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Timothy Paul Jones (born January 16, 1973) is an American Christian scholar of apologetics and ecclesiology. He is also the C. Edwin Gheens Professor of Christian Family Ministry at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He has advocated the contemporary retrieval of ancient Christian apologetics.^[1]

Early Life and Education

Born in Mansfield, Missouri to the family of a rural pastor, Jones graduated from Manhattan Christian College (B.A., Biblical Studies).^[2]^[3] He continued his studies at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, earning the M.Div. in 1996.^[4] He completed his doctoral studies at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and received his Ph.D. in 2008.^[5]

After graduation, Jones served as pastor of different churches in Missouri and Oklahoma. He then transferred to Southern Baptist Theological Seminary as a member of its faculty. He currently serves as the institution's chair of the Department of Apologetics, Ethics and Philosophy.

Works

Jones has promoted the practice of apologetics to address the issue of church relevance today. He draws from church history in explaining how apologetics addressed cultural hostility to the church in the past and how it can also be applied today.^[6] He maintained that faith has been considered immoral or harmful in the past but Christianity flourished due to the contribution of apologetics.^[6] Modern churches, for Jones, can also learn from these experiences to survive a secular and post-Christian culture. Here, he emphasized the importance of the concept of resurrection. He explained that, “when the resurrection is not central in apologetics, the practice of apologetics can turn into a bad game of theological trivia”.^[6]

As a scholar, Jones also examined modern theological texts. An example is his critique of the work, A New New Testament, the work of a group of scholars and religious leaders that added ten new texts to the New Testament in an attempt to provide more context to the Christian canon.^[7] According to Jones, the new texts did not add anything of note because they came from a different time period and represent a fundamentally different world view.^[7]

Jones had published more than twenty books including the Christian Booksellers Association bestseller, The Da Vinci Codebreaker (Bethany House, 2006) and Misquoting Truth (IVP Academic, 2007) the first book-length scholarly response to Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman. The foreword of his 2007 book Conspiracies and the Cross was penned by Dinesh D'Souza. Recently, he has written on ethnic diversity in the church in the book In Church as It Is in Heaven, which has been featured in Publishers Weekly.

References

^ Hearn, Travis. (2023). We’re all apologists now, Jones says in annual faculty address at Southern Seminary. The Christian Index. https://christianindex.org/stories/were-all-apologists-now-jones-says-in-annual-faculty-address-at-southern-seminary,44366
^ Jones, Timothy Paul (2007). Hullabaloo: Discovering Glory in Everyday Life. Colorado Springs, CO: Cook Communications Ministries. ISBN 978-0-7814-4483-5
^ Jones, Timothy Paul. (2003). An analysis of the relationship between Fowlerian stage-development and self-assessed maturity in Christian faithfulness among evangelical Christians. Dissertation. https://repository.sbts.edu/bitstream/handle/10392/243/3120603.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
^ Jones, Timothy Paul (2012). Christian History Made Easy: Leader Guide. Torrance, CA: Rose Publishing Inc. p. 5. ISBN 978-1-59636-527-8
^ The Gospel Coalition. (n.d.). Moral evil and the problem of evil. Video lecture series. https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/course/moral-truth-and-the-problem-of-evil/#course-introduction
^ ^a ^b ^c Cockes, Timothy. (2023). Every believer’s an apologist, professional apologists say. https://www.baptistpress.com/resource-library/news/every-believers-an-apologist-professional-apologists-say/
^ ^a ^b Bell, Caleb. (2013). Scholars piece together a ‘new’ New Testament. https://religionnews.com/2013/03/28/scholars-piece-together-a-new-new-testament/