Top 10 Recently Reviewed Books on the Bible

The history of slavery in America may not be hidden, but widely unknown is the degree to which Christianity was used to defend not only slavery but also later segregation and discrimination. This secret alliance between religion and bigotry is a largely untold story which more people need to learn about in order to dispel the notion that religion is necessarily a force for good.

Did Jesus exist as a real, physical person? That’s always been assumed by Christians, but recent scholarship has begun to cast some doubt upon that. The more one looks at the biblical record, the less reliable the evidence of a historical Jesus becomes. If one probes deeply enough, belief in a historical Jesus may become unjustified.

Dennis MacDonald's argument is one which is novel and will surely anger biblical traditionalists and literalists: namely, that the gospel of Mark was written as a conscious and deliberate imitation of the stories in the Homeric epics. The goal was to give readers a familiar context to discover the superiority of Christ and Christianity over pagan gods and beliefs.

The question of whether or not there are any errors, contradictions or general problems in the Bible is one which consistently comes up in discussions between Christians and nonbelievers. Even among Christians such questions come up, but more from the perspective of what texts means in relation to other passages.

This is an ambitous book, and it can serve as a valuable reference book for anyone interested in biblical history and research - and even for undergraduate students who expect to take classes in these subjects.

In recent years, there has been a plethora of writings about "lost" gospels - documents of early Christian communities which are supposed to offer an alternative perspective on the nature of Christianity and, perhaps, the nature of Jesus. But do these "lost" gospels really offer us anything? Do they tell us anything about the earliest years of Christianity, or does their popularity instead tell us more about ourselves?

Christian fundamentalists can always find some portion of the Bible to support their views on topics like abortion, homosexuality, and so on. It is not surprising, then, that many would come to regard the Bible as a manifesto of oppression which is of use only to those who seek to retard the moral development of modern society. But if what an alternative understanding of the Bible were possible?

The diversity of Christian beliefs today is extraordinary - but it is matched, if not exceeded, by the diversity of beliefs among the earliest Christians. As much as Christians today may not be aware of how much diversity there is among their contemporaries, they are quite ignorant of what it was like in the earliest days of Christianity....

Is there a connection between the Bible and eroticism or sexuality? Most believe that there is, but also that this connection is (almost) entirely negative in nature. Such a conclusion is not hard to understand - the Bible has, after all, long been used as a source of inspiration for grounds for repressing people's sexual and erotic impulses. Can it also be used as a source of inspiration for encouraging those impulses?

There exist many different methodologies used today by scholars for understanding and drawing meaning from biblical texts - and quite a few of these were developed over the past century. One of the more informative and controversial is New Historicism, a movement which began in the field of literary studies in the 1980s. What impact has it had on biblical scholarship?