The bible a biography karen armstrong pdf

The truth of scripture cannot be assessed unless it is – ritually or ethically – put into practice.”

Karen Armstrong’s The Bible: A Biography is a wide ranging history of The Book, a well researched and thoughtful examination of a number of important topics.

For this review I am going to focus on just one of the areas she covers, because of the powerful and often destructive influence that it represents: the subject of biblical inerrancy.

Considering how deeply the concept of biblical literalism is embedded in contemporary evangelical Christianity, it is somewhat surprising to learn that it only became an issue in the late eighteen-hundreds.

“[A]n exclusively literal interpretation of the Bible is a recent development. Until the nineteenth century, very few people imagined that the