Dr. Robert Sumner passed away in December 2016. The Biblical Evangelist newspaper is no longer being published and the ministry of Biblical Evangelism has ceased operation.

The remaining inventory of his books and gospel tracts was transferred to The Baptist Tabernacle of Los Angeles and may be ordered here.

The Beatles, The Bible And Bodega Bay: My Long and Winding Road
Ken Mansfield

We will open this review with a word about the author, who grew up on an Indian reservation, yet appears well qualified to write this book. He spent most of his life in the entertainment field and has been on a first-name basis with many of its musical leading lights, a number of who were his clients, and is a Grammy-winning producer. He was climbing to corporate heights as a young Capitol Records executive when he was handpicked to become the manager of the new Beatles’ Apple Record label, causing him to have frequent contact with the Fab Four, as they were called back then.

This is a strange and intriguing book from several aspects. We admit to requesting a review copy because the first part of the title was so intriguing. The Beatles and the Bible? To us, the “Beatles and Transcendental Meditation and Guru Cultist Leaders” would surely seem more appropriate. At the start of the book, telling of his first trip to meet the Beatles on their own turf, he says, “God, I’m scared.” At the end of the book, after being told he has incurable cancer, he is looking out over Bodega Bay, watching the sunset, clutching his Bible, and with thanksgiving in his heart, says, “God, I’m no longer scared.”

Is Mansfield a born-again Christian? There seemed little doubt in our mind as we read the book, saw his complete faith in the Word of God (high view) and the God of the Word (personal commitment in salvation), and enjoyed snippets of his testimony. That he was not a Christian during his Beatle days is clear. From the human viewpoint, he attributes his conversion to his current wife, Connie. As deeply as she loved him, she broke off their relationship because of the “unequal yoke” and it brought him to his senses.

Apparently he has come a long way since his pre-conversion days. Even so, we scratched our head over some of his spiritual insights. And he speaks more highly of Catholicism than we would, even swallowing the pope’s argument that Peter was “the rock the church was to be built on.” Horrors! And he is enamored with the paraphrase posing as a Bible, Taylor’s so-called “Living Bible.” We are not.

The story is told in yo-yo form. By that I mean one chapter deals with events during his Beatle days and the next chapter will be 20 or 30 years later and relate to Bodega Bay (where the author now lives). The next chapter will go back to Beatle stuff and the following chapter at the Bay. This is probably a good way to do it – even though it gives the appearance of being two separate books – because there is no way one can intelligently connect the Beatles to the Bible. Our understanding is that they were wild, wicked, immoral, profane, and active participants in the liquor and drug culture.

In fact, we will do a “take” on one of the author’s comments. Talking about Peter Brown’s book, The Love You Make, and his “dark-side approach…to events and to the Beatles themselves,” he concluded, “I think there must have been two John Lennons – I never met his!” That is how we felt in reading this book as Mansfield described these humble, gentle, gracious, loving and caring stars. He is especially kind in his references to John, whom we always considered the worst of the perverse, saying he always wore his heart on his sleeve and from it “there was always a gentle hand extended that willingly and naturally wanted to reach out to everyone around him.”

In our opinion, the Beatles described in this book are nothing like the Beatles we observed and wrote about over the years. We can only echo, “There must be two Beatles’ groups; I never met his!”

The John Lennon we wrote about told Maureen Cleave of London’s Evening Standard, “We are more popular than Jesus now,” and he predicted, “Christianity will go.” The Beatles we wrote about had teen-age girls in their hotel rooms by the score, many of them, according to the police, underage juveniles. Derek Taylor, long a press office with the group – and mentioned frequently in this book – described the boys: “It’s incredible, absolutely incredible. Here are these four boys from Liverpool. They’re rude, they’re profane, they’re vulgar, and they’ve taken over the world. It’s as if they’d founded a new religion. They’re completely anti-Christ. I mean, I’m anti-Christ as well, but they’re so anti-Christ they shock me, which isn’t an easy thing.”

Permit one more illustration: Maureen Cleave, of the London Evening Standard, quoting Paul McCartney: “I don’t feel I have to be religious. I may need it as I grow older to comfort me when I’m dying. But now, as far as I’m concerned, I can rot.” Alas, he never grew old and he never had any biblical religion to “comfort” him. The stalker’s bullet ended any hope of repentance and hurled him into eternity.

Like we said, “There must be two Beatles’ groups,” the one Mansfield pictures and the one presented to the world over the years. Mansfield does not deal with these things in his book; quite the contrary, he admits his “view of the Beatles and Apple is totally jaded.” He does say, “I am personally offended by the disproportionate amount of negative verbiage written about other areas of [John’s] brilliant life.” So we assume that feeling would relate to this review. We would like to think Mansfield’s is the true portrait, but it involves too much of a leap of faith for us! And he remains, if we understood him correctly, an undiminished, loyal-to-the-end, fan of rock ‘n’ roll.

You may want to take this review in light of an honest confession: I am no Beatle fan. I never was, I never will be, and there is nothing about this book that would cause me to change my mind. Sorry about that, kids. At the same time, I have sought to honestly evaluate the book; it is a mixed bag of good and evil.

Oh, yes. There are a number of beautiful full-color pictures of the Bodega Bay area, as well as numerous shots of the Beatles (individually and collectively, some never before published). We liked the Bodega Bay ones!

Broadman & Holman

Nashville, TN

43 Chapters

307 Pages

$24.99