The Unauthorized Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible

From SkepticWiki

Full title: The Unauthorized Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible

Author: Robin Lane Fox

ISBN 0394573986 (Paperback)

[edit] Synopsis

Robin Lane Fox discusses the Bible from his viewpoint as a classical historian and an athiest, describing what in the Bible is accurate, what is not so inaccurate, and what is outright unhistorical.

[edit] Review

In spite of its somewhat sensationalistic title, this book is far from the hack polemic that one might expect it to be. Robin Lane Fox does not shy from discussing the errors and inaccuracies in the Bible, and indeed he discusses several of these. He points out the many ways that archaeological findings conflict with the Bible. He also points out how the prophecies in Jeremiah had been "corrected" to concord with the accounts now found in the book of Ezra, and the various flaws in the narratives of the birth of Jesus in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, which show that the narratives are unhistorical. These are only a few examples of the problems that he finds. Nonetheless, he is fair. He has no problem with concluding that the Gospel of John was written by an eyewitness, though not necessarily the apostle John; although he criticizes the author of the book of Acts for historical blunders, he chooses the most parsimonious explanation for the presence of the sections in Acts that break into the first-person plural—that Acts was written by a companion of Paul.

Fox's Unauthorized Version is a well-written and well-researched work that provides a good overview of the good and the bad in the Bible. jjramsey.