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Reddit mentions of How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now
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Reddit mentions: 10
We found 10 Reddit mentions of How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now. Here are the top ones.
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| Height | 9 Inches |
| Length | 6 Inches |
| Number of items | 1 |
| Release date | October 2008 |
| Weight | 2.22 Pounds |
| Width | 1.6 Inches |
> What are some of the best books to read on this subject?
IMHO, the following two books would be considered good references:
To be honest -- and I promise that I'm making this as not-a-copout as I can -- my feeling is that if you're even taking the position that the entirety of the Bible is authentic and accurate, there's such a gulf of understanding between us that trying to bridge it would be well outside of the scope of a few posts.
I'll try to summarize as best I can, here.
Old Testament: The Torah was not given to Moses by God. Large portions of "God's laws" existed in other cultures before even the Jews claim that they were given to Moses. Like, word-for-word, verse for verse, verbatim. Sometimes with minor changes. The Law is clearly not entirely divine in origin, if any of it is (personally, I think I see the hand of God in places in Deuteronomy, but I'm not sure). Similarly, a great deal of the OT is founded upon pre-existing myths from other cultures in Mesopotamia. We're able to discern several different agents at work in the text, including people who clearly have very different conceptions of God, writing at different times, as well as any number of redactors. In some cases, it's pretty clear that the final version of the text was based upon a later writer completely failing to understand the original writer. In some cases, multiple incompatible versions of stories were combined into the text serially by redactors who clearly had no idea that the text was supposed to be "perfect". Check out the stories about how David met Saul, for example. Also, a lot of the traditional interpretations of things came about when the Jews noted the many flaws, inconsistencies, and absurdities in the Torah, and invented all sorts of amazing (and often ridiculous) explanations for them.
For more on this, I cannot recommend highly enough James Kugel's How to Read the Bible. It's written by a very intellectually honest orthodox Jew, which is very valuable to me because it's as unbiased as possible while still being sympathetic and open to the theist view. No joke, I will buy this for you in a heartbeat if you send me an address. It will radically transform and improve your understanding of these things.
As to the Gospels, you ought to be able to find any number of websites describing its inaccuracies and contradictions. Of course, there's a strain of fundamentalism that insists, through astounding intellectual dishonesty, that there are no contradictions. To assert this, one must use a definition of "contradiction" that would be prima facie absurd in any other context. The differing accounts of Jesus' birth, the date of the Last Supper, and so, so much more. Also, many of the accounts of Jesus' life are clearly, shall we say, modified to make the points that the authors cared about, such as Jesus's genealogy falling into nice round numbers that it actually didn't. Also, a lot of details seem to have been invented after the fact to give the impression that Jesus fulfilled prophecies that he likely didn't (As a Christian this doesn't bother me; I don't see the OT as inerrant, so it's not surprising to me that many of its prophecies were wrong). For example, the narrative wherein the family has to travel for a census (never happened) so that Jesus could be in the city that prophecy said the Messiah would be born in (he probably wasn't).
For more on this subject... I like Marcus Borg. Actually, this book by him and N.T. Wright does a great job examining such matters from multiple perspectives, as it's written in a format where they disagree with each other and give their own takes on things. Borg represents (IMO) rational but honest scholarship taken too far, whereas Wright represents a more traditional but still informed perspective. This book covers many important topics, such as many of the miracles, the nativity, the resurrection, and so on. If you want to be able to defend yourself against atheist attacks, buy this book if only for Wright's sections. But read Borg's, too. They'll open your eyes to so much.
Okay, now let's talk epistles. The wikipedia article on the subject of the Pauline Epistles is a great jumping-off point. For a more in-depth treatment, I really liked Ehrman's Jesus, Interrupted though it definitely deals a lot with the gospels as well.
I'd like to make two more points in closing. The first is that there's just no reason at all to think that the Bible is accurate and authentic in its entirety. None. It doesn't even claim to be. It can't. It wasn't fully compiled until hundreds of years after its constituent parts were written, therefore it logically cannot be self-referential. When (not) Paul wrote that all scripture is God-breathed, he couldn't have been including the books that hadn't been written yet. Also, as you'll see if you read Kugel's book, much of scripture is clearly not inspired. Some would argue that it's still the book that God wanted us to end up with, but that raises the question of why there are so many different versions. Some bibles have books that others don't. Some translate things in contradictory ways to others. There is just no way to suggest that there's some kind of special force watching out for this book; we'd first have to posit that there's a single "right" version and then ask how we know which that is.
Secondly, consider so many of the things in the Bible that are, to put it mildly, inconvenient. Are iron chariots God's Achilles heel (Judges 1:19)? Why didn't any contemporary writers (including the other gospel authors) say anything about the zombie horde that broke loose in Jerusalem (Matthew 27:52-53)? Oh, and let me tell you a story:
God made the world and he saw that it was good. Except, it wasn't. So he decides that he's going to kill everyone except for one good guy and his family. So two (or seven) of every kind of animal gets crammed into -- well, we'll skip this part, you know it. But anyway, afterward, God realizes that he's made a huuuuuuge mistake and promises not to do it again.
And that is where rainbows come from.
Sure thing!
If you want something accessible on a college level that I have used in my courses, I'd recommend The Hebrew Bible for Beginners by Lohr and Kaminsky.
Another magnificent but weightier text that touches directly on source critical issues and the history of scholarly theories is James Kugel's How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture Then and Now.
Those are both broad surveys for beginners. On the more narrow question of dating and good for someone with a bit of Hebrew background, an important new-ish book is How Old is the Hebrew Bible: A Linguistic, Textual, and Historical Study by Ron Hendel and Jan Joosten. They do a great job of summarizing the current state of the question. It's the closest thing I have to offer as a consensus or mainstream view.
For a more "minimalist" or skeptical view that focuses on the historical origins of biblical narratives, I would recommend beginners take a look at The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts by Neil Asher Silberman and Israel Finkelstein.
Later this summer, I am really interested to see John Barton's forthcoming book A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book. I haven't seen it, but he's great and it seems like a serious piece of scholarship.
A lot of what's been listed is devotional stuff, not critical stuff.
For a good critical intro to the New Testament, try Raymond Browns Introduction to the New Testament
Or Bart Ehrman's The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings
Just about anything by Geza Vermes is also very good.
For the Old Testament, I'd recommend James Kugel's How to Read the Bible
or even Asimov's Guide to the Bible.
The wiki for this sub suggests the following:
If any moderators are reading I personally propose adding this to the Wiki, it's excellent:
How to Read the Bible by James Kugel.
Eh, I wouldn't be too hard on the ancient Israelites. The stories in Genesis were likely passed around for generations before written down; they should be viewed more as folk-tales rather than as something to teach a lesson. That these stories should be the source of our morals is a relatively modern way of reading the bible.
If you read the exchange with Jacob and Esau, Jacob doesn't ever lie to Esau. Sure, he's sneaky as heck, and takes advantage of his brother, but he's not being outright dishonest. To the original audience, Esau was the bad guy here, so for Jacob to outsmart him would have been a positive thing.
I've just looked up the story in Gunkel's Genesis, and he goes on for pages discussing how this story illustrates the feeling of superiority the shepherding Israelites had over their hunting neighbors. It was apparently common to mock hunters for not planning ahead, and being in the position where they are living paycheck-to-paycheck, so to speak. Esau comes home hungry and is at the mercy of his brother, who sells something at a very high price.
A book you might enjoy is James Kugel's How to Read the Bible, which tries to explain what the texts would have meant to the original audience.
If you'd like to read more about the historical backdrop behind the various stories in Genesis, there's a really good book on the subject. The author is a biblical historian.
http://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Bible-Guide-Scripture/dp/0743235878/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1396028025&sr=1-1&keywords=kugel
I can't comment much about that book. However, I did find this book to be pretty helpful regard that.
James Kugel, How to Read the Bible (http://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Bible-Guide-Scripture/dp/0743235878/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1449018176&sr=1-1&keywords=How+to+Read+the+Bible)
He does well to trace some of the history of Biblical interpretation with particular depth while at the same time covers a breadth of issues.
I thought I had one more, but I can't seem to find it on my shelf.
Historians aren't merely considering the Old Testament narrative, for example, the call of Abraham, when they conclude that Yahwism (ancient Judaism) was henothesitic. The Pentateuch/Torah, while comprised of several early textual sources, did not reach its final form until late into Israel's nationhood, and maybe not until after the return from Babylonian captivity (537 BCE). So, most of what you're reading in the Old Testament was written much later than the period it depicts and that, as such, the writers/editors often shape the narrative to fit their own theological persuasions. In this case, the writers/editors would have been part of a more thoroughly monotheistic Judaism and this perspective would have shaped the way they brought the stories together.
On the other hand, earlier texts incorporated into the whole still reflect the latent henotheism of ancient Judaism, as I listed above. There's no real difference between identifying ancient Judaism as henotheistic and saying that "a lot of Israelites had a hard time holding to this concept [monotheism]." Henotheism doesn't even require worship of other deities only an assumption that other deities exist. The text assumes this (“You shall have no other gods before me”) and the common people believed it (as suggested by their frequently idolatry). You write, “…by the time Moses was on the scene, God had weaned them enough to give them the solid decree that he was the one and only God.” The only way you can draw this conclusion - since the Ten Commandments and the Mosaic Law do not declare that Yahweh is the one and only God; only that no other god is to be worshipped – is that you assume the Bible to be homogenous and feel free to impose the perspective of later writers onto the early Israelites.
You assume that the disparate documents compiled in the Bible are coherent, theologically consistent, and somehow point to an overarching divine plan, placing the Bible in a unique position among literature. That’s a lot to assume and awfully hard to defend. Since I consider ancient Judaism to have been henotheistic, you conclude that I “have not taken the time to really dive in and attempt to understand how it all fits together, nor understand that there were processes involved in accomplishing God's plan for the people group in question.”
If you’re interested in this, I’d suggest one or more of the following:
The Bible with Sources Revealed, by Richard Friedman
The Old Testament: A Historical and Literary Introduction to the Hebrew Scriptures, by Michael Coogan
How to Read the Bible: History, Prophecy, Literature--Why Modern Readers Need to Know the Difference and What It Means for Faith Today, by Steven McKenzie
How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now, by James Kugel