GOSPEL CHARACTERS, The Personalities Around Jesus; by Leonard Griffith; Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1976; 192 pp., $3.95 (paper). 

The author, a member of the clergy staff at St. Paul’s Church in Toronto, originally published this book in England in 1920. The book gives character sketches of sixteen of the most important people whose lives were connected with the life of Christ while on earth. The book is sometimes interesting reading, sometimes incorrect, sometimes speculative, sometimes theologically unsound. It is always a danger when writing character sketches of Biblical people to engage in speculation and to go beyond what Scripture has chosen to reveal to us. This book has not avoided that danger.