'Loveday's case is that the mantle of historical truth and divine authority has placed upon the Bible an intolerable weight, crushing it as a creative work of immense imaginative and inspirational power. His argument is both fascinating and persuasive.' Matthew Parris The Bible for Grown-Ups neither requires, nor rejects, belief. It sets out to help intelligent adults make sense of the Bible - a book that is too large to swallow whole, yet too important in our history and culture to spit out. Why do the creation stories in Genesis contradict each other? Did the Exodus really happen? Was King David a historical figure? Why is Matthew's account of the birth of Jesus so different from Luke's? Why was St Paul so rude about St Peter? Every Biblical author wrote for their own time, and their own audience. In short, nothing in the Bible is quite what it seems. Literary critic Simon Loveday's book - a labour of love that has taken over a decade to write - is a thrilling read, for Christians and anyone else, which will overturn everything you thought you knew about the Good Book. "Loveday intelligently and successfully assesses the Bible in ways that are accessible and useful for those with open, inquiring minds." — Publishers Weekly. Simon Loveday trained as an anthropologist and a literary critic, teaching at UEA and Oxford. He also edited the psychological journal Typeface and wrote The Romances of John Fowles. He lectured at Keele University and lived in Wells, Somerset, where he was at one time Chair of the Wells Festival of Literature. Simon Loveday died in October 2016. The Bible For Grown Ups A Look at the Good Book By Simon Loveday Icon Books Copyright © 2016 Simon Loveday All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-78578-131-5 CHAPTER 1 1. The structure of the Bible The groundwork for this chapter was laid in 2011 – the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible. The radio was full of praise for the beautiful prose and the magical rhythm of that 1611 translation, which has become not only a flagship and standard-bearer for the English language, but also the best-selling book in history. The words of the King James Bible are woven into the lives, and the hearts, of many of us who went to Church schools, grew up with Anglican services, and sang its psalms. Weddings bring us its message of love, funerals its words of consolation and hope. But there is a remarkable omission from all this celebration. The King James Bible is not an original work – it is a translation. What is it a translation of? What was the original, and how did it come into existence? The Bible as we now have it consists of three parts: the Old Testament, the Apocrypha, and the New Testament. ('Testament' here means a kind of contract; the Old Testament defined one kind of contract between God and man, the New Testament redefined that contract.) The Old Testament - known to modern Jews as the Hebrew Bible – consists of about 39 books. (Catholics and Protestants recognise 39; other Christian denominations, such as Ethiopian and Coptic, recognise up to four more.) These were written down in Hebrew or Aramaic between about 900 BC (or possibly later) and about 160 BC. They were then translated into Greek and became widely available – to Jews and Gentiles – around the Mediterranean. The core of the Bible is usually regarded as the first eleven books (from Genesis through Kings, omitting Ruth). These books tell a continuous story and take the Israelites from the creation of the world through to the fall of Jerusalem in 587 BC. For the Old Testament part of this book, it is the first part of this core – the five books known as the Pentateuch – that I will focus on. The Apocrypha (from the Greek for 'that which is hidden away') consists of about sixteen books – again, different branches of Christianity vary in their precise selection – mostly composed in late pre-Christian times. The Roman Catholic Church accepts it as a part of the Old Testament and so of the Bible, but the Anglican Church does not. It does not have the same 'canonical' status as the other parts of the Bible, and consequently, though it is very stimulating (it contains, for example, the world's first detective stories), I will not be discussing it in this book. The New Testament consists of 27 books – the four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the Letters (or Epistles) of St Paul and others, and the Revelation of St John. It tells the story of Jesus and his followers from the birth of Jesus (somewhere between 6 and 4 BC), through his death around 30–35 AD, till shortly after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD. It was written in Greek between about 43 AD and about 120 AD, but did not take final form until the 4th century AD. An obvious point that is often missed is that both the Old and the New Testament were written by Jews (with the possible exception of Mark and Luke), about Jews, and largely for Jews; virtually every major character