Van Voorst concludes that non-Christian sources provide "a small but certain corroboration of certain New Testament historical traditions on the family background, time of life, ministry, and death of Jesus", as well as "evidence of the content of Christian preaching that is independent of the New Testament", while extra-biblical Christian sources give access to "some important information about the earliest traditions on Jesus".
He criticised Van Voorst for using divergences from the canonical Gospels as evidence against the historical value of the New Testament apocrypha, but noted that the author usually offered additional grounds for his conclusions.
[5] Helen E. Bond considered Van Voorst's treatment of the New Testament apocrypha particularly strong,[6] while Curt Niccum found his book generally useful but least good on Jewish literature.
Thomas O'Loughlin, while concluding that the book was up-to-date and generally balanced, thought that an apologetic agenda had led Van Voorst to place the New Testament "almost outside of history" and to simplistically classify non-canonical Christian texts as "gnostic".
[9] On the other hand, some reviewers in Evangelical journals criticised what they saw as an over-skeptical attitude towards the New Testament,[10][11] in one case recommending works by F. F. Bruce and Gary Habermas as superior in this respect.