Karen Armstrong

A Biography (Books That Changed the World)

The Bible

renee badenoch

I have a bit of a bias towards this book despite it's flaws, because it was a book that made me start deconstructing Christianity. The book is flawed. I think it would benefit with footnotes and a more robust glossary and bibliography, for starters. It also simplifies some concepts (the difference between Yahweh and Elohim, for example) in ways that make the book digestible and easy to read, but also are a bit reductive. I say "easy to read," though I do not think this book is easy to read unless you are already interested in the subject matter. 

The main takeaway from this book was that the Bible has not historically been taken literally, and throughout most of the 2,000ish years of the written document of the Bible, it has been a text subjected to numerous interpretations, some of those resulting in edits, revisions, and rewrites. the Bible may have many meaningful, profound, and even beautiful and mysterious aspects that resonate with a believer, but followers of the Bible should be wary of having too rigid of an understanding of a very complex document.

The Bible A Biography (Books That Changed the World)

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