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Permalink Reply by Nelson on July 31, 2012 at 5:07pm

Richard Elliot Friedman- Who Wrote the Bible?

Shows you how the Hebrew Bible was written and cobbled together. The evidence demonstrates that there are significant and unarguable reasons to conclude that we should not take the Hebrew Bible at face value.

Bart Ehrman- The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture (you can do the "Cliffs Notes" version Misquoting Jesus but there's significantly less information)

Shows you how the copyist scribes, either by accident or purposefully as a result of theological/political/social/christological controversies, changed the text of the New Testament over time, that we do not have THE NEW TESTAMENT, we have A (as in one among many possible) new testaments. The conclusion is that, even if the events written down in the original text of the books of the NT happened, how the hell would you and I and everyone else today be able to say so with any confidence given the quality of the sources we have?

Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman- The Bible Unearthed

Shows you the evidence from modern Syro-Palestinian (nee "Biblical") Archaeology. The conclusion from almost 150 years of digging in the desert looking for confirmation of the biblical narrative is that hardly any of it happened (or at our most charitable, that we have no reason to think any of it happened). No patriarchs. No slavery in Egypt. No Exodus. No 40 years spent wandering in the "wilderness". No majestic Davidic dynasty. No united Kingdom. No conquest of Canaan. Etc., etc., etc....

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Permalink Reply by Heather Spoonheim on July 31, 2012 at 5:31pm

Sorry I can't help you find the book - but I read it over 20 years ago.  I had almost entirely lost my Christian faith by that point - but I was almost afraid of learning about the origins of the old testament.

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Permalink Reply by Heather Spoonheim on July 31, 2012 at 5:33pm

Sorry, that was in reply to Nelson's suggestion of 'Who Wrote the Bible?'.

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Permalink Reply by Thete.fi on December 9, 2012 at 8:13am

For the New Testament, I would suggest E.P. Sanders "Historical Figure of Jesus". It has a slight bias, but nothing too big. For more controversial but interesting historical information on Jesus and his life I'd suggest:

• Myllykoski, Matti 1991. Die letzten Tage Jesu: Markus und Johannes, ihre Traditionen und die historische Frage.

It's in German but there might be an English version, not sure. I've wrote a piece on "historical Jesus" myself, you can google it for "The Atheist New Testament", but it's just a "secular theory" of how Christian beliefs came to existence.

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