A History of the Bible: The Book and Its Faiths by John Barton – review

A priest and scholar’s masterly study of the Bible takes it out of the hands of zealots

When I was nine, my parents decided the moment had come for me to have my first proper encounter with the Bible, and duly bought a lavishly illustrated, child-friendly version of the Christian gospels. The Old Testament, with its gruesome tales of Sodom and Gomorrah and the destruction of the Canaanites, was carefully left in the bookshop.

Having read John Barton’s magisterial history of the unexpurgated biblical text, I now see that Mum and Dad were inadvertent followers of Marcion, the second-century heretic who rejected the intemperate God of the Israelites and left the Hebrew Bible out of his pared-down canon altogether. Who knew? Fortunately our parish priest never found out.

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from Culture | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2vrRsIs