Book in English so review in English ....et ensuite en français

English

This video (a conference made by the author) made me read the book

The book :

This book is about the bible mainly the new testament : Where does its current content comes from ?
It appears that

• the new testament was copied again and again during centuries.
• it's now a straight process
• sometimes very bad source were used to build a translation or a new "bible"
• a lot of mistakes were just humans errors during the painful copy process (Greek without no spaces or commas,...)

You will discover in which context the texts were copied. We have a tendency to imagine a pre-christian world by our standards. Today a lot of people can write and read. This wasn't the case then !!! (Barely 10% were able to read).

My review :

A great book !
I knew by reading it that the bible is full of hate and cruelty
But I discovered how the new testament was made.
I knew that it was written long after Jesus death.
I discovered the different paths and languages the texts used to reach or nowadays printed bibles.

I discovered mistakes made just because real human beings had translated or written the text.
Some changes were just mistakes but some were made on purpose !
So some texts were changed as an answer to critics or problems that first Christians were facing !

And those intentional changes are not unimportant ones !
We talk here about the nature of Jesus, place of woman in the church...

The most interesting stuff in the book is the story around the gospels and acts. It's written sometimes like a police investigation that makes you learn about the real forgery of a religious text.

En Français