Parallel Lives of Jesus: A Guide to the Four Gospels, by Edward Adams. Introductions to the Gospels most often underscore the individual personality of each Gospel and leave aside questions of the Gospels’ similarity. Parallel Lives of Jesus achieves both with economy and clarity.
People often assume—wrongly—that the Bible presents a single view of God and the world. In Understanding Wisdom Literature, David Penchansky shows how the Hebrew Bible’s wisdom books, Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes, speak differently from covenant-centered writings such as Genesis, Deuteronomy and Isaiah.
One of the most interesting shifts in Christian theology after the Shoah was in how the adjective Jewish was used. In the patristic era, to call someone’s work Jewish was to insult it: the work was too fleshly or legalistic. Since the Shoah, to call someone’s work Jewish is to praise it as appropriately this-worldly, concerned with the ordinary stuff of life, embodied.
I lament biblical illiteracy as much as anyone,
but I think surveys sometimes load the dice against scripture when illustrating
the public's unfamiliarity with the Bible. A recent example was noted by the
American Bible Society as it released The
Freedom Bible in connection with the 9/ll anniversary.
When documentaries explore Christianity, they have little
difficulty finding diverse manifestations of faith and practice. A global survey also reveals a surprising diversity when it comes to the content of the Bible.
