A History of the Bible
The Book and Its Faiths
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4.3 • 6 Ratings
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
WINNER OF THE 2019 DUFF COOPER PRIZE
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
'With emotional and psychological insight, Barton unlocks this sleeping giant of our culture. In the process, he has produced a masterpiece.' Sunday Times
The Bible is the central book of Western culture. For the two faiths which hold it sacred, it is the bedrock of their religion, a singular authority on what to believe and how to live. For non-believers too, it has a commanding status: it is one of the great works of world literature, woven to an unparalleled degree into our language and thought.
This book tells the story of the Bible, explaining how it came to be constructed and how it has been understood, from its remote beginnings down to the present. John Barton describes how the narratives, laws, proverbs, prophecies, poems and letters which comprise the Bible were written and when, what we know - and what we cannot know - about their authors and what they might have meant, as well as how these extraordinarily disparate writings relate to each other. His incisive readings shed new light on even the most familiar passages, exposing not only the sources and traditions behind them, but also the busy hands of the scribes and editors who assembled and reshaped them. Untangling the process by which some texts which were regarded as holy, became canonical and were included, and others didn't, Barton demonstrates that the Bible is not the fixed text it is often perceived to be, but the result of a long and intriguing evolution.
Tracing its dissemination, translation and interpretation in Judaism and Christianity from Antiquity to the rise of modern biblical scholarship, Barton elucidates how meaning has both been drawn from the Bible and imposed upon it. Part of the book's originality is to illuminate the gap between religion and scripture, the ways in which neither maps exactly onto the other, and how religious thinkers from Augustine to Luther and Spinoza have reckoned with this. Barton shows that if we are to regard the Bible as 'authoritative', it cannot be as believers have so often done in the past.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Barton (The Bible: The Basics), editor-in-chief of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion, provides a clear, comprehensive look at "the story of the Bible from its remote beginnings in folklore and myth to its reception and interpretation in the present day." Barton writes with a jargon-free style, surveying in simple language what is known and not known about when the Hebrew Bible was written. He adopts a non-fundamentalist position that concludes that the account of the origins of the Israelites "was, at best, folk-memory," given that they were recorded centuries after the events they describe. He offers a similar scholarly look at the dating of the writing of the Gospels and at how those texts have been interpreted over the centuries. That analysis supports his contention that no versions of either Judaism or Christianity "correspond point by point to the contents of the Bible," despite fundamentalists' claims to the contrary. Barton notes, for example, that observant Judaism's dietary restrictions and Christianity's doctrine of the Trinity go far beyond what the texts of the Bible state. He concludes that freedom of interpretation and commitment to religious faith are complementary, rather than antithetical. Barton's rigorous, accessible history will appeal to academics and general readers alike.
