The man who introduced me to A.B. Bruce and his classic masterpiece, The Training of the Twelve, was Dr. Howard Hendricks, the late distinguished professor and lecturer at Dallas Theological Seminary. I was a senior in college when I heard several recorded lectures by Dr. Hendricks on Christian discipleship which significantly impacted my life. Included in his lecture content were references to two books that had virtually shaped his life and worldwide ministry. One was Dedication and Leadership by Douglas Hyde, a former Marxist, news editor of the London Daily Worker, and member of the Communist Party in Great Britain. Hyde described the Communist mechanics of instilling dedication and a willingness to sacrifice as prerequisites for leadership. Hendricks said he read this book once a year “just to keep my perspective.” The second was The Training of the Twelve, considered by most scholars to be the best work ever written about how Jesus trained the Twelve and equipped them to spread the gospel throughout the world. Almost immediately, I obtained copies of both works and began to slowly allow the ideas and concepts to firmly take root in my mind and heart.

The difficulty I had in reading Bruce’s classic work came as a great surprise to me. As one of Europe’s leading New Testament scholars and apologists for the Christian faith in the 19th century, his sentence structure, cultural and political understanding, historical knowledge, geographical references, and remarkable insights into who Jesus was and how He trained the twelve Apostles was, frankly, above my level of reading at the time. Four years later, I was unable to put Howard Hendricks’ recommendation out of my mind and reached for Bruce once again. This time, however, my strong determination and desire to see for myself why this book had been so important to Dr. Hendricks fueled my way through to the very end. Unfortunately, I also realized that, for all the reasons listed above, most people would probably never access this great treasure on the life of our Lord.

Challenged by the Board of Directors of the Jackson Institute, I prayerfully accepted the task of editing Bruce’s classic work and began the three-year journey (1993-1996) of re-writing The Training of the Twelve into modern English. My goal was to ensure that Dr. Bruce’s work was preserved and unchanged in content while making it more accessible to a broader reading audience.

In October, 2002, thirty years after listening to his recordings on discipleship, I met Dr. Hendricks and had the privilege of thanking him personally for the impact he had made on my life and ministry through his teaching and books. During our conversation, he shared that he had read The Training of the Twelve (545 pages) 39 times, and that no book outside the Bible had shaped his life more than this one.

Written in 1871, The Training of the Twelve contains rare insights about our Lord’s primary strategy of spending time with twelve uneducated and untrained men to prepare them to take the gospel of grace to the ends of the earth. After more than 140 years, this book has stood the test of time and has been instrumental in transforming the lives of thousands of men and women who have seen Jesus as never before and are now committed to following Him and His plan for world evangelization.

Alexander Balmain Bruce (1831-1899) was born at Aberargie near Perth on January 31, 1831. Showing exceptional ability as a young student, he was educated in Edinburgh and later ordained as a minister in the Free Church of Scotland. After serving as an assistant, first at Ancrum, then at Lochwinnoch, he was called to Cardross in Dumbartonshire in 1859 and to Broughty Ferry in 1868. While there, he published his first considerable exegetical work, The Training of the Twelve, in 1871.

In 1874 Dr. Bruce delivered his Cunningham Lectures, afterwards published as The Humiliation of Christ and, in the following year, was appointed to the chair of Apologetics and New Testament Exegesis at the Free Church College, Glasgow. He held this post for twenty-four years. Bruce was one of the first British New Testament professors whose work was favorably received by German scholars. The character and work of Christ were, he held, the ultimate proof and the best defense of Christianity.