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Big picture for the general public
Title: The Bible: the Biography Author: Karen Armstrong Publisher: Atlantic Books Price: £16.99 ISBN: 978-1-84354-396-1
This book is one in the series Books That Shook the World. It doesn’t tell you a great deal about what’s in the Bible (it’s not a Bible introduction), but it tells the story of how it was put together and how people have read it. This is a big-picture kind of book meant for the general, and largely secular, public. Fully paid-up biblical scholars, being on the whole lovers of detail, may find it irritating, but in the breadth of this book lies its importance.
Karen Armstrong moves back and forth, as she tells her story, between the Jewish and Christian communities. She tells us how Jewish debates about interpreting the Scriptures have found parallels in Christian circles and of how both communities have been affected by broader cultural forces. She reveals that, for many centuries, no-one thought that reading the Bible literally was either possible or desirable, and that inventive reading which found symbolic meanings in every page was considered much more spiritual. She shows how it is only in modern times that people began to think that every text was about facts or that a text only meant what the author thought it meant. Modern liberal and verbal inerrancy views of the Bible are two sides of the same coin, both ignoring the long, subtle and complex history of Bible reading. She calls for a return to a ‘more compassionate hermeneutics’ which would practise a proper and trustful listening to the Scriptures, and she sees a generosity in some of the reading styles of the past.
This is a fast-paced journey through history, and there are moments when grand assertion hides a contentious issue. But it is revealing to see Christian reading in parallel with Jewish reading and within the wider cultural context. Most readers will have a few ‘aha!’ moments as things fall into a new place (her account of Sola Scriptura was one for me). I am grateful for the way a sometimes tendentious book can stir the reader to thought.
If Armstrong is right that today Scripture has a bad name and is associated with a kind of extremist certainty, then this book certainly shows that the Scriptures and their readers have a more intriguing history.
Susan Durber Principal of Westminister College, Cambridge |
