SOURCE: “In a Personal Spirit,” in Times Literary Supplement, March 31, 1989, p. 331.

In the following review, Donoghue offers a positive assessment of The Book of God, calling the work both scholarly and accessible.

Gabriel Josipovici describes the Bible as “that most complex yet most reticent of books,” and his response to it observes both of the qualities he attributes to it. He will not let go of its complexity till it has blessed his account of it. Nor is he gruff in granting to it the right to be reticent.

In “Religion and Literature” (1935), T. S. Eliot denounced men of letters who go into ecstasies over “the Bible as literature,” the Bible as “the noblest monument of English prose,” and insisted that such men “are merely admiring it as a monument over the grave of Christianity.” The Bible, he maintained, “has had a literary influence upon English literature not...