Books like How to Read the Bible by James L. Kugel

Explores the New Testament book of Revelation in a historical first-century context, reinterpreting the book as a scathing attack on the decadence of Rome that was subsequently adopted by early Christians as a weapon against heresy.

This book offers a literary approach to the biblical text. Robert Alter brings numerous textual examples of the different types of biblical narrative, e.g., dialogue, repetition, narration.

In Beyond Belief, Elaine Pagels examines the roots of Christianity, from the Gospel of Thomas to early canon formation, while reflecting on the personal and spiritual impact of faith in the modern world.

Good Book is the story of an average man who becomes obsessed with the Bible and embarks on a journey to understand its teachings and influence.

"Five years after his book about God as portrayed in the Old Testament - God: A Biography - Jack Miles gives us his consideration of Christ. He presents Christ as a hero of literature based only in part on the historical Jesus, asking us to take the idea of Christ as God Incarnate not as a dogma of religion but as the premise of a work of art, the New Testament.". "As this story begins, God has not kept his promise to end the five-hundred-year-long oppression of the Children of Israel and return them to greatness. Under Rome, their latest oppressor, the Jews face a holocaust. This is God's supreme crisis. Astonishingly, God resolves the dilemma by becoming a Jew himself, Christ, inflicting upon himself in advance the very agony his people will suffer, revising in the process the meaning of victory and defeat. By dying and rising as Christ, God not only swallows up the historical defeat of the Jews but also offers the promise of a cosmic victory that will "wipe away every tear" for all mankind."--BOOK JACKET.

This is a companion to the Bible like no other. Leading us chapter by chapter through key biblical stories - from Creation and the Tree of Knowledge through the Exodus from Egypt and journey to the Promised Land - James Kugel shows how a group of anonymous ancient interpreters radically transformed the Bible and made it into the book that has come down to us today. Here, for the first time, we can witness the development of the Bible "As It Was" at the start of the common era - the Bible as we know it.