Status
Available
Call number
Publication
Mariner Books (2012), Paperback, 256 pages
Description
An acclaimed author takes readers back to early Christianity to ask how a box of handwritten scrolls became the Bible, and forward to see how the multibillion-dollar business that has created Biblezines and Manga Bibles is selling down the Bible's sacred capital.
User reviews
LibraryThing member Devil_llama
A look at the Bible as a work of men, not of a God. The author is a Christian scholar who teaches religion and the Bible, and he writes with a light, easy-to-read touch. Unfortunately, that's the essence of the book. It is lightweight. The actual history of the Bible is short changed, and there is
Show More
only a little discussion of the scholarly work. There is a slight touch of how do we know that, but it is limited. The topic of Biblical history and how it came to be so powerful is minimized, and the discussion of Bible as icon is simplistic. The author's simple, liberal pieties can become hard to take after a time, and his attempt to make the Bible neutral toward homosexuality is painfully strained. In the final chapter, he manages to create a straw-man of atheist thought, and then lights that straw man on fire in a blaze of gotcha glory that will appeal very much to a religious crowd, but to those familiar with the breadth and depth of atheist thought and literature, it will be just another case of empty gesturing. He promises early in the book to explain to us how he continues to be a Christian in the face of his knowledge of Biblical errancy, but fails to really live up to that promise, giving only a few cliches. This is not a different way of looking at the Bible, in spite of his conviction that it is. It is intimately familiar to anyone who has ever encountered a liberal Christian trying to convince people to be neither fundamentalists or non-believers. In the end, I decided this wasn't really a book for grown-up thinkers. Show Less
LibraryThing member DubiousDisciple
Beal is a professor of religion at Case Western Reserve University, and an accomplished author. His writing style is fluid, intelligent and entertaining. I confess, though, that I’m not totally sure what the focus of this book is! The subtitle is The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book,
Beal is a Christian with a deep respect for the Bible, albeit one who has “drifted quite a distance from the familiar biblical waters of the conservative evangelical tradition in which [he] was raised.” Bottom line, he doesn’t consider the Bible inerrant by any stretch, and finds beauty and inspiration in its multitude of voices.
Beal begins by bemoaning America’s Biblical illiteracy. Less than half of all adult Americans can name the first book of the Bible, or the four Gospels. More than half of graduating high school seniors guess that Sodom and Gomorrah were husband and wife. The Bible has risen to the status of a cultural icon, but it’s no longer read. Instead, value-added products such as magazines and graphics novels is a thriving industry. Anything to avoid reading the Bible’s actual text.
If we did read the Bible regularly, we probably wouldn’t be convinced of its univocality (meaning, the assumption of its internal consistency.) Most of us have the idea that the Bible provides answers to life’s questions, and when we come to a crossroads, we’re taught to ask, “What does the Bible say?” Fact is, the Bible will often say lots of things on our topic, drowning us in a confusing array of contradictory advice. The Bible is not a book of answers, but a library of questions. Not a wellspring of truth but a pool of imagination, rich in ambiguity, contradiction, and argument.
The Bible is dead; long live the Bible.
Show More
which is pretty open-ended, and Beal takes advantage of his generic subtitle to meander around a bit, working in a number of interesting tidbits and topics. Makes for a great, if a bit undirected, read.Beal is a Christian with a deep respect for the Bible, albeit one who has “drifted quite a distance from the familiar biblical waters of the conservative evangelical tradition in which [he] was raised.” Bottom line, he doesn’t consider the Bible inerrant by any stretch, and finds beauty and inspiration in its multitude of voices.
Beal begins by bemoaning America’s Biblical illiteracy. Less than half of all adult Americans can name the first book of the Bible, or the four Gospels. More than half of graduating high school seniors guess that Sodom and Gomorrah were husband and wife. The Bible has risen to the status of a cultural icon, but it’s no longer read. Instead, value-added products such as magazines and graphics novels is a thriving industry. Anything to avoid reading the Bible’s actual text.
If we did read the Bible regularly, we probably wouldn’t be convinced of its univocality (meaning, the assumption of its internal consistency.) Most of us have the idea that the Bible provides answers to life’s questions, and when we come to a crossroads, we’re taught to ask, “What does the Bible say?” Fact is, the Bible will often say lots of things on our topic, drowning us in a confusing array of contradictory advice. The Bible is not a book of answers, but a library of questions. Not a wellspring of truth but a pool of imagination, rich in ambiguity, contradiction, and argument.
The Bible is dead; long live the Bible.
Show Less
LibraryThing member Jared_Runck
Beal has returned to the theme of the Bible’s role in Western (specifically American) culture with this newest work, focusing here on its contradictory status. While 78% of Americans would claim that the Bible is the literal “Word of God,” and 65% that the Bible “answers all or most of the
For Beal, this indicates that the Bible has taken on a deformed role as a cultural “icon”…the “Book” that has all the answers to life’s problems. In probably the most fascinating section of the book, Beal then goes on to explore how this iconic force has been expanded and reinforced by the Bible publication industry, which has seen a veritable explosion of, for lack of a better term, “niche” Bibles tailored to all imaginable (and some unimaginable) Bible audiences. Or, as Beal frames the controlling question: “What is the cultural meaning of “the Bible” that a publisher claims when it publishes something like The Hot Rodder’s Bible?”
Beal is certainly right that the Bible has slowly morphed into a marketable “product,” carrying with it all the fraught egocentrism of the American consumerist mindset. Instead of readers “conforming” themselves to the difficult and sometimes off-putting claims and concerns of Scripture, we simply now shop for the edition that best meets our felt needs (usually for encouragement and affirmation rather than exhortation or, worse, correction and discipline).
Beal is also right that we need to recover a greater sense of the Bible’s “strangeness” and cultural distance from our moment. He especially sees evangelicalism as trapped between a desire for the “preservation” of Scripture and “popularization” of it. For his part, Beal doesn’t think we can have it both ways. Either we are true to the alien nature of much of Scripture, or we end up deforming it into the theological equivalent of the American “hot dog.”
I agree with Beal’s assessment of the issues, but I differ (strongly) with his chosen answers and solutions. In brief, instead of opting to say that American culture has misread the biblical answers to our most pressing dilemmas, he goes a step further in claiming that we have misread the Bible as ever having any “answers” in the first place!
For Beal, this view of Scripture is idolatrous and bound to fail in the ever-shifting winds of cultural change. And his solution to fixing this problematic view is to deconstruct our concept of “the Bible” as a coherent and fixed document. Canon has always been debated; it never was truly fixed. (In his view, Athanasius’ Easter Letter is more a testament to a still-“open” canon rather than a “closed” one.)
However, this is where I begin to find some fundamental contradictions in Beal’s position. First of all, he wants to claim that our idea of a “Bible” (as a single collection of authoritative writings) would have been entirely foreign to the earliest Christians, where each Christian community had its own collection of writings it considered authoritative, usually a mix of canonical and non-canonical works. However, he also admits that all Christian communities used the Jewish Scriptures…though he seems to miss that this is indeed a “universal” canon of those communities (i.e., a “Bible” of the sort he is trying to deconstruct).
Even more problematic, however, is this statement:
“These libraries were never closed or fixed, but were interconnected with the libraries of other communities, so that texts flowed and morphed within larger, non-centralized social networks. Not unlike the emerging digital network culture of today.”
That statement is, in my opinion, frankly damning of Beal’s entire approach. In all of his touting of the importance of retrieving the “strangeness” of the Bible, he is simply advocating a view of Scripture that aligns it more closely with the contemporary hypertextual experience of the digital age. Has Beal really “recovered” a more authentic view of Christian Scripture…or has he simply “remade” the Bible in the image of our digital age? Has he really destroyed the idol of bibliolatry…or has he simply fashioned a new image more palatable to postmoderns? My inclination says he has done the latter in both cases.
To be honest, I found most of his “evidences” of contradictions within Scripture tired and tiresome. There are only so many times one can read about the differences between the Genesis creation accounts without becoming convinced that too much is being made out of them…that we find the differences because that is what we are looking for rather than searching more carefully for commonalities and connections.
Finally, his argument that the Bible is a “library” rather than a “book” seems to be an exercise in missing the point of his own metaphor. True, a library contains many different points of view (and I’m not disputing that this is part of the fabric of Scripture), but every library is organized according to an overarching system that determines what is (and what is not) included in it. That is, there is a greater unity that defines the “library” as a “library.”
Essentially what Beal offers here is a vision of the “Bible without canon.” It is, as the subtitle declares, only an “accidental” Book with no real coherence or meaning of its own…only the meaning that we choose to attribute to its various parts. To use Beal’s own metaphor against him, it’s a library with no catalogue.
We are a long way from the fascinating insights and confessional tone of Beal’s “Roadside Religion.” Was it informative? Yes. Was it convincing? No, not to this reader.
Show More
basic questions of life,” a 2005 study revealed that more than half of these self-identified “Bible-believing” Christians had not participated in any sort of Bible study or Sunday school program in the last month. We have then a cultural conundrum of high biblical reverence but low (and sinking quickly) biblical literacy.For Beal, this indicates that the Bible has taken on a deformed role as a cultural “icon”…the “Book” that has all the answers to life’s problems. In probably the most fascinating section of the book, Beal then goes on to explore how this iconic force has been expanded and reinforced by the Bible publication industry, which has seen a veritable explosion of, for lack of a better term, “niche” Bibles tailored to all imaginable (and some unimaginable) Bible audiences. Or, as Beal frames the controlling question: “What is the cultural meaning of “the Bible” that a publisher claims when it publishes something like The Hot Rodder’s Bible?”
Beal is certainly right that the Bible has slowly morphed into a marketable “product,” carrying with it all the fraught egocentrism of the American consumerist mindset. Instead of readers “conforming” themselves to the difficult and sometimes off-putting claims and concerns of Scripture, we simply now shop for the edition that best meets our felt needs (usually for encouragement and affirmation rather than exhortation or, worse, correction and discipline).
Beal is also right that we need to recover a greater sense of the Bible’s “strangeness” and cultural distance from our moment. He especially sees evangelicalism as trapped between a desire for the “preservation” of Scripture and “popularization” of it. For his part, Beal doesn’t think we can have it both ways. Either we are true to the alien nature of much of Scripture, or we end up deforming it into the theological equivalent of the American “hot dog.”
I agree with Beal’s assessment of the issues, but I differ (strongly) with his chosen answers and solutions. In brief, instead of opting to say that American culture has misread the biblical answers to our most pressing dilemmas, he goes a step further in claiming that we have misread the Bible as ever having any “answers” in the first place!
For Beal, this view of Scripture is idolatrous and bound to fail in the ever-shifting winds of cultural change. And his solution to fixing this problematic view is to deconstruct our concept of “the Bible” as a coherent and fixed document. Canon has always been debated; it never was truly fixed. (In his view, Athanasius’ Easter Letter is more a testament to a still-“open” canon rather than a “closed” one.)
However, this is where I begin to find some fundamental contradictions in Beal’s position. First of all, he wants to claim that our idea of a “Bible” (as a single collection of authoritative writings) would have been entirely foreign to the earliest Christians, where each Christian community had its own collection of writings it considered authoritative, usually a mix of canonical and non-canonical works. However, he also admits that all Christian communities used the Jewish Scriptures…though he seems to miss that this is indeed a “universal” canon of those communities (i.e., a “Bible” of the sort he is trying to deconstruct).
Even more problematic, however, is this statement:
“These libraries were never closed or fixed, but were interconnected with the libraries of other communities, so that texts flowed and morphed within larger, non-centralized social networks. Not unlike the emerging digital network culture of today.”
That statement is, in my opinion, frankly damning of Beal’s entire approach. In all of his touting of the importance of retrieving the “strangeness” of the Bible, he is simply advocating a view of Scripture that aligns it more closely with the contemporary hypertextual experience of the digital age. Has Beal really “recovered” a more authentic view of Christian Scripture…or has he simply “remade” the Bible in the image of our digital age? Has he really destroyed the idol of bibliolatry…or has he simply fashioned a new image more palatable to postmoderns? My inclination says he has done the latter in both cases.
To be honest, I found most of his “evidences” of contradictions within Scripture tired and tiresome. There are only so many times one can read about the differences between the Genesis creation accounts without becoming convinced that too much is being made out of them…that we find the differences because that is what we are looking for rather than searching more carefully for commonalities and connections.
Finally, his argument that the Bible is a “library” rather than a “book” seems to be an exercise in missing the point of his own metaphor. True, a library contains many different points of view (and I’m not disputing that this is part of the fabric of Scripture), but every library is organized according to an overarching system that determines what is (and what is not) included in it. That is, there is a greater unity that defines the “library” as a “library.”
Essentially what Beal offers here is a vision of the “Bible without canon.” It is, as the subtitle declares, only an “accidental” Book with no real coherence or meaning of its own…only the meaning that we choose to attribute to its various parts. To use Beal’s own metaphor against him, it’s a library with no catalogue.
We are a long way from the fascinating insights and confessional tone of Beal’s “Roadside Religion.” Was it informative? Yes. Was it convincing? No, not to this reader.
Show Less
LibraryThing member shannonkearns
Really enjoyed this book. The history part was well done and fascinating. If you've done a lot of Biblical study some of the "where do we go from here" parts will seem overdone and elementary, however for folks who aren't Biblical scholars, that part is probably pretty challenging and great.
LibraryThing member auntieknickers
Raised in an evangelical family (his parents worked with Campus Crusade for Christ and similar organizations) and now a professor of Biblical studies at Case Western Reserve, Beal knows his Bible and its history. He begins by surveying all the rather peculiar ways in which the Bible is marketed
Beal's book also deals with what I might call the sociology of the Bible and how it achieved a sort of iconic status quite apart from the actual texts and their meanings. He gives a good rundown of Bible history, reminding us that the earliest Christians did not have a common Bible but rather collections of texts which differed from group to group. Beal also has some excellent suggestions for how Bible studies might best be conducted. (If his ideas, which are quite similar to my own, were to be adopted, I'm afraid there'd be a lot of Bible study workbook authors out of work.)
I think both clergy and laypeople could get something from The Rise and Fall of the Bible, and that even atheists (who so often seem to be just a different variety of fundamentalists) could learn enough from it to make some of their arguments a little less ridiculous. Highly recommended.
Show More
today, especially to evangelicals. I had seen some of these in bookstores but I didn't know about "Biblezines" in which the sidebars of commentary and Tips for Teens eclipse the Bible text; manga Bibles; and Bibles for every age and gender, with "appropriate" bindings -- there's even a Duct Tape Bible! He also points out the use of "Bible" as a term for the definitive work on a subject, from the Shooter's Bible to the Cake Bible. Beal also discusses translations and the difference between those which try to find the most accurate translation of each Hebrew or Greek word, and the "functional equivalent" translations/paraphrases like the Living Bible. Readers who are fairly familiar with the history of the Bible and its criticism may find a lot to skim, but I believe nearly everyone has something to learn from this book.Beal's book also deals with what I might call the sociology of the Bible and how it achieved a sort of iconic status quite apart from the actual texts and their meanings. He gives a good rundown of Bible history, reminding us that the earliest Christians did not have a common Bible but rather collections of texts which differed from group to group. Beal also has some excellent suggestions for how Bible studies might best be conducted. (If his ideas, which are quite similar to my own, were to be adopted, I'm afraid there'd be a lot of Bible study workbook authors out of work.)
I think both clergy and laypeople could get something from The Rise and Fall of the Bible, and that even atheists (who so often seem to be just a different variety of fundamentalists) could learn enough from it to make some of their arguments a little less ridiculous. Highly recommended.
Show Less
Language
Original publication date
2011
Physical description
256 p.; 7.9 inches
ISBN
0547737343 / 9780547737348