Original Story: God, Israel, and the World, The

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Dec 2006 by Reid, Garnett

The fourth problem with the authors concerns me the most. Despite the inclusive nature of The Original Story, something major seemed lacking as I read it. What is missing is any effort to take the claims of the OT text seriously as revelation. Does this book spring from the mind of God? Evidently not, according to Barton and Bowden, since the primary nature of the OT involves merely what Israel thought about religion. This mantra recurs with tedium in such phrases as: "believed they had encountered God" (p. vii); "ideas about God" (p. vii); "human insights into religious questions" (p. vii); "what biblical authors believed about God" (p. 9); "stories that ancient Israelites told themselves about their past" (p. 9); and "primarily the religious ideas of people in ancient Israel" (p. 19). The only consideration that the biblical text might represent more than human ideology comes on the final two pages of the book despite the likelihood that most of the people who engage the OT in close, disciplined study do so with this very presupposition.

Fifth, the effect of such a suspicious treatment of the OT turns out to be anything but what the title suggests. If the Bible's accounts are conflated, redacted, and legendary, then we really do not know "the original story." The redactors are the real authors, which is exactly what Barton and Bowden contend, and "we can never be certain they got it right" (p. 300). These surreptitious editors "find subtle ways of forcing us to read (the text) against its natural sense. . . . They throw us off the scent of the original meaning" (p. 297). The alternative, though, is for "biblical scholars to go back to reading the Bible in the way ordinary believers read it, as a text that has something powerful to say to us about God" (p. 310); but if that is the case, say the authors, "much of what we have written in this book becomes irrelevant!" (p. 306).

Readers seeking an introduction to the OT based on its own claims as both a divine and a human book would benefit more from the work by Dillard and Longman, the volumes in InterVarsity's Dictionary of the Old Testament, or Baker's four-volume Handbook series on the OT.

Garnett Reid

Free Will Baptist Bible College, Nashville, TN