Book review: A History of the Bible, by John Barton
I picked up this book for two reasons.
The first reason was that I wanted to be able to get my way around the Bible. By this I mean that if I, for some reason, want to check out the parable about the rich man and Lazarus, I don't want to just read it: I want to have some sense of its context. For example, what does it mean that it only shows up in a single gospel? Or if, for a completely different reason, I want to read the book of Jonah, why is it located where it is? How does it fit in the collection of books that make up the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament?
I admit that reading a whole history to get a basic understanding of a subject is not very time-efficient, but I've never regretted doing it that way (like, for example, with genetics).
The second reason to read this was more straightforward: I like history, I like books: a history of the most important book ever written was a no-brainer.
John Barton's book was a great choice on both counts, and I would've been satisfied if it only covered those two aspects. But here's the thing: there's so much more than that. To begin with, it's a very broad history. It's not just about how the book was written, collected, distributed, canonized. There's also a whole history of its interpretation, both in Judaism and Christianity. It has a lot of cool facts about the Bible's long history of translations. There's a running theme on the tension between the Scripture and the Tradition (in fact, the main purpose of the book is to make an argument about this subject, and while this isn't super relevant to me as a non-believer, I still found it fascinating). And there are probably a dozen other things I'm forgetting right now.
On top of all that, the writing is fantastic. It's the kind of book written with so much passion and honesty that even its mistakes are positive. For example, sometimes the author includes a detail that could've easily been left out. This doesn't happen often, but when it does you can sense that he loves the subject so much that he couldn't help but mention that little tidbit.