Revelations: Personal Responses to Books of the Bible

Revelations: Personal Responses to Books of the Bible by Bono, Nick Cave et. al., Cannongate (2005), £10.

The following is abstracted from a review by Stephanie Merritt in The Observer Sunday 27 March 2005.

In 1998, long before Jerry Springer: The Opera galvanised evangelical Christians to vocal protest against blasphemy, independent Scottish publisher Canongate had achieved the same result – not with a coprophiliac Jesus or a torrent of musical obscenities, but with nothing more offensive than a new edition of the King James Bible. This divided edition (now out of print) included introductions to the books of the Old and New Testaments from Nick Cave, Bono, the Dalai Lama and others, writers largely from outside the Christian tradition.

Canongate's crime, in the eyes of the religious demonstrators, was to reclaim the books of the Bible from the literalists and to treat them simply as works of great poetry, myth and philosophy.

These 1,500-word introductions represented such a diversity of literary talent and interpretations that Canongate has now published them as an anthology, Revelations, without the biblical texts, and it is worth the cover price just to see such an extraordinary collection of names gathered on the same contents page. Nowhere else will you find Nick Cave rubbing shoulders with the Dalai Lama, or Bono and Joanna Trollope, Mordecai Richler, Peter Ackroyd, Will Self, Ruth Rendell and many others.

But it was not the individual pieces, whose attitudes were respectful, if not reverential, which angered hard-line believers so much as the principle of the whole series, as Richard Holloway, former Bishop of Edinburgh, explains in his thoughtful and humane introduction.

Here, he repeats the distinction made by the ancient Greeks between factual writings and myths, asserting that the books of both Jewish and Christian scripture belong firmly in the latter category. Far from devaluing the biblical accounts, he argues, the meanings of these stories are freed when we stop demanding that they contain literal truth. 'In other words, the value of factual discourse turns out to be transient, while myth or imaginative discourse turns out to be enduringly useful.'

Many of these writers conclude that man has effectively created God in his own image and that the stories gathered here tell us more about the human condition than they do about any perceived deity. Moreover, they tend to look at the brutalities of the Old Testament God in particular with clearer eyes than believers might, and without the same need to exonerate him.