Recently in Bible Category

I've enjoyed every book I've read by Bart Ehrman, including his latest, Jesus Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don't Know About Them). I only had time to read the first couple of chapters carefully (the publisher didn't send a review copy), so I'll only make a few remarks.

At the Things of My Soul blog, a Mormon shares his frustration with the Evangelical view of the Bible as applied negatively to Mormons but not to others in "Religious Double Standards When Dismissing Mormonism":

Someone called me un-Christian for not accepting the Bible (as canonized in the 4th Century AD) as inerrant. They said that the Bible is the word of God - straight from God's mouth to the prophets' ears to the page. Then, in the same breath, they accepted as Christian someone who said that an entire book in the Bible is not inspired of God. (Martin Luther about the Epistle of James) They quoted Revelation (completely out of context in my opinion) to castigate us for adding to the canon, but they didn't castigate Luther for taking away from the canon. That's a double standard.

LDS Public Affairs released a press statement announcing a soon-to-be-released Spanish edition of the "LDS Bible." The 1979 English language "LDS Bible" used the King James Version for the text, but added new chapter headings, cross-references, and an LDS bible dictionary. The new Spanish language edition uses "the 1909 Reina-Valera edition of the Bible," with some changes: "The 2009 Latter-day Saint edition modernizes some of the outdated grammatical constructions and vocabulary that have shifted in meaning and acceptability."

I wonder if they have ever noticed the "outdated grammatical constructions and vocabulary" in the KJV? For an illustrated overview of the new edition, visit the Santa Biblia page (strangely, in English).

While some outsiders lump Mormons in with Evangelicals as thoroughgoing biblical literalists and inerrantists, there is actually a range of opinion on this subject within the LDS community. For the not so literal view, check out a recent two-part guest post at Mormon Organon by David H. Bailey, an accomplished LDS mathematician. In Latter-day Biblical Literalism, Part One, he disagrees with those who hold that the LDS Eighth Article of Faith ("We believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly") requires strong biblical literalism.

I personally cannot see how such claims can be defended in light of modern scholarship, or even from a careful reading of the text itself. A more flexible approach is required, one that recognizes the human as well as the divine in scripture. To that end, I present the following examples, certainly not out of disrespect for the Bible, but only to underscore the hopelessness of a literal or inerrant approach.

At FPR, "What is biblical criticism?" The post gives the following list of approaches: source criticism, form criticism, tradtion-historical criticism, redaction criticism, social-scientific criticism, canonical criticism, rhetorical criticism, structural criticism, narrative criticism, reader-response criticism, poststructuralist criticism, feminist criticism, and socioeconomic criticism. An impressive, even intimidating, list.