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?

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.

(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.

PR

Emily Gardiner Neal in 1975.
Source: Wheaton Archives & Special Collections

Emily Gardiner Neal was born in 1911 to a well-to-do family and reared in New York City. She was educated at a private high school for girls in New York City and the David Mannes College of Music, also in New York. She intended to become a concert violinist. Emily’s parents were openly atheistic, and what Emily knew of Christianity was from hearsay. In 1930, Emily married a Naval Academy graduate, Alvin Neal. He too was an atheist. Emily later related that during their courtship they spent many hours talking about the possibility of God’ existence – a sign of their religious longings.

After his required time in the peace-time Navy of the 1930’s, Alvin became a businessman and moved his family to Argentina and later the Netherlands West Indies. But before the beginning of World War II, the family returned to the United States and settled in Pittsburgh. At the outbreak of the War, Alvin reentered the Navy and served as an officer aboard the aircraft Carrier USS Ranger.

How she became a Christian and an anointed minister of healing prayer is an amazing story of God’s providential choreography. In 1954, her neighbor asked her to drive her to an Episcopal church for a healing service, as her own car was in repair. Emily did the favor and stayed for the service. What she saw utterly amazed her, there seemed to be several instant healings, including a large goiter disappearing. Despite what she had seen, Emily suspected some sort of fraud in the healing service and determined to carefully examine the issue of spiritual healing with all of the reporting and critical skills she had developed. Her objective was to expose as fraudulent the healing claims being made by Christian healing ministers of the era.

The diagnosis had been based on an extensive series of X rays, bronchoscopy, and sputum tests – all positive. As a result, the patient scheduled for resection of five ribs and removal of the affected lung.

Shortly before the operation was to be performed, the patient attended a healing service and claimed a cure. When returned to the hospital for final examination prior to surgery, a repetition of the previously conducted tests revealed no evidence of lung cancer. He was dismissed from the hospital, and is today in robust health. The medical explanation was, again, mistaken diagnosis.[5]

On one occasion Alvin accompanied Emily to an interview of a patient cured of cancer. Emily related what happened in the car after the interview: “I heard Alvin clear his throat and say: ‘You know, there may be something to this work you’re doing, after all. Did You notice the radiance – the strange luminosity of that man’s face? I don’t know how to explain what I felt in him. All I’m sure of is that that man been touched by something I don’t know anything about.’”[6]

Alvin came to fully support her healing ministry.

Mrs. Neal’s book, A Reporter Finds God should be considered among the top dozen works in the literature of Christian healing. Her concern for the skeptically minded of her day was manifested in her careful attention to the data of documented healings and her methodical procedures. Her story of leaving skepticism behind would be an eye opener to today’s generation of skeptics.[7] (Hint: it would make an excellent gift to a skeptical/agnostic relative or friend – readily available at used book sites).

A Reporter Finds God was immensely successful, it was reprinted at least 15 times by 1965. After its launch Emily decided to learn more about Christianity, not just the healing ministry. She entered seminary and completed a degree in theology. Mrs. Neal then attended the Pittsburgh Pastoral Institute and was permitted to take courses open only to clergy, such as pastoral counseling. In fact, she became an effective and active Christian counselor for the rest of her life.

Shortly afterward, Mrs. Neal was invited to her first healing mission in Wisconsin. There she was asked to participate in the laying on of hands. It was the first time for her. Her respect for the Church’s authority prompted her to phone Bishop Pardue, her bishop in Philadelphia, to ask what to do – he gave her permission to do so, and this began her personal healing ministry.

In 1957 the editor of Prentice Hall asked her to write her second book, and the result was God Can Heal You Now, which came out in 1958.[9] Mrs. Neal’s orthodoxy and healing anointing was widely recognized and requests to speak and to lead healing missions poured in. This served to distance her from her career as a successful magazine writer. She tried to resist the pull away from being a reporter which she enjoyed doing and had done so well. But the love of the Lord drew her to His work. The Lord Is Our Healer [10] was published in 1961 and her recognition as an outstanding author and speaker of the healing ministry continued to grow.

Along with three bishops, three priests, and two physicians she served on the Joint Commission on the Ministry of Healing appointed at the 1961 General Convention of the Episcopal Church to study the Church’s ministry of healing. The Commission’s report, which strongly affirmed the reality and need of the Church’s healing mission, was submitted to the General Convention of 1964, was unanimously approved by both the House of Bishops and the House of Deputies. This proved to be a boost to the prestige and acceptability of the healing ministry among Episcopal clergymen. Of course, the report was no guarantee that the liberal-Sadducaical clergymen, of which there were many in the Episcopal Church, would accept or act upon the report. As it turned out, the Episcopal Church continued to be a denomination where many of its churches had no healing ministry at all and mostly continued their journey to destructive liberal theologies.

In 1966, she was asked by The Rev. Dr. John Baiz to lead weekly healing services and counsel at Calvary Church in Pittsburgh. This she did for ten years, along with traveling widely on missions throughout the United States and abroad and continuing to write books about healing prayer. Mrs. Neal’s theology has many parallels with the that of Mrs. Agnes Sanford, and much influenced by her work. For instance, Emily practiced inner healing prayer in her counseling ministry. Mrs. Neal also followed Mrs. Sanford in appreciating the value of sacramental confession in healing. Also, like Mrs. Sanford, Mrs. Neal welcomed the charismatic renewal and its boost to the healing ministry, but like her mentor expressed reservations about its sometimes over-exuberant manifestations.[11]

The works of these two women overlapped and might be classed among the first generation of orthodox Christian works on healing that were readily available to the public. True, the whole generation Anglican/Episcopal clergymen and women such as Pearcy Dearmer and Ethel Banks had done great work, as did the multiple Pentecostal healers from the 1900s on. But they published in the era before WWII, when most American cities did not have even a single bookstore, and books had to be ordered by mail, thus their works were limited in circulation. But in the post-War era, bookstores and the paperback industry exploded and the book of Mrs. Neal and Mrs. Sanford were able to reach mass audiences.[12]

Mrs. Neal moved in 1976 to Cincinnati, where she lived on the grounds of the Convent of the Transfiguration, an Episcopal community of nuns. She was ordained a deacon in January 1978. In Cincinnati, she served on the staff of St. Thomas Episcopal Church as Deacon, leading weekly healing services and counseling. At the Convent she also functioned as deacon and led a monthly healing service and counseled weekly. In 1987, the Episcopal Healing Ministry Foundation was formed. This allowed Mrs. Neal and several of her Episcopal friends to specifically carry out the work of training and equipping Episcopalians in the healing ministry. She served as its president until her death on September 23, 1989.

PR

This chapter is an excerpt from William De Arteaga, Anglican Healing Awakenings: Saints, Heroes, and Villains (Christos Publishing, 2024). Used with permission.

Notes

[1] Emily Gardiner Neal, A Reporter Finds God Through Spiritual Healing (New York Morehouse-Barlow,1956). To date there has been no book length biography of Mrs. Gardiner Neal. I have depended for biographical information on two sources, Anne Cassel’s brief article in Sharing, “Emily Gardiner Neal’s Story,” (Dec. 1989) 18-22, and the biographical fact sheet found at the archives of Wheaton College, “Emily Gardiner Neal.” https://archives.wheaton.edu/repositories/5/resources/1019 Sourced 1/10/2024.

[2] Mrs. Neal’s numerous books are readily available on Amazon and on online used book sites such as abebooks.com. A very useful anthology of her Christian writings is Emily Gardiner Neal, Anne Cassel, ed. The Reluctant Healer: One Woman’s Journey of Faith (Colorado Springs: Shaw, 1992).

[3] William James, Varieties of Religious Experiences (New York: Modern Library, 1902).

[4] See my discussion of this in my work, Agnes Sanford and Her Companions, Chapter 23.

[5] Neal, A Reporter, 37.

[6] Emily Gardiner Neal, In the Midst of Life (New York: Hawthorn, 1963). 23.

[7] See for instance “Forward to a skeptic,” in: Emily Gadiner Neal, Where There is Smoke; The Mystery of Christian Healing (NY: Morehouse-Barlow, 1967) 5-14.

[8] I have written extensively on the pivotal importance of Mrs. Sanford and her writings. See The Pneuma Review articles which summarize my work on her. “Agnes Sanford, Apostle of Healing,” The Pneuma Review, Posted June 15, 2016. http://pneumareview.com/agnes-sanford-apostle-of-healing-and-first-theologian-of-the-charismatic-renewal/

[9] Emily Gardiner Neal, God Can Heal You Now (Englewood-Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1958).

[10] Emily Gardiner Neal, The Lord is Our Healer (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1961).

[11] Neal, Our Healer, 39.

[12] WWII changed that through the massive publication of quality books as cheap paperbacks for the GI’s and created a large reading public. Applebaum, Yoni. “Publishers Gave Away 122,951,031 Books During World War II” The Atlantic, September 10, 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/09/publishers-gave-away-122951031-books-during-world-war-ii/379893/

John MacArthur, Strange Fire: The Danger of Offending the Holy Spirit with Counterfeit Worship (Nashville, TN: Nelson Books, 2013), 333 pages, ISBN 9781400206414.

Introduction

In this highly polemical book, John MacArthur argues that as an aggressive though “counterfeit” form of Christian spirituality, the global Pentecostal-Charismatic movement is neither founded on nor representative of orthodox Christian doctrine. He claims it has infiltrated and is undermining orthodox Christianity with “counterfeit” theologies, worship beliefs, and practices—all emerging from its heretical doctrine of the Holy Spirit. MacArthur’s stated purpose for writing this book is to therefore galvanize the “evangelical church” in concerted condemnation against its existence, and honour the Holy Spirit by ridding the evangelical church of the movement’s influence, thus leading to the recovery of correct doctrines of the Holy Spirit.

Having read some highly constructive reviews and responses emerging on MacArthur’s book, in this review, I will hopefully avoid covering matters already well addressed, and provide critique on issues perhaps not adequately touched. I will begin first however with a thematic survey on the book’s content.

Survey

In sermonic style, MacArthur begins his treatise by setting forth the Pentateuchal narrative on Nadab and Abihu’s priestly offering of “strange fire” and God’s judgement against them, as his controlling metaphor for exposing the demonically sourced errors of Pentecostal/Charismatic spirituality that have infiltrated Evangelical Christianity. MacArthur then structures his book into three parts. In Part One (“Confronting a Counterfeit Revival”), MacArthur pursues two basic objectives. First (chapter 1) is to establish that the “systemic” reason for the Pentecostal-Charismatic movement’s existence as a false form of Christian spirituality, is its elevation of “religious experience over biblical truth.” (pp. 16-17). He then argues that at the heart of this aberration is the movement’s historical foundation upon a “deficient soteriology,” which conversely fosters this elevation of experience. Here, MacArthur directly blames the soteriological themes of 19th century Holiness Movement teachings (p. 27).

MacArthur moreover charges that this deficient soteriology under girded the preaching of early Pentecostal leaders, particularly that of Charles Parham. While stressing the dubious nature of Parham’s life and ministry, MacArthur argues that we acknowledge him as the originating founder of the Pentecostal/Charismatic movement—in order to jeopardize the theological “legitimacy” of the whole movement (p. 26-28). MacArthur moreover argues that equally responsible for the “theological foundations” of the movement is E.W. Kenyon, whose seminal Word of Faith doctrine MacArthur stresses, is rooted in a synthesis of various early 20th century “New Thought” metaphysical teachings (pp. 28-31). Hence, in MacArthur’s construal of Pentecostal historiography, Parham and Kenyon together “are responsible for the theological foundations upon which the entire charismatic system is built,” and together represent its dubious “historical roots.” Hence, in MacArthur’s construal of Pentecostal historiography, the doctrinal and moral errors of Parham and Kenyon together establish the dubious theological underpinnings of Pentecostalism and the Charismatic Movement (p. 31).

MacArthur’s second pursued objective of Part One (chapters 3 and 4) is to critique Pentecostal-Charismatic spirituality via Jonathan Edwards’ “distinguishing marks” of genuine spiritual renewal (e.g., “The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God”). MacArthur thereby argues that Pentecostal-Charismatic spirituality is neither birthed by nor honouring to the Holy Spirit. To argue this MacArthur alleges that the movement shifts people away from Christ by its false doctrines, worship practices and experiences wrongly attributed to the Holy Spirit (pp. 53), and through its fostering of immorality via its emphasis on miracles and prosperity gospel teaching. (pp. 60, 65-66). Crucial also to this critique, is MacArthur’s allegations that Pentecostal/Charismatic spirituality moreover undermines Scriptural authority by encouraging believers to seek extra biblical revelation (pp. 67-68), thus elevating false experiences of God over Scriptural and doctrinal truth (pp. 71-72). Finally, MacArthur charges that Pentecostal-Charismatic spirituality fails to produce genuine love amongst believers (pp. 74-76), which MacArthur roots to the movement’s narcissistic blending of “mysticism” (via charismatic worship practices) to the “materialism of prosperity theology” (p. 78). MacArthur concluding verdict is that Pentecostals and Charismatics are “playing with strange fire” (p. 81).