academic Bible study: suggestions?

Cafe Society
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I’m not sure if this topic belongs here, so apologies in advance if it’s wrongly placed…

My friends and I are thinking about starting a Bible study group. None of us are religious (although we were brought up in somewhat religious households) - we’re more interested in the Bible from an academic point of view. We’re all philosophy or literature majors, recently out of grad school, and we all feel that we could do with a better understanding of the Bible to help us in our respective fields.

My roommate has suggested we just start from Genesis. I suppose that’s one way to go about it, but I dunno… does anyone have any better ideas? Should we try incorporating secondary texts? Literary texts? Philosophical texts? All of the above? Anyone who’s participated in something like this before?

Any ideas are most welcome.

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Asimov’s Guide to the Bible is a handy little book. Not really an analysis of the text, but more like a collection of factoids about each of the books. It has a bunch of maps, and Asimov refrains from his usual mocking tone when dealing with the religious (which was hilarious in The Relativity of Wrong), and keeps this book quite scholarly.

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As an Episcopalian I have completed a four year study called Education for Ministry(EFM). It doesn’t mean you are considering becoming a member of the clergy, but that you want to learn more about Christianity, it’s history, and how to express it to others.

The link above is to a page with sample lessons. I would particularly recommend the first year lessons, which go really deep into the origins of the Bible, it’s transition from oral history to the edited and written word.

First year is Old Testament, second year is New Testament, third year is Church History, and fourth year is philosophy and new theologies.

I really liked EFM. It is very academic, non-sentimental, and acknowledges the role of mythic history, rather than always taking Scripture literally. I learned a lot.

Of course the course as a whole is a group thing, but maybe there is some other way to get access to the materials.

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Heck, missed the edit window.

I agree with wolf’s recommendation. And don’t just go straight through, the Bible is not a novel but a collection of books written down over centuries, with different editors and theological slants, in different languages, from different cultures.

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Another recommendation for Asimov’s Guide to the Bible.

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Really? You mean, it wasn’t just written all by God? :eek:

:wink:

Thanks for the recs, everyone. I’ll definitely check out the Asimov book.

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Find a Unitarian Church near you - I’ve attended some fascinating, informative academic Bible classes and seminars at mine. The UUs are great because they treat the Bible with respect (i.e. it isn’t a 'let’s find all the contradictions and historical mistakes we can" fest), but not as infallible, and they don’t take the supernatural aspects at face value.

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I’ve never read Asimov’s book so I can’t recommend it but I’ll agree not to plow straight through from Genesis. I would perhaps select major events or characters and try to read those portions (Creation, David, Saul, etc) for discussion or else select one of the Gospels to read or major prophets. That would give you the most immediate return for your investment. Some on the minor prophet books of the Old Testament are quick reading but you don’t often discuss Obadiah these days.

Back when I belonged to a church which stressed Biblical study, the usual thought was that Mark was the most immediately accessable of the Gospels and Matthew was best for covering the major points Jesus taught. Of course, if you’re starting in the next few weeks, Luke has the traditional Christmas story.

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Yet another vote for not trying to read it cover-to-cover: that’d be like trying to read something like The Norton ANthology of English Literature straight through from beginning to end. If I were you, I’d do a book at a time and skip around.

Genesis is long, but there’s a lot of good stuff in it. It contains many of the Bible’s most famous stories and will give you lots to think and talk about.

If you like the long, saga-like narrative that makes up the last three-fourths of Genesis, you might like the story of David, which starts in 1st Samuel and continues through more than one book.

If you want a short, self-contained story, try Jonah or Ruth.

As philosophy/literature types, you might dig Job or Ecclesiastes.

You definitely should read at least one of the gospels. Mark is the shortest, but leaves a lot of stuff out, including some of Jesus’s most famous teachings. John is more mystical and full of longer, more symbolic/cryptic discourses (although the philsophical types might like that). If you read just one, though, I’d recommend either Matthew or Luke. Luke has an advantage of having a sequel: Acts, which tells the story of the earliest Christians immediately after Jesus’s life.

A huge number of commentaries, dictionaries, guides, annotations, explications, etc., etc., have been written about the Bible, from many different perspectives. One approach you should at least consider, though, is avoiding all of them and coming at the Bible cold, reading just the Biblical text itself and discussing your own personal impressions of it, before turning to external sources.

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One thing I’ve done is listen to the cds by some of the instructors of The Teaching Company . I’ve listened to the Old Testament class by Amy Jill Levine and the New Testament classes of Bart Ehrman. They’re the equivalent of a first year college level class.

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What’s the best edition of the bible for academics? Including say, footnotes on version differences and word translation controversies. That sort of thing.

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Let me throw in a recommendation for Richard Elliott Friedman’s “Who Wrote the Bible?” It’s about the Old Testament only (and primarily the Torah), but it approaches the issue like a giant jigsaw puzzle and does a great job of explaining how the Bible was edited together and how to make sense of otherwise bizarre and contradictory passages.

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A good book on the Bible that I enjoyed is Biblical Literacy by Joseph Telushkin

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+aleph[sub]1[/sub]

I came into this thread with the specific purpose of posting essentially what Baker said. My wife and I completed this course during the 1980s, and I do not believe one can say enough good things about it. (Originally it was TEE, Theological Education by Extension.before it was ‘rebranded’.),
Imagine, if you will, Dex and Euty’s write-up amplified and enhanced to the point where it legitimately covers the material of a tough three-credit course fot each of four semesters (eight with the final tweo years). You have a hint in that of how rewarding the course was.

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Link to the first of our five Staff Reports on “Who Wrote the Bible?”: Who wrote the Bible? (Part 1) - The Straight Dope The links to the other four parts are available in the opening paragraph.

There’s a question of what exactly you want to study. There are (at least) two very reasonable “academic” approaches:

  • The historic approach: who wrote what and when and why. The Hebrew bible was (presumably) written from about 1250 - 400 BC, with an oral tradition that was older. There are books included in the Christian “Old Testament” (like Maccabees) but not in the Hebrew bible. And the New Testament was written from around 50 - 100 AD. The historic approach is what was in the Staff Reports that Polycarp mentioned.

  • The literary approach: treating each book/text/subplot as a literary work and analyzing the meaning of the story, the dramatic style, the literary style, etc. An example of this might be: The Story of Drunken Noah

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Several authors have already been mentioned. I’d add Jonathan Kirsch, who’s written some excellent books on the Bible.

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New Oxford Annotated RSV or NRSV with Deutero-Canonical Books.

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The Oxford Annotated is always the go-to for anyone who wants to seriously read the Bible. However, I love and use the New Interpreter’s Bible, which is actually probably even more comprehensive in its discussion on academic issues surrounding scripture than the Oxford Annotated (there are parts where the footnotes take up more of the page than the text of the Bible itself!).

I suggest reading Genesis simply because it’s got a lot of good stories, and there’s been so much work done on the general authorship and structure of the Pentateuch, so it would be great way to be introduced to the documentary hypothesis. While I don’t generally suggest reading the Bible from beginning to end, I do think it makes sense to read the Pentateuch (i.e. Genesis to Deuteronomy) or at least good chunks of it together, and then possibly going to the New Testament and reading the four Gospels.

As far as a good book or guide, I haven’t read Asimov’s Guide to the Bible, but wasn’t that published in the 1960’s? It might be a little outdated by now. My church did a Bible study where we used some of Bart Erhman’s books, which approach the Bible from a typical mainstream scholarly perspective. I also highly, highly recommend John Dominic Crossan once you get to the Gospels!

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I did two classes like this, ‘The Bible as Literature’ and ‘Biblical and Classical Literature’, both of which were a requirement for the English degree at my school and the latter taught the Bible alongside the Aeneid and the Odyssey.

In some ways, your group is going to work better because you’re all approaching it from roughly the same angle. Our class combined the atheists with the evangelicals, and the poor prof fought a losing battle most days.

We started from Genesis in the Bible-focused class, mainly to begin examining the ideas of multiple authorship.

I don’t recall all of the secondary books that we had, but we did read some apocrypha that was quite eye-opening. There was one I do recall called ‘Other Nativities’ that was fairly good and included quite a lot of apocrypha on the birth of Jesus.

Our main texts, however, were the Oxford Study Bible and Tanakh put out by JPS

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Starting with Genesis and the first half of Exodus is a reasonable introduction. There are interesting stories, there’s lots of interesting commentary easily available, and there’s enough going to keep up interest. However, somewhere in midst Exodus – say, after Chapter 21 – things get bogged down. There’s lots of legal code, and long borrrring instructions on how to build the tabernacle. So I’d do Exodus through Ch 22 (just to get a flavor of the legal code), and then skip to Ch 32. After Ch 34, I’d say enough of Exodus. The other books of the Pentateuch (espesh Leviticus and Numbers) are basically lists of laws and rituals.