The Bible for Grown-Ups review – who wrote the good book?

Literary critic Simon Loveday, who died last year, is not concerned with matters of faith or theology but with understanding the Bible as a text, or rather as many texts. He demolishes the idea that the Old or New Testaments are historically accurate: literalist readings of the Bible are, he says with a biblical metaphor, “built on sand”. There is not “a single shred of historical evidence” for the exodus, nor is there any record of Herod killing Bethlehem’s firstborn. Far from preaching a single message, Loveday highlights the many contradictions in the Bible, due to the fact that it is a palimpsest: the work of many hands, writing, re-writing, editing and translating over hundreds of years. The idea of the virgin birth may even have been inspired by a mis-translation. But for Loveday, the Bible’s enduring strength lies in its immense symbolic power, forged by those who shaped many diverse texts into one book whose core myth is deliverance. This illuminating study reclaims the Bible as a great work of human creativity, one that “celebrates our recapture of our own imaginings”.