Bible Review, Fall 2005

When Jesus preaches in his hometown synagogue, the locals are astounded. “Where did this man get all this? … Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and the brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon?” (Mark 6:3). Readers of BR (and especially of its sister magazine Biblical Archaeology Review) have […]

For centuries, scholars from many backgrounds—religious and nonreligious, Christian and Jewish—have worked on discovering how the Bible came to be. Their task was not to prove whether the Bible’s words were divinely revealed to the authors. That is a question of faith, not scholarship. Rather, they were trying to learn the history of those […]

Simon Magus is arguably the worst of the bad guys in the history of the church.1 One of the major sins, simony, the act of buying an ecclesiastical office, is named for this magician who clashed with the apostle Peter. It gets worse. In the early Christian apocrypha, he is the common enemy who […]

Walk through the religion section of any major bookstore, and you’ll see an amazing array of Bibles. The broad selection of translations (also called versions)—and the seemingly endless ways in which they are packaged—is without historical precedent. But for many people, it is also bewildering, if not frustrating. Rather than the “blessing” it could […]