Unger's guide to the Bible

In terms of contents, this volume is an excellent mix -- a one-volume complete Bible library, with an overview, a (tiny) historical section, a brief survey of the books of the Bible, a fairly substantial Bible dictionary, and a fairly good concordance (derived from Cruden's concordance) to the important words in the King James Bible.

Which is most of the problem. The King James Bible. The inaccurately translated, based on late and imperfect copies of the Biblical texts King James Bible. A good reference guide would be based on something newer -- at the time this was published, the Revised Standard Version or perhaps the New English Bible.

There is also the matter of outlook. The summary of the Biblical books gives five pages to Genesis, show more five to Isaiah, three to Luke, twenty to the Apocalypse. Forget the fact that the Revelation to John is shorter by far than any of those books. Forget the fact that it is just barely canonical, is not in the early church's lectionary, and the number of manuscript copies is less than 10% the number of copies of the gospel. But, in this reference, it gets all the press.

That particular data point should give you most of what you need to know about this book. It's a conservative, eschatological, non-scientific, non-historical introduction. Unger admitted in another of his books that his main basis for understanding the Bible is [what he thinks] the Bible says about itself, even if that conflicts with outside evidence. If that's what you want, go for it. If, instead, you believe "be babes in evil, but in thinking be mature," and want to look at all the available information, this book probably isn't meant for you. show less