According to a Gallup poll taken last month, 40% of Americans believe that the Bible is the literal record of words spoken by God. A new crop of books from Yale University Press shows why this belief is illogical and incoherent.
All three cover ground that is largely familiar to scholars of religion, but still has the capacity to shock traditionalists. Far from being a unified set of texts, the Bible is the product of multiple hands, contradictory agendas, and a gradual process of codification that proceeded according to the prevailing political agendas of the times. Indeed, the boundaries of biblical literature were themselves contested over an extended period of time, settling only in the first centuries of the common era.
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