The Diversity of the New Testament

Mack opens the prologue to his book describing the "important role assigned to the Bible in our religious institutions."

"Readings from the Bible are essential to liturgies, lessons from the Bible are felt to be necessary in the construction of theologies by those charged with the intellectual life of religious traditions," Mack writes. "The remarkable thing about this kind of appeal to the Bible, however, is that it does not seem to matter whether all of the theologies and teachings so derived agree."

Even at the highest levels of Christian scholarship, Mack goes on to argue, the Bible is assumed to have a unified, single message that can be understood by properly interpreting its meaning. This ignores the historical facts about the assemblage of texts that is now called the Bible, Mack claims. The story that the Bible is a coherent work divinely...