Honest book about the bible

GBSJG

I just finished reading the WTS book "The Bible - God's Word or Man's?" and I'm now looking for a book that will handle this matter from a more honest viewpoint.

So I'm not looking for an all positive book about the Bible or an all negative book about the Bible. But a book that discusses evidence that supports the bible but also evidence the contradicts it.

Can anyone recommend such a book to me?

drew sagan

Well, I think that is going to be a hard find. So much that has to deal with the Bible is polarized material, trying to pull you into one corner or the other.
Many on the forum have enjoyed Bart Ehrmans books. Although some try to make more out of what he is saying than is really there, for the most part they are pretty good books. He tends to focus on our views of what the Bible is and how when looking at the original texts and contridictions you sometimes get a differant picture than what we normally think of.

Terry

http://www.jbooks.com/interviews/index/IP_Kress_Bloom.htm

Jesus and Yahweh is a stunningly fresh book

Re: Jehovah (or Yaweh)

Yet you seem to have a certain affinity...He interests me greatly. I say toward the end of the book, I would like to tell him to just go away, since he's gone away anyway, but it isn't that easy. I end the book on a rather wistful note. There may be a little irony in the wistfulness, but I well remember the last sentence in the book, and it's very deliberately the last sentence, speaking of Yahweh it says, "Will he yet make a covenant with us that he both can and will keep?"

You also describe a certain playfulness or impishness that you seem to have a soft spot for.There's a kind of scamp in there. But he also goes violently crazy as he leads the Israelite host in that ridiculous, mad 40 years [of] wandering through the wilderness, trekking back and forth. He gets crazier and crazier and the poor things get crazier and crazier. One of my favorite passages in the book is what I am talking about—the ridiculous attempt on the part, first, of the neo-Platonizing Jews like Philo of Alexandria, and then later the high rabbinical sages, to get rid of what they might call the anthropomorphic element and say he isn't a man, he isn't a human, he doesn't do certain things, since it's made very clear that he's walking down the road frequently, that he's picnicking, that he's doing this, that, and the other thing, that he's burying Moses with his own hands, he is closing the door of the Ark with his own hands, and so on.

Yahweh is not a theological God. Theology is Greek, as the word itself indicates. Yahweh is a human, all-too-human, much, much-too-human God, and very scary. He is irascible, he's difficult, he's unpredictable, and he himself doesn't seem to know what he is doing

Jesus:

As for Jesus, there isn't any single Jesus. There are Jesuses and Jesuses and Jesuses and Jesuses. Indeed, here in the United States, it seems to me that every professed Christian has her or his own Jesus, just as every supposed scholar in that mad, quixotic quest (rather pathetic) for the historical Jesus, they always come up with a reflection of themselves in a concave mirror, a kind of distorted image of themselves.

Seeker4

Try this one: Don't Know Much About the Bible : Everything You Need to Know About the Bible But Never Learned - Kenneth C. Davis.
I heard Davis interviewed about this book. It's easy to read, yet scholarly, and not written from a religious viewpoint.

Enjoy.
S4

magdelaine

Try this one: Pathways in Scripture. It's from a Catholic perspective but then the bible is a Catholic book.

And if you are interested in how the earliest Christians practiced Christianity, try this book: The Fathers of the Church: An Introduction to the First Christian Teachers
Oh, and I had to add The How-To Book of the Bible. It clarifies a lot of issues. Check out the reviews!

God bless!