Well, the wrong reasons are where they’re exciting and excitable. What are the wrong reasons for including a book in the Bible? The Protoevangelium of James, for example. ![]() Now, if you look at those, the church showed great wisdom in not selecting them, either because they’re not very interesting or because, where they are interesting, they are interesting for the wrong reasons. He looks at the 27 books of the New Testament, but he also discusses other books, those which are sometimes called apocryphal gospels. I think that’s a very important idea and it tells you something about the literature that we call the Bible, that it’s left this mark on us and then left this mark on our civilisation that can’t be eliminated.” “Bockmuehl sometimes talks about the ‘footprint’ left by these texts. At some point, words on a piece of paper have turned into ‘scripture’, and they acquire a kind of authority. Then the ‘Bible and its Texts’ is his third section, how you move from ‘books’ to ‘scripture’. He starts with the Old Testament and the many different kinds of literature you get in the Old Testament, then moves on to the New Testament and how it all started and the different kinds of literature you have there. It’s built around fairly obvious sections. We tend to use phrases like ‘the Bible says’, but in fact, you’ve got several different voices in the Bible and the trick is to be like a conductor managing a choir and getting all those different voices to sing from the same sheet.Ĭan you talk a bit about the structure of the book? What are the biblical controversies or issues that he addresses? He’s saying that the Bible is actually rather an untidy collection. He says that Christianity is “not in essence a scriptural religion” focused on a book seen as a single holy work. He knows his subject intimately and he covers a whole range of different topics with immense skill. He’s well aware that the Bible evolves over thousands of years and that’s important for a modern reader to understand, if they’re going to cope with reading it. ![]() It came out earlier this year and it is a general introduction for the non-specialist reader (though that does not mean that it has nothing for members of the academic guild). Tell me about John Barton’s A History of the Bible: the Book and its Faiths. Foreign Policy & International Relations.
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