Thursday, March 06, 2014

Bible Stories for Skeptics

a review by Edd Doerr

Bible Stories for Skeptics, by Richard Trudeau. Abigail Rogers Publishing, 2013, 163 pp, $14.95.

With a bit of a  twinkle in his eye, Richard Trudeau --  a skeptic, retired Unitarian Universalist minister, Harvard Divinity School grad and (though he doesn't use the word) humanist -- removes the supernaturalism from some of the common stories in  the Judeo-Christian Bible for the edification of non-scholars. He links them to  history as known to archeologists and serious historians and tries to salvage some things of value in the collection of diverse materials in the book. He shows how and why the contents of the book evolved and how its assorted unknown authors borrowed and modified stuff, none of which is readily apparent to the casual reader or ordinary churchgoer. Among his conclusions, that Jesus was not really a Christian and that Christianity, as Bernard Shaw put it, is not the religion "of" Jesus but a religion "about" Jesus. An interesting read.

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