‘In truth,” writes John Barton at the beginning of “A History of the Bible,” “there are no versions of either Christianity or Judaism that correspond point for point to the contents of the Bible, which is often not what it has been made into and read as.” That is a gentle way of putting it. What he means, as he goes on to show over the next 200 pages, is that the Old and New Testaments (to use the Christian terminology) are a shapeless collection of frequently incompatible writings whose origins and aims are largely unknowable and whose historical claims are woefully untrustworthy.
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