# Looking for a Biblical guide approved by religious leaders **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [April 27, 2026, 10:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looking-for-a-biblical-guide-approved-by-religious-leaders/1029606 "2026-04-27T22:27:40Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Prof.Pepperwinkle](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/prof.pepperwinkle/32/13627_2.png) [@Prof.Pepperwinkle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Prof.Pepperwinkle)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2026, 12:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looking-for-a-biblical-guide-approved-by-religious-leaders/1029606/21 "2026-04-28T00:42:28Z")
For someone who has a few hours to kill, there’s John Evans, _A Guide to Biblical Commentaries and Reference Works_ (2016, Zondervan). He states clearly at the start that he is himself an Evangelist, but his work, which covers hundreds of works on the Bible, the Testaments, individual books, etc., makes a point of stating who will benefit from each text: whether it’s a preacher, a curious layman, a scholar, a missionary, and whether or not the work is by and for Evangelicals, Academics, Fundamentalists, etc. It also discusses how well received the books were, or the series. It’s over a thousand pages, but it’s useful to distinguish between works I know I may profit from, and those I can tell I won’t. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2026, 12:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looking-for-a-biblical-guide-approved-by-religious-leaders/1029606/22 "2026-04-28T00:47:05Z")
For Catholic religious leaders specifically, the term for what you’re looking for is “nihil obstat”. That’s an official statement from bishops, at the start of a book, that nothing in the book is an obstacle to the teachings of the Church. I don’t have any specific works to recommend, but that might at least help your search. ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2026, 12:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looking-for-a-biblical-guide-approved-by-religious-leaders/1029606/23 "2026-04-28T00:54:58Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > For Catholic religious leaders specifically, the term for what you’re looking for is “nihil obstat”. That’s an official statement from bishops, at the start of a book, that nothing in the book is an obstacle to the teachings of the Church. Yes, good one, but parables are generally not excluded. Note that in most holy works it is hard to separate the parables from the actual factual history. The Qur’an has the same issue, same with the Tripiṭaka, The Bhagavad Gita, etc. In fact parables are a known and effective teaching tool in real life. OP, why are you fixated on the Bible, and not, for example, on the Qur’an? ---
**Author:** ![griffin1977](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/977dab/32.png) [@griffin1977](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/griffin1977)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2026, 12:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looking-for-a-biblical-guide-approved-by-religious-leaders/1029606/24 "2026-04-28T00:57:54Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#): > > Will narrowing it down to a few specific leaders of different sects provide me with a book/guideline they all agree with? If you kept it small enough. The Pope and Archbishop of Canterbury share most of the same fundamental teachings (except of course the supremacy of the Pope and the authority of the king of England to appoint the archbishop of Canterbury 😉 ). As you add more and more the subset becomes smaller. The history of Christianity is a sequence of schisms over one doctrinal issue or other, it’s a very big tree with lots of different branches. ---
**Author:** ![RTFirefly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/c77e96/32.png) [@RTFirefly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RTFirefly)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2026, 1:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looking-for-a-biblical-guide-approved-by-religious-leaders/1029606/25 "2026-04-28T01:02:27Z")
> [@Prof.Pepperwinkle](#): > > Many, many Bible scholars all recommend the **[New Oxford Annotated Study Bible, Revised Standard Version.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Annotated_Bible)** The RSV? You can get shots to keep you from getting RSV. 😉 > [@Prof.Pepperwinkle](#): > > These scholars are, almost to a man, not Fundamentalist or Evangelical, but more of the academic and analytical schools. Which means they don’t really represent a wide swath of persons identifying as Christian. Few fundagelicals would even give them the time of day. I think the answer to Czarcasm’s question is “yes.” The problem is, some guides would reflect what one group of religious leaders believe about those stories, and other guides would reflect what some other group of religious leaders believe about them. And the guides would contradict each other all over the place, because the different groups see the Bible in very different ways. The scholars that the good Prof. mentions here would tell you that the story of Jonah is not factual, and is a fable, parable, or whatever the appropriate categorization is, and the big names of the religious right would tell you it’s factual, and so would any guide that they endorse. So yes, there are such guides, but they will reach vastly different conclusions. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2026, 1:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looking-for-a-biblical-guide-approved-by-religious-leaders/1029606/26 "2026-04-28T01:09:53Z")
Because that was what I wanted to know. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2026, 1:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looking-for-a-biblical-guide-approved-by-religious-leaders/1029606/27 "2026-04-28T01:22:21Z")
> [@DrDeth](#): > > Yes, good one, but parables are generally not excluded. I’m not sure how that’s a response to me. I didn’t say anything about books separating parables from parts intended as literal. I was just talking about how you know if a book is “approved by religious leaders”, for Catholic values of “religious leaders”. > [@RTFirefly](#): > > Which means they don’t really represent a wide swath of persons identifying as Christian. Few fundagelicals would even give them the time of day. Worldwide, fundamentalist evangelicals are a pretty narrow swath of Christians. Catholics alone are around half of all Christians, and most Protestants aren’t fundamentalist, either. ---
**Author:** ![puzzlegal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puzzlegal/32/3827_2.png) [@puzzlegal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puzzlegal)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2026, 1:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looking-for-a-biblical-guide-approved-by-religious-leaders/1029606/28 "2026-04-28T01:29:50Z")
Moderating: These posts are really off topic > [@DrDeth](#): > > Interesting Note on Parables- Plato’s story about Atlantis is a parable. He wasnt recounting history. There never was Atlantis, they can thus never find Atlantis as it is fictional. > > This is just to show other cultures have their parables which the credulous have taken as fact. > [@DrDeth](#): > > Yes, good one, but parables are generally not excluded. > > Note that in most holy works it is hard to separate the parables from the actual factual history. The Qur’an has the same issue, same with the Tripiṭaka, The Bhagavad Gita, etc. > > In fact parables are a known and effective teaching tool in real life. > > OP, why are you fixated on the Bible, and not, for example, on the Qur’an? The OP has a question about the Bible. While it’s possible that people in this discussion would be interested in some standard book about which surahs of the Korean are considered historical and which are parable and which are something else, you haven’t done this. You already to be attempting to drag the conversation away from the Bible, which is the topic of this thread. Please drop it. ---
**Author:** ![needscoffee](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/needscoffee/32/1076_2.png) [@needscoffee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/needscoffee)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2026, 1:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looking-for-a-biblical-guide-approved-by-religious-leaders/1029606/29 "2026-04-28T01:44:48Z")
> [@puzzlegal](#): > > Moderating: > > These losers are really off topic I suspect you had a swypo there… ---
**Author:** ![puzzlegal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puzzlegal/32/3827_2.png) [@puzzlegal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puzzlegal)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2026, 1:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looking-for-a-biblical-guide-approved-by-religious-leaders/1029606/30 "2026-04-28T01:51:38Z")
Thank you. It was meant to say “posts” and I’ve fixed it. ---
**Author:** ![griffin1977](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/977dab/32.png) [@griffin1977](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/griffin1977)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2026, 2:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looking-for-a-biblical-guide-approved-by-religious-leaders/1029606/31 "2026-04-28T02:31:49Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#): > > factual and which are parables/lesson I think there’s a problem here. This doesn’t exist. You will of course find some writings at one end of the spectrum, from the small minority of Christians who think every word is the literal historical truth. But the other end isn’t just a list of “these bits are allegory, these bits happened”. It’s a generally accepted that “the Bible is not a history book”. The actual historicity of each particular passage doesn’t really matter so you aren’t going to get a canonical list of what is and isn’t allegorical. ---
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2026, 3:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looking-for-a-biblical-guide-approved-by-religious-leaders/1029606/32 "2026-04-28T03:23:48Z")
> [@needscoffee](#): > > I suspect you had a swypo there… Freudian swypo? ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2026, 5:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looking-for-a-biblical-guide-approved-by-religious-leaders/1029606/33 "2026-04-28T05:43:13Z")
Jews have a book like that. It’s called the Talmud. ---
**Author:** ![RTFirefly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/c77e96/32.png) [@RTFirefly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RTFirefly)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2026, 11:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looking-for-a-biblical-guide-approved-by-religious-leaders/1029606/34 "2026-04-28T11:19:47Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Worldwide, fundamentalist evangelicals are a pretty narrow swath of Christians. Catholics alone are around half of all Christians, and most Protestants aren’t fundamentalist, either. Presumably, the OP is looking for an English-language guide. ---
**Author:** ![Briny\_Deep](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/briny_deep/32/17188_2.png) [@Briny\_Deep](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Briny_Deep)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2026, 3:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looking-for-a-biblical-guide-approved-by-religious-leaders/1029606/35 "2026-04-28T15:53:34Z")
No offense is intended in the least, but your original question does seem to presuppose a wide agreement among religious leaders which just doesn’t exist. You’re not going to find any book that you can trust as representative. If you want scholarly information, the Oxford Annotated can’t really be beat. I expect Evangelicals and Fundamentalists actually do read that, if they want to know what the wide consensus of opinion is among academia, not that they’re going to base their own belief on that. To pick one of the less controversial aspects of scholarly research vs. what certain Bible Believers believe, take authorship. The Epistles of Paul tend to start out with statements like “Paul, to the churches in Thessalonica, greetings.” Literalists, who believe every word of the Bible is inspired, inerrant, and infallable, start and end their question of “Who wrote this letter” with What It Says In The Bible. If the letter says it’s by Paul right on the first page, that’s all they need to know. Many if not most Christians, let alone disinterested observers, don’t read the Bible quite this way, and would be open to at least the idea that perhaps a certain letter was written by someone else and then Paul’s name was applied to it. That’s the sort of info you’ll find in the Oxford book. As far as “but what does it all MEAN,” – not that you are explicitly asking that, I realize – you’d have to look towards what various Christian (or Jewish) bodies say it means, and decide who you trust. For example, while seeking understanding of what the Bible means, I deeply distrust Evangelical and Fundamentalist interpretations as misguided or flat-out wrong, so my small library of Biblical guides is populated mostly by Anglican and Catholic authors. But that’s just me. If you’re inclined to be receptive to what the Baptists think, by all means get a Baptist guide, but it’s going to be very different from something by Rowan Williams. ---
**Author:** ![Vlad\_Igor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/7feea3/32.png) [@Vlad\_Igor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Vlad_Igor)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2026, 4:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looking-for-a-biblical-guide-approved-by-religious-leaders/1029606/36 "2026-04-28T16:07:15Z")
I will echo @griffin1977’s point above that the Bible does not contain factual history. Parts of it were written as a theological interpretation of historical events, so asking “what parts are historical?” is not answerable. The Book of Acts appears to be historical, but it is likely Luke’s take on the post-resurrection community of Jesus-followers. Paul’s letter to the Galatians contains passages that are close to a historical record, but Paul was not writing to the church in Galatia for that purpose. To your question, I have the Oxford NRSV Annotated Bible that is considered the most unbiased translation of ancient Greek and Hebrew by scholars. I also have the Oxford Jewish Annotated New Testament that explains Christian Scripture in the context of the Jewish authors; I have The Jewish Study Bible that provides historical and social context of the Hebrew Bible; finally, I have Evolution of the Word by Marcus Borg that arranges the Christian Bible in the most agreed-upon chronological order so that you get an idea of how The Way began to evolve from a Judaic sect to its own theological entity. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2026, 4:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looking-for-a-biblical-guide-approved-by-religious-leaders/1029606/37 "2026-04-28T16:15:10Z")
> [@Briny\_Deep](#): > > No offense is intended in the least, but your original question does seem to presuppose a wide agreement among religious leaders which just doesn’t exist. My original question was a _question_, not a presupposition. I asked if any such books/outlines existed. Was it wrong to even ask the question? ---
**Author:** ![Briny\_Deep](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/briny_deep/32/17188_2.png) [@Briny\_Deep](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Briny_Deep)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2026, 4:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looking-for-a-biblical-guide-approved-by-religious-leaders/1029606/38 "2026-04-28T16:15:58Z")
Be a short thread if the answer was just No, wouldn’t it? Responders here have assumed you wanted engagement with the topic. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2026, 4:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looking-for-a-biblical-guide-approved-by-religious-leaders/1029606/39 "2026-04-28T16:18:07Z")
I wanted an answer to a question, not a popularity contest. I have absolutely no problem with a short thread, as long as it does what it is supposed to do. ---
**Author:** ![Richard\_Parker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/35a633/32.png) [@Richard\_Parker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Richard_Parker)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2026, 4:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looking-for-a-biblical-guide-approved-by-religious-leaders/1029606/40 "2026-04-28T16:55:30Z")
> [@Prof.Pepperwinkle](#): > > **[New Oxford Annotated Study Bible, Revised Standard Version.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Annotated_Bible)** Just wanted to toss in another vote for the Big Red Bible. It’s a pretty terrific work. The thing it is annotating, the RSV, is a document produced by the National Council of Churches and contains translation footnotes that sometimes touch on the OP’s question. But more importantly, the annotations and introductory essays in the New Oxford version discuss how passages are used and understood in mainstream Christian traditions. It’s not that typical believers would necessarily endorse the scholarly consensus about historicity or how to interpret a given passage (and as pointed out, there is no consensus among believers). But the scholarly account of how believers use the passages does go some way toward answering OP’s question about which passages some mainstream religious adherents treat as historically accurate vs. parable. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looking-for-a-biblical-guide-approved-by-religious-leaders/1029606.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/looking-for-a-biblical-guide-approved-by-religious-leaders/1029606.md?page=3)