As I mentioned last month, with the loss of a family member our income took a hit. I’m so grateful for my Patreon supporters who ensure I will never employ paywalls or intrusive third party ads (so I always welcome more ongoing support there, or through PayPal for those who don’t like Patreon). And there are other ways to tip me or support my work (see How to Help). But I’m doing a new thing too:

Every month I will write about something I recommend buying and why. I am an Amazon Associate, so if you click through the sales link in any of these recommendation blogs (like today’s), or indeed any article or page here at all, I will get a commission on everything in your cart when you check out (even if you don’t buy the thing I recommend, and even if you buy a bunch of weird stuff like chubby seal pillows or storage sheds), as long as you fill that cart after following my link, and complete your purchase within 24 hours. I also get bonuses (in addition to the commissions) if my links pull enough sales volume every month, so it’s super great if you buy a lot of stuff through links on my site (hitting their bonus threshold of a thousand dollars in sales a month is hard to do, but hey, let’s try!).

Today I am highlighting two of the books I have long recommended people read, this time in the subject of the Origins of Christianity (last time it was Modern Philosophy and next time it will be Ancient Science—and then I’ll circle back and start over!).

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When people ask me what they should start with to get up to speed on biblical studies, I always recommend the same two books: The Bible Unearthed (subtitle: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts) by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Silberman (2002) and Jesus, Interrupted (subtitle: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don’t Know About Them)) by Bart Ehrman (2009).

Why these? They aren’t “correct” about everything, but they are solid representations of the widest mainstream consensus on the Bible now. Unearthed treats the Old Testament; and Interrupted, the New. They are the closest you’ll get to a one-stop expert summary. Everything else you can revise or build on from there.

Next to them I recommend my formal work On the Historicity of Jesus, not because of its thesis (you needn’t believe Jesus didn’t exist; it’s not solidly known either way and doesn’t really matter to much), but because of its far-reaching survey of all the relevant data, from two chapters full of background facts surrounding the origins of Christianity, to several chapters analyzing the literary contents of the New Testament Gospels and Epistles that is informative and important to know even if you are a historicist about Jesus. Doubting his historicity is more acceptable among experts than you are usually told (see my growing List of Historians Who Take Mythicism Seriously, which count over forty now). But all the surrounding data I survey is even less controversial (even the few things that used to be controversial, as I survey in Some Controversial Ideas That Now Have Wide Scholarly Support). And much of it isn’t covered in Unearthed or Interrupted, yet is important to have a good grounding in. And its bibliography will breadcrumb you to more.

The subtitles to Unearthed and Interrupted are from twenty years ago; the “new” or “hidden” consensus they document isn’t new anymore (and indeed the field may be going even further than both, only time will tell: see Was the Entire New Testament Forged in the Second Century?). It’s pretty standard and well known now. The cats are out of that bag. But if you want to get a level grounding in the baseline consensus in each field before exploring more, these remain unrivaled for the purpose.

The surprises in Unearthed were that the Isrealites didn’t come from Egypt and invade Palestine, but were always Palestinians (just one tribe of Canaanites among many) and simply conquered their neighboring kin and rewrote history, producing much of the Old Testament as straight-up propaganda. The sham continued, such that (surprise!) the Isrealites were not even monotheists. That was a later invention, again imposed by force from above and by extensive rewriting of biblical propaganda. How traditionalists got overwhelmed by all this evidence and lost the fight to minimalists is analyzed in A Test of Bayesian History: Efraim Wallach on Old Testament Studies (resulting in the field finally admitting Moses and the Patriarchs probably didn’t exist, after decades of fighting that conclusion; if the same timeline follows, Jesus may be going the same way in another ten or twenty years).

The corresponding surprise in Interrupted is that nearly everything said by or about Jesus in the New Testament isn’t true, and is similarly a product of political and social propaganda wars—and Ehrman is not a fringe skeptic: that’s literally the mainstream consensus now. How traditionalists got overwhelmed by all this evidence and lost the fight to minimalists is analyzed in a series of studies by James Crossley (from Jesus in an Age of Terror to Jesus in an Age of Neoliberalism).

So this is the starter-kit I recommend for understanding the Bible as real actual experts now see it.