The New Testament: a Very Short Introduction

[dreamer_easy]

Like The Old Testament: a Very Short Introduction, this clear and interesting little book left me much enlightened. It puts the New Testament into the context of thought and literature at the time it was written - over five decades, rather than over centuries or millennia, like the Hebrew Bible; as the author, Luke Timothy Johnson, explains, this

Comments

[hnpcc]

Ooh I will have to look out for both of those. I probably still identify as ethnically Christian, but essentially lapsed (I hope that makes sense). I find the background to what was happening around the time(s) of the books being written really interesting (and also what happened after the Roman Empire got involved and the codification[1] of the Church as an entity.)

What they do is two things: apply Greek thought to try to make sense of it; and squabble amongst themselves, of course.*snerk* the bane of all movements is trying to get them to move in the same direction under the same leadership. Heh. Complicated further by all these different ethnic groups coming in and wanting to do things their way, and adding in bits of their own traditions to make it feel more homely[2] (or to have a bob each way just in case the old gods came back) and suddenly you have the Orthodox, the Catholics and all these Protestant splinter groups. And that's just the organised ones

[dreamer_easy]

The actual nuts and bolts of it - this very new community trying to figure out how to live with each other - is extremely interesting. I got a sense of the personalities involved, which you don't get when the Bible is presented as a homogenous divinely inspired lump.