Volume 40, Number 8 · April 22, 1993
The Good Book and True
By John Barton
The Unauthorized Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible
by Robin Lane Fox
Knopf, 478 pp., $27.50
A book entitled The Unauthorized Version obviously has an iconoclastic intent. Robin Lane Fox—a classicist, historian of the ancient world, and atheist—sets out to discover how far, and in what senses, the Bible is 'true.' He shows in great detail how often it is in error, and how much of the truth it nevertheless contains is human, not divine truth. But anyone who hopes that his book will therefore be an old-fashioned exercise in free-thinking apologetics, aiming to show up the Bible as nonsense and to convict the religious establishment of propagating lies, will find The Unauthorized Version an unwelcome surprise. Lane Fox is one of the few nonreligious readers of the Bible who are thoroughly acquainted with both professional Biblical and theological scholarship—much of it, of course, produced by believers in the Judeo-Christian tradition. As he remarks in his acknowledgments, 'Ancient historians sometimes write as if all theologians are an inferior species: I have not shared this belief'; and he correctly sees that though he writes as an atheist, 'there are Christian and Jewish scholars whose versions would be far more radical than mine. They will find this historian's view conservative, even old-fashioned.'
Review, 4162 words
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