Volume 41, Number 6 · March 24, 1994
The Old New Age
By Frank Kermode
The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution
by Christopher Hill
Allen Lane/Penguin, 466 pp., $30.00
The Battle of the Frogs and Fairford's Flies: Miracles and the Pulp Press During the English Revolution
by Jerome Friedman
St. Martin's, 304 pp., $16.95 (paper)
The Bible is a collection of ancient writings, and, except to believers in plenary inspiration, it is a rather random, miscellaneous, and fortuitous compilation. It is possible to regard it as in some sense a unity, but that unity has been imposed by history, by the fact that its parts have coexisted and been interpreted together for so long. If the early Christian bishop Marcion had had his way in the second century there would not be an Old Testament in Christian Bibles. But for good or ill the Old Testament has been, formidably and formatively, in the Bible. And the constituent books are not quite the same books as they would have been if each had survived in isolation.
Review, 3259 words
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