The Unauthorized Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible

Robin Lane Fox is one of the leading classical historians today, known for major works on Alexander the Great and the clash between Pagans and Christians. And there is much in this book that many readers will find useful and interesting. Lane Fox starts off right away against those who believe the Bible is reliable history. He points out the two differing creation stories in the book of Genesis. He notes how Luke irretrievably muddled his nativity story by tying Herod's reign with a census conducted under Governor Quirinius of Syria, not aware that Quirinius, and the census vital for moving Mary and Joseph from Nazareth to Bethlehem, were separated from Herod by at least a decade. And then Lane Fox goes on. He discusses the history of the actual texts and the earliest copies, and how there are in fact thousands of differences. Most of these are relatively minor, but the last twelve verses of Mark and the story of the women taken in adultery in John were clearly not in the original versions. We learn about the practice of pseudonymous authors, and we have a long discussion of the claims of the Tanakh or Old Testament, and how they usually do not match the claims of archaelogy or surrounding records. We learn the interesting fact that no-one in the New Testament quotes the Songs of Songs or Ecclesiastes. We also learn this amusing anecdote about the plant that temporarily shades Jonah: "Traditionally, the plant has been seen as a gourd, but the Hebrew word is uncertain. When Latin biblical translators changed it to ivy, Augustine knew of congregations in north Africa who rioted until the gourd was brought back to the text." And Lane Fox is especially good on how Christians muddled the relationship between the "New" and the "Old" Testaments: "When Christians quoted those old prophecies, they used Greek translations which were untrue to the Hebrew originals: they ran separate bits of a text into one; they twisted the sense and reference of nouns (Paul, at Galatians 3:8, is a spectacular example); they mistook the speakers and the uses of personal pronouns (John 19:37 or Matthew 27:9)...they muddled Jeremiah with Zechariah...they reread the literal sense and found a non-existent allegory..."Yet although Lane Fox is an atheist, there are times when he is surprisingly uncritical of the New Testament. He tries to argue that Jesus was crucified in 36, instead of a far more likely 30. His argument is that since Jesus died after John the Baptist and John the Baptist, according to Mark, was executed for opposing Herod Antipas' marriage to his half-brother's widow, that marriage must have taken place no earlier than 34, when the half-brother died. The problem with this argument is that a) Mark gets the half-brother wrong b) Josephus doesn't say John the Baptist's execution had anything to do with Antipas' marriage. This leads to a larger problem. Against most scholarly opinion, and against most evidence, Lane Fox insists that the Gospel of

I must admit that I am a fan of Robin Lane Fox. I like his manner of writing, deprecating humor and incredible facility for research. This book is simply a tour de force - no other words to describe it.While not religious, Fox is just, even fair, in his treatment of a book many consider the Word of God. First and foremost he is a historian of the first degree, conversant with both the religious views of the past and the social setting in which they arose and thrived. The book travels along a fairly straight line but by subject - not chronologically. For all the rants against the author he more or less accepts the Bibical accounts as being genuine which is not to say they are valid or even true. He does not ask obvious questions - how could a people without an alphabet or writing materials preserve a history of themselves or their god? Instead he compares stories, searches for meaning, finds numerous flaws in both prophecy and inner logic and lets the reader decide.In his dating of the New Testament he is quite conservative. His text comparisons are interesting as are his descriptions of local customs of the time. The manner in which this disparate groups of stories became our Bible is a mystery story in itself but the author sticks with the words and their context. This work is very readable and written for the educated layman.

My favorite general introduction to the Bible as a book. It's a close reading of the Old and New Testaments, taking Pilate's taunt ("What is truth?") as a starting point. Fox gives good account of the dubious texts that secularists need to know for their daily battles with fundamentalist: The two, contradictory accounts of the creation of Man in Genesis; the versions of Christ's birth in Matthew and Luke that are provably false in terms of Roman history (Augustus never decreed "that all the world should be taxed"); and the "aggressive forgeries" that pepper the Epistles. On the other hand, Fox tells how the "higher criticism" that Christians so often scorn actually proves that the Gospels are much older than people once assumed, and that most of the Epistles really were written by the same person.

Although perhaps too secular for many (compare Friedman's Who Wrote The Bible?), this work in fact is a brilliant summary of the state of Biblical Criticism in its entire confusion of accounts. Getting one's bearings in this field of utterly misleading renditions is difficult, to say the least, and Fox's account cuts through the nearly sophistical layers of myths and scholarly myths about those myths that keep the Old Testament in a kind of evidentiary limbo. Most enjoyable, although no work is the last word in this field.