastors, preachers, teachers, Bible study leaders, and all Christians who read their Bibles regularly.
Untold Story brings the people and places to life. The intended audience is any Christian who wants to understand the New Testament in a powerful new way.
(While there have been a few titles from the past that tried to reconstruct the New Testament story in chronological order, none of them were comprehensive, none were documented with up-to-date scholarship, nor have any of them been reviewed by scholars to ensure accuracy.)
A number of the twenty scholars who endorsed my book have confirmed it’s uniqueness by saying, “There is no book like this.”
I’ve described the book as a contribution to New Testament 3.0 in contrast with New Testament 1.0 and 2.0 (See New Testament 3.0 – A Breakthrough for details on what I mean by that).
The sad truth is that most Christians today, including preachers and teachers, have built their theology on a crossword puzzle of verses.
They don’t know The Story. They know chapters and verses. And some of them are experts at a particular book of the Bible, but this all misses the forest for the trees.
The Story – the narrative of what happened from Pentecost to Patmos chronologically and where the 21 letters in the New Testament fit into that grand drama – is largely unknown. Even among scholars.
That’s precisely why I decided to take the time and effort to write the book, which was no small endeavor. It was a super heavy lift.
Raul: In the Foreword, Dr. Craig S. Keener said that Untold Story is an invitation to see ourselves as part of the ongoing story God has been telling. What are some of the places that did this most meaningfully for you?
Frank: There are so many. One can never fully understand Paul’s letters unless they learn The Story. So it’s meaningful how the Story told in the book opens up the New Testament epistles, including those of Paul who wrote the majority of them.
Another is the way that Christian workers (ministers) were trained in the first century. It’s drastically different from the way ministers are trained today.
Also, the way churches were planted is completely different from how they are founded today.
Without knowing the Story, we are left to interpreting the New Testament we want through cutting and pasting verses together. The result is that we arrive at conclusions that are unbiblical, even though the conclusions are based on certain portions of the Bible. The problem is that context is missing.
Jeremiah 8:8 in the NET Bible says,
How can you say, “We are wise! We have the law of the Lord”? The truth is, those who teach it have used their writings to make it say what it does not really mean.
This text was delivered during a period of spiritual and moral crisis in ancient Judah, when the people and their religious leaders (especially the scribes) claimed wisdom and faithfulness to God’s word. But they were in fact corrupting it through false interpretation and misleading teaching.
The verse addresses the scribes and religious leaders who boasted, “We are wise, and the law of the LORD is with us,” yet Jeremiah exposes their reliance on the pen of the scribes (the Bible experts) who “have twisted it by writing lies” suggesting they distorted or misrepresented the Torah, misleading the people.
This same thing is done today unwittingly and unknowingly when Christian leaders and teachers don’t know The Story. Yet they still teach the New Testament. So they inevitably misinterpret the text.
Knowing the Story prevents this problem. So far, it’s been a tremendous help to Charismatics and Pentecostals who honor the word of God and want to fully understand it. It’s done the same for other denominations and movements in the Christian world.
I explain this in more detail in the many of the interviews I’ve done on the book which your readers can check out here. The interviews delve deeper than this interview. (More interviews will be added to that page in the coming days, so check back.)
Also, we recently launched a visual podcast that goes along with the book. Your readers can check it out at TheUntoldStory.me.
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Category: Biblical Studies, Fall 2025
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