Approach the Bible as if it’s a library

Bibliofuture says:

College Course
I took a course on the bible at a State University. The course looked at the Bible in it’s historical context and from a scholarly perspective. When we started the course the Professor gave a speech about leaving bagage at the door. He explained this to mean that we all came into the class with some bagage about the bible. For some people this meant they based parts of their live on the bible. For other people the bible was complete trash. The professor wanted us to leave all that backage out of the classroom and approach the bible from a scholarly standpoint and to study the bible in it’s historical context and to temporarily discard the frame of reference we normally approached the bible with, either positive or negative. The text for the book was Who Wrote the Bible by Richard Friedman. Scholars have been able to identify different authors for the bible by studying the text. Becuase we do not know their names they have been assigned letters for their names. Here is a brief blurb from Amazon that talks about the different authors and the book. “J,” “P,” “E,” and “D” are the names scholars have given to some authors of the Bible, and, as such, they are very important letters to a lot of people. Churches have died and been born, and millions of people have lost faith or found it, because of the last two centuries of debate about who, exactly, wrote the canonical texts of Christianity and Judaism. Richard Elliott Friedman’s survey of this debate, in Who Wrote the Bible?, may be the best written popular book about this question. Without condescension or high-flown academic language, Friedman carefully describes the history of textual criticism of the Bible–a subject on which his authority is unparalleled (Friedman has contributed voluminously to the authoritative Anchor Bible Dictionary). But this book is not just smart. Perhaps even more impressive than Friedman’s erudition is his sensitivity to the power of textual criticism to influence faith. –Michael Joseph Gross