I, of course, also read Crisis of Conscience and In Search of Christian Freedom. I learned a lot, though, from reference books and study Bibles. They helped me to see that there was a wealth of scholarship outside the Watchtower that I was missing. These books also helped shape my current view of the Bible:
1. The New Jerusalem Bible, Doubleday – This is one of my favorite study bibles because of the great footnotes. It is a Catholic bible and the Scholarship is great. Catholic study bibles are a bit different than Protestant bibles because they are less apologetic and acknowledge difficulties and myths in the bible. Plus, Catholic bibles contain extra books that shed more light on Jewish history.
2. New International Version Study Bible, Zondervan – Easy to read bible with good footnotes. It helped me to see that there are other plausible interpretations of bible passages aside from the Society’s.
3. The Other Bible, Harper Collins – A collection of other ancient Jewish and Christian writings that never made it into the official bible canon. Of interest are the various creation myth stories, the gnostic texts, and the other gospel accounts, such as the Infant Gospel of Thomas. Here is a breakdown of the various sections: Gnostic Gospels, Dead Sea Scrolls, Visionary Wisdom Texts, Christian Apocrypha, Jewish Pseudepigrapha, and Kabbalah.
4. NIV Exhaustive Concordance, Zondervan – An indispensable tool for bible research. Some fun things to do are to check out words like Satan and demons. It’s interesting how certain words don’t exist at all in most of the Bible, but then suddenly appear out of nowhere. The brief Hebrew and Greek dictionary in the back is cool too.
5. Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, Thayers – Good to get down to the real meaning of NT words as used in the original language.
6. Gesenius’ Hebrew-Chaldee Lexicon of the Old Testament, Thayers – Find out the true sense of the Hebrew words in the OT.
7. The Gentile Times Reconsidered, Carl Olof Jonsson – This book destroys the Society’s interpretation of the Gentile Times and exposes their dishonest portrayal of Babylonian history.
8. Demon Haunted World, Carl Sagan – This book is an eye opener. So many people believe in weird things that aren’t supported by facts. This book helps you tune your BS detector, which will aid in making rational decisions. It is a great book that destroys many myths and superstitions that haunt people who have been indoctrinated to believe them.
9. Why People Believe Weird Things, Michael Shermer – Ginny already recommended this one, and I think it is worth another recommendation. It’s very similar to Demon Haunted World in content, but comes from the perspective of an author who, in ignorance, used to believe in weird things.
10. The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins – This is a great book that helps to explain some concepts of evolution and dispel the myth that there is Intelligent Design present in life around us. It is good to read a book like this since most of us were indoctrinated from a young age by the Society to reject the Theory of Evolution. The only way to make an informed decision whether to accept or reject the theory is to learn both sides of the issue.
There are so many others I would like to recommend, such as Robert Park’s Voodoo Science, and any other book written by Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins. On a different note, I very much enjoyed a book of classic literature by W. Somerset Maugham called Of Human Bondage. I could really relate to the main character in this book as he grew from a young boy in a religious household, to a young man who left his religious upbringing behind.
There are many more, but those are the ones that helped me the most while I was making the transition from JW to apostate.
rem
