Biblical History Message Board

Welcome! I've been doing a lot of reading on this lately, and would love to hear about books that others have enjoyed on this topic. I'm in the middle of Crossan's "Historical Jesus", and intend to follow up with his "Birth of Christianity".

Hmmm, what does it mean that one of the top shared books is one on Knitting and Crocheting? *begins statistical analysis* Note, for the record, I have never knitted or crocheted. But, I have read "What is Gnosticism?" by Karen King.

Well, I'm half the Knitting and Crocheting book. It's actually more odd that it's that *particular* Knitting and Crocheting book; there are several more popular ones. I guess that's just the mojo of LT's weighting system.

I find Crossan a bit tought to get through.

I have had fun lately with The Jesus Dynasty by James Tabor, Who Wrote the Bible by Richard Friedman, God Against the Gods by Jonathan Kirsch, and The Great Transformation by Karen Armstrong. A little light reading.

I recently finished God Against The Gods and am currently working on Whose Bible Is It?. I enjoyed Kirsch's book quite a bit. His writing style is elegant and very accessible.

I am just finishing Kirsch's Moses: A Life. Good, but not quite in the all-time top ten list. I prefer God Against the Gods.

Well, let's put it this way. I still haven't finished the Crossan book. I have all the other ones referred to here, just have to get through them all!

I just finished Whose Bible is it? and posted a small review. I am now working on Lost Christianities and Lost Scriptures which are great together - since you can read the source material as you go. Has anyone else read these?

Yes, I seem to have been reading a lot of Bart Erhman these days, perhaps because he is writing so much. Liked Misquoting Jesus, although I wish he had given more examples. Just finished The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot, which was pretty good. He stretches our understanding, but stays in a comfortable zone without getting too extreme.

I saw both of those. The Judas book looked the more interesting. I guess I'll have to pick it up now. :D I would recommend the two "Lost" books, if you haven't read them already.

Read Lost Christianities, have the other but haven't gotten to it.

A couple of months ago, I read Ehrman's refutation of The Da Vinci Code (without actually reading that book itself!). Yesterday, I started his Misquoting Jesus : the story behind who changed the Bible and why; I appreciated Pelikan's Whose Bible Is It?, so am hoping this one'll be equally informative.

I just found this lecture series on The Old Testament and thought it was worth posting:

http://oyc.yale.edu/religious-studies/introduction-to-the-old-testament-hebrew-b...

I've been reading/listening to the The Bible for the first time. I'm looking forward to reading a few of these suggestions, or at the very least, adding them to a massive, growing TBR pile.

>15 Sandydog1:, in case you are interested, there's a new audio Bible product out unlike anything else previously available. It's called GoBible, and I could not find it on Amazon, so bought it at my local Christian bookstore, though you can get it from the link I provided.

It looks sort of like an iPod and comes in a case with clip and earphones. What most makes it different than any other audio Bible (whether cassette, or CD, or mp3) is that this self-contained audio device allows you to search for verses not just to a book or chapter, but exactly to the specific verse, that's the very best part. It has other features and books included too, and comes in 3 different translations, but since each translation has a different narrator, I chose my favorite narrator Alexander Scourby, even though his narration is in the KJV and I would have rather had the NKJV, but I don't like the narrator for that version nearly so much.

It takes about 72 hours to listen through the whole entire Bible. $100.

I have found Norman K. Gottwald's 1959 "A Light to the Nations: An Introduction to the Old Testament" a great (99 cent) find at the Goodyear Goodwill store. The book is especially valuable in its exposure of the process by which the Bible was amended over the centuries, in effect countering the tendency of the religious to adumbrate the secular history of the text.