WINNER OF THE 2019 DUFF COOPER PRIZEA SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER'With emotional and psychological
insight Barton unlocks this sleeping giant of our culture. In the process he has produced a
masterpiece.' Sunday Times The Bible is the central book of Western culture. For the two faiths
which hold it sacred it is the bedrock of their religion a singular authority on what to
believe and how to live. For non-believers too it has a commanding status: it is one of the
great works of world literature woven to an unparalleled degree into our language and thought.
This book tells the story of the Bible explaining how it came to be constructed and how it has
been understood from its remote beginnings down to the present. John Barton describes how the
narratives laws proverbs prophecies poems and letters which comprise the Bible were written
and when what we know - and what we cannot know - about their authors and what they might have
meant as well as how these extraordinarily disparate writings relate to each other. His
incisive readings shed new light on even the most familiar passages exposing not only the
sources and traditions behind them but also the busy hands of the scribes and editors who
assembled and reshaped them. Untangling the process by which some texts which were regarded as
holy became canonical and were included and others didn't Barton demonstrates that the Bible
is not the fixed text it is often perceived to be but the result of a long and intriguing
evolution. Tracing its dissemination translation and interpretation in Judaism and
Christianity from Antiquity to the rise of modern biblical scholarship Barton elucidates how
meaning has both been drawn from the Bible and imposed upon it. Part of the book's originality
is to illuminate the gap between religion and scripture the ways in which neither maps exactly
onto the other and how religious thinkers from Augustine to Luther and Spinoza have reckoned
with this. Barton shows that if we are to regard the Bible as 'authoritative' it cannot be as
believers have so often done in the past.
