The Bible is too important to be left to believers

May I write a review of a review? I have to get this out of my system, having been unable to sleep last night, for anger at Christopher Howse’s beastly, scoffing and unjust treatment of a new book: Simon Loveday’s The Bible for Grown-Ups, reviewed in our 30 July issue. Somebody needs to call a halt to the tedious practice of using review to show off at somebody else’s expense.

It happens that I feel a special protectiveness towards this book, having seen the manuscript last year and encouraged its author to seek a publisher. Icon books have now published him, and done his study proud.

The book deserves it. Let me tell you first (as Mr Howse, who writes about religion for a national newspaper, finds no time to tell his readers) what Mr Loveday sets out to do. Many valuable studies of the Bible place the Christian (and, more generally, faith-based) message of the great book at the centre of the examination. Others are intent upon proving or disproving, or even mocking, its claims.

Loveday’s study is different. Written neither from the viewpoint of belief or unbelief, he aims to explain what nobody ever tried to explain to me in my own religious education: how this vast collection of stories, poetry, historical records, reports, genealogical tables, inventories, testaments and legends ever got stapled together — as it were — into the thing we call the Bible.

Who wrote the various bits, and why? What other aims might they have had, beyond the composition of a sacrament to their God? How did this all end up between two covers? How were its contents chosen?

How much is meant to be a factual report, and how much allegorical? How much is included just because it is beautiful, uplifting, solemn? Which of its famous stories occur in other cultures, religions, or literatures?

And though Loveday insists he wants to set aside belief or unbelief, there is a kind of message at the core of the decade-long adventure that this work has represented for him.