stillajwexelder,
I have just finished reading for the 2nd time "Who Wrote The Bible" by Friedman and American Professor but first published in London. He gives solid evidence that the Pentateuch was written by 4 writers who are called J, E, P and D --- and so on -- traditionally of course written by Moses. My question is 2-fold
1) Has anyone else read this book and/ or similar - and what did you think of it -- did it (or other) shake your faith - help make you agnostic?
Yes. That book is absolutely worth a second read. It is the simply the best introductory review of the evidence I have ever seen. Of course, being short and for us non-academics, it skips a lot of other great evidence for JEPD, but it seems very fair in the selected evidence presented. I can't say that this book shook my faith since the Bible had already done that when I first gave it a first full read when I started at Bethel. At the time, I thought reading the Aid book would help restore my faith but the weak defenses in the Aid book were what
really began to turn me agnostic.
What I especially liked about the Friedman book were the short segments reviewing portions of Bible history. Those were extremely well written. The simple explanation of Israelite meat eating, the reason Solomon married all those wives, and Solomon's gerrymandering of Israel, and his attempts to treat Northerners especially as slave labor -- a lot of these things I don't think I would have seen on my own.
2) What is your favored reading material of a religious/historical/philosophical nature now that you do not trust what the WTBTS publishes?
At the level of Friedman's books, I also liked Randel Helms (Who Wrote the Bible? and Gospel Fictions). Even with the sensationalist speculations of Passover Plot, I still liked Hugh Schonfield's presentation of the evidence he used for that book plus his further work in The Pentecost Revolution, The Jesus Party along with some other books of his. Hyam Maccoby also wrote some books that were very good at this same level: "Paul and the Invention of Christianity" "Revolution in Judea" etc. The books from authors that are involved in the Jesus Seminar are often good, and are beginning to replace these other introductory level books by some of these other authors for Jesus/Early Christian materials. The Jesus Seminar style pretends to be more authoritative, but it often presents a good concensus of the work done in this area for the last 100 years or so.
Gamaliel
edited over and over to try to get the quote boxes to look right.
