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A review by ronald_schoedel
A History of the Bible: The Book and Its Faiths by John Barton
5.0
I decided to read this book upon hearing it recommended on a BYU Maxwell Institute podcast, as my church is in its quadrennial year-long reading of the Old Testament. The last few years of scripture reading for me have been one of rediscovery after learning about biblical literary genres and what that means for the actual text of the Bible.
Coming from a rather fundamentalist Christian background before becoming LDS, I am familiar with a lot of the arguments in fundamentalist Christian circles in favor of the Bible being inerrant and the only correct way to understand any of it is to be perfectly literal. I’m also quite familiar with the (mostly confined to North America and UK) minority (but not too small) segment of Christianity that believes the 1611 KJV is the literal God-dictated word of God, more so than the underlying Greek and Hebrew texts, and thus inerrant and in no further need of refinement or retranslating. This belief is fairly common in American Baptist churches, for example. If one falls into these camps, one will find this book extremely frustrating and such a one will likely label it heretical.
But if you’ve ever wanted to know how the Bible came to be, how it’s been interpreted over the years, and how Jewish and Christian interpretations of the Old Testament have developed, this book is well worth the couple dozens of hours of reading. I rather enjoyed the Audible version read by Ralph Lister (a British book by a British author [Oxford professor and Church of England priest] ought to sound British!). The subtitle of the UK original edition (“A History of the Bible: The Book and Its Faiths”) better captures the intent of the book, than the US title (“A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book”), as much is said about the various faith traditions and their relationships with the scriptures.
This is useful in that the Jewish understanding of what Christians call the Old Testament turns out to be significantly different to any Christian reading thereof. Christians often assume Jews believe pretty much the same thing but are just waiting for the real messiah to manifest. Truth is Judaism sees the Hebrew Bible (OT) much differently, often because the modern Christian understanding of the OT is read backwards into it, with a belief in the Jesus Christ of the New Testament first and then attempting to figure out how the OT text supports those Christian beliefs.
I particularly appreciated learning about the canonization process of both testaments and the methods scholars used for determining the original texts that would make their way into canon. His explanations of the genres of the various books of the Bible and how they would’ve been understood by the earliest believers illuminates a lot and can help a lot of modern Christians rectify the seeming contradictions between known truths and so-called orthodoxy. For example, a world billions of years old versus young earth creationism: believing in salvation through Jesus doesn’t need you to also believe the universe and everything therein was literally manufactured from nothing in the space of 144 hours. Neither Jews nor early Christians took a literal reading of either of the two different creation stories in Genesis to be literal history and neither should 21st century Christianity.
The Rev Prof Barton helped me to put into coherent order in my mind lots of different ideas I’ve picked up in my studies of the Bible over the last dozen years or so. He also helped me to understand various others’ views of scriptural interpretation, which I believe is valuable from the perspective of finding commonality and community with other Christians outside our own faith tradition or community.
Coming from a rather fundamentalist Christian background before becoming LDS, I am familiar with a lot of the arguments in fundamentalist Christian circles in favor of the Bible being inerrant and the only correct way to understand any of it is to be perfectly literal. I’m also quite familiar with the (mostly confined to North America and UK) minority (but not too small) segment of Christianity that believes the 1611 KJV is the literal God-dictated word of God, more so than the underlying Greek and Hebrew texts, and thus inerrant and in no further need of refinement or retranslating. This belief is fairly common in American Baptist churches, for example. If one falls into these camps, one will find this book extremely frustrating and such a one will likely label it heretical.
But if you’ve ever wanted to know how the Bible came to be, how it’s been interpreted over the years, and how Jewish and Christian interpretations of the Old Testament have developed, this book is well worth the couple dozens of hours of reading. I rather enjoyed the Audible version read by Ralph Lister (a British book by a British author [Oxford professor and Church of England priest] ought to sound British!). The subtitle of the UK original edition (“A History of the Bible: The Book and Its Faiths”) better captures the intent of the book, than the US title (“A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book”), as much is said about the various faith traditions and their relationships with the scriptures.
This is useful in that the Jewish understanding of what Christians call the Old Testament turns out to be significantly different to any Christian reading thereof. Christians often assume Jews believe pretty much the same thing but are just waiting for the real messiah to manifest. Truth is Judaism sees the Hebrew Bible (OT) much differently, often because the modern Christian understanding of the OT is read backwards into it, with a belief in the Jesus Christ of the New Testament first and then attempting to figure out how the OT text supports those Christian beliefs.
I particularly appreciated learning about the canonization process of both testaments and the methods scholars used for determining the original texts that would make their way into canon. His explanations of the genres of the various books of the Bible and how they would’ve been understood by the earliest believers illuminates a lot and can help a lot of modern Christians rectify the seeming contradictions between known truths and so-called orthodoxy. For example, a world billions of years old versus young earth creationism: believing in salvation through Jesus doesn’t need you to also believe the universe and everything therein was literally manufactured from nothing in the space of 144 hours. Neither Jews nor early Christians took a literal reading of either of the two different creation stories in Genesis to be literal history and neither should 21st century Christianity.
The Rev Prof Barton helped me to put into coherent order in my mind lots of different ideas I’ve picked up in my studies of the Bible over the last dozen years or so. He also helped me to understand various others’ views of scriptural interpretation, which I believe is valuable from the perspective of finding commonality and community with other Christians outside our own faith tradition or community.