Volume 25, Number 11 · June 29, 1978
Deciphering the Big Book
By Frank Kermode
The Birth of the Messiah: A Commentary on the Infancy Narratives in Matthew and Luke
by Raymond E. Brown
Doubleday, 594 pp., $12.50
A Palpable God: Thirty Stories Translated from the Bible with an Essay on the Origins and Life of Narrative
by Reynolds Price
Atheneum, 195 pp., $8.95
The Early Versions of the New Testament
by Bruce M. Metzger
Oxford University Press, 498 pp., $17.50
There are vast libraries of Biblical scholarship, and they are in the present age expanding at least as fast as ever before; but it does not appear that they are much frequented by the general reader. If he is a nonbeliever he is likely to think it none of his business; if a believer he tends to leave all this to his pastors and to buy and read books which obscure the interesting issues with a smokescreen of institutional piety, or, at best, attenuate and vulgarize them.
Review, 3668 words
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