THE BIBLE NOW
Homosexuality, abortion, women, death penalty, earth
By Richard Friedman & Shawna Dolanski. Oxford University Press. 220 pages. £16.99
ISBN 978 0 195 311 631
The authors of this curious book are American academics who specialise in Old Testament studies. They aim in this work to present a defence of the Bible.
A laudable aim, one assumes. However, to grasp the nature of a defence, one needs to ask what the perceived danger is. Would the threat be from those who undermine the Bible’s historicity? Or the new atheists? Or postmodern pluralists? The answer is none of the above. The danger these scholars wish to defend the Bible from is the problem posed by readers with less scholarly expertise than themselves. The authors summarise their message: ‘We have warned you about doing Bible when one is not trained in it’ (p.177). What appears at first glance to be an apologetic for the Bible turns out to be a rather old-fashioned, authoritarian and modernistic view of the Scriptures by the scholarly guild. It would be a tyranny of the expert were the effort not carried out with so little finesse.
