by Sandy » Tue Jun 07, 2011 10:39 am
Not a bad review, I think I'll read the book.
The assumption that Barton, or any other conservative Christian, reads the Bible in a particular way, and is unaware of how it was collected and put together, is just that--an assumption. It is also an assumption to think that because some scholar has spent an inordinate amount of time poring over texts that he is studying through the lenses of some other scholar's presuppositions and prejuduces, he is correct. There's probably no other piece of human literature to which the statement, "That's what it says, but that's not really what the author meant to say.." is applied than the Bible, and next to it, the US Constitution.
Barton is usually guilty of leaving things out, rather than inventing things or adding them in. I did a research paper in college many years ago on the faith of George Washington, and discovered just how much factual material is left out of secular textbooks and historical accounts. That, of course, supports Barton's view, so he includes it. Other such information, which doesn't necessarily support his view, he leaves out. In that, though, he is not unlike most other "scholars" in any field who write up their research as if they are the only ones in the universe who possess their special knowledge in their particular field.
This particular book looks like it might be well balanced and well researched. I needed some good summer reading. I just finished Frederick Taylor's work, Dresden, and one I picked up in the airport a week or so ago, The Nazi Officer's Wife about a Viennese Jewish woman who survived the Holocaust by marrying a German soldier, who protected her.