May 22, 2014
Who read the Bible in antiquity, and what kind of authority did they give it? This sweeping narrative traces how, from tenth century B.C.E. Israel to the time of the early rabbis in the third century C.E., the texts that would become biblical (and those that wouldn’t) gradually and haltingly gained authority. Told as a chronological narrative, How the Bible Became Holy argues that different groups of Jews and Christians gave these texts very different kinds of authority, and created a tension between the authority of text and of lived tradition that remains important to Jews and Christians today.
