The Bible: A Biography (Books That Changed the World) : Book

This Hardcover Book item from Atlantic Monthly Press was reviewed on 23-Oct-2008.

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1) Hardcover Book The Bible: A Biography (Books That Changed the World) by Atlantic Monthly Press. This book provides an overview of the story of the Bible, not the text itself, but how it was written, how the canon was selected and how it has been interpreted and used over the centuries. Spanning the millennia from the writing to the present, it gives a view of the place of the Bible in the world that is often missing when reading about a particular book or thene of the Scriptures.

Author Karen Armstrong introduces, or reminds, the reader, about the sources of the Old and New Testament, the multiple authors of Isaiah and the way the Bible shaped the Jewish self-image. As it progresses, she cites comments by many writers, Christian and Jewish, including Sts. Augustine and Jerome, Martin Luther and many others.

I have read a fair amount about the Bible (see my Listmania, "Thinking of God") but I learned things I had not previously known. From my perspective, telling the story in a continuum is the most helpful aspect of this book. For one who has studied the Bible less deeply, it will provide a good introduction.
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2) Hardcover Book The Bible: A Biography (Books That Changed the World) by Atlantic Monthly Press. A good knowledge of the Bible, I think, is required to really follow and understand all the historical facts jammed into the middle of this small book. But if you don´t know the Bible well and slog on through this book anyway you will still gain a general impression of how long, rich and complex the history of the development of the Bible is. It is actually many books written by many different people in different settings for different purposes. It has been significantly edited by other people. It is full of paradoxes. It is still changing (its meaning). That is it is inexhaustible (books like this and many others still written today prove that). For the author it is a scripture written by men; to others it is the word of God.
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3) Hardcover Book The Bible: A Biography (Books That Changed the World) by Atlantic Monthly Press. I quite liked parts of this book, but parts were appalling, in factual and discursive content. Karen Armstrong is a well respected religious writer, whose sincerity and efforts to bring different beliefs together in harmony cannot be doubted. All the more disappointing that she gets so much wrong in her latest effort.
One good test of a non-fiction work is to examine the dating of the source material quoted by the author. For the first part of the book, which deals with the Hebrew version of biblical accounts, her references tend to be from 20-25 years ago and are not in tune with latest scholarship. For instance she gets the dating of Abraham, and the Exodus wrong, talks about Palestine in the time of the Greeks, and says the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1942! Current thinking puts the Exodus around 1200 BCE and the first of the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947. Armstrong clearly has a limited knowledge of the Qumran Community and so-called Essenes, indicated by her thinking that they did not have a coherent vision of beliefs, and continued to worship at the Temple. That is quite wrong. Their corpus of sectarian texts has a commonality of style and purpose and repeated cross referencing. They hated the Temple in Jerusalem and kept away from it.

As she moves into the Christian era, her scholarship becomes stronger, as one would expect from a former Catholic nun. One has to admire her breadth of knowledge of the New Testament texts and Christian history. If only she would refrain from being so dogmatic in some of her assertions, and admit of the lack of certainty on so many issues she seems to take as gospel. As the book progresses we drift more and more away from a Biography of the Bible into a highly knowledgeable, and often interesting dissertation, on commentary from outside sources. There are diversions into, what can only be described as backwaters of Bible evolution, like Kabbalah, which she, in my view, gives far too much prominence to. The Bible has certainly been an evolving creation, and she rightly comments that Talmudic studies continue this evolutionary process. I would contend that the Koran is an evolutionary development of the Bible and as such should have been a major consideration in assessing the Hebrew-Christian texts. From someone who has done so much valuable work in Muslim areas, in helping to bring ideas and people together this is an even more surprising omission.

Books by well-known authors tend to be viewed automatically as being as good as their predecessor. They should be viewed on their own merits, and this book is lacking in comparison to her previous works. It also reflects poorly on the editors of Atlantic Books as well as the back cover reviewers; Hugh MacDonald, of the Glasgow Herald; Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Sunday Times; Edward Norman, Literary Review. They are clearly not experts in this field, although one could equally blame their editors for asking them to review such a complex work. Would you ask a gereralist to review a book on gardening? Better to ask the gardening columnist, or if there isn´t one, bring in an expert from outside.
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4) Hardcover Book The Bible: A Biography (Books That Changed the World) by Atlantic Monthly Press. This is a book that requires undivided attention as you read. The author is brilliant but sometimes it is hard for those less brilliant to grasp what she is saying. I have read it for a discussion group in which I was participating and it has helped me to grasp the content better because of a good leader and other group members.¤

5) Hardcover Book The Bible: A Biography (Books That Changed the World) by Atlantic Monthly Press. The hopes and fears of all my years of Bible study have been met in this book!

Mostly it gave me a new appreciation for the strong influence of the Jewish faith and its practices of scriptural interpretation (exegesis and midrash) on the creation of the New Testament. It cleared up misconceptions I have long held (as a by-product of the commonly held Christian belief in the New Testament as fulfilment of the Old Testament, which indeed was the initial mindset of the New Testament authors) that the Jews have always been looking for a Messiah. According to Armstrong, this was only a minor theme in the Jewish scriptures until the period just before the advent of Jesus.

She also points out that the catalyst for writing of the New Testament was the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. That Zionism was originally a secular movement. And alerted me to the extremes American Christian fundamentalism is taking. Scary. But the book is well balanced by the hopes of many thoughtful religious scholars.
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6) Hardcover Book The Bible: A Biography (Books That Changed the World) by Atlantic Monthly Press.

As the work at the heart of Christianity, the Bible is the spiritual guide for one out of every three people in the world. It is also the world’s most widely distributed book, translated into over two thousand languages, and the world’s best selling book, year after year. But the Bible is a complex work with a complicated and obscure history. Made up of sixty-six “books” written by various authors and divided into two testaments, its contents have changed over the centuries. The Bible has been transformed by translation and, through interpretation, has developed manifold meanings to various religions, denominations, and sects. In this seminal account, acclaimed historian Karen Armstrong discusses the conception, gestation, and life of history’s most powerful book. Armstrong analyzes the social and political situation in which oral history turned into written scripture, how this all-pervasive scripture was collected into one work, and how it became accepted as Christianity’s sacred text. She explores how scripture came to be read for information, and how, in the nineteenth century, historical criticism of the Bible caused greater fear than Darwinism. This is a brilliant, captivating book, crucial in an age of declining faith and rising fundamentalism.

Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 20-Nov-2008, 08711396939780871139696, 910-420-100-930-62B-RIB-XAB-8

The Bible: A Biography (Books That Changed the World)

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