Burning issues about the Bible: truth versus fiction

Remarkable new analysis of the source texts of the Bible seeks to revolutionise our understanding of the origins of Christianity and Judaism

One has long suspected that much of the Bible contains nothing more than a selection of folk tales and myths. Now, an incendiary new trilogy, A Bonfire of Inanities: The Bible Dismantled, by textual scholar Paul McGrane, looks set to bear out such suspicions by revealing the enormity of misrepresentations and misunderstandings that have been handed down for centuries.

The first volume of the trilogy, Ancestral Tales: The real truth about the ancient roots of Judaism and Christianity (Singular Books, June 2023), eminently readable and impressively and compellingly researched, represents an outstanding piece of hermeneutic detective work which, in the specific case of its subject matter and objectives — that of separating truth from fiction in the Bible — could be said to be essential scholarship long overdue.

McGrane applies his doctoral (Oxon) expertise in textual analysis in a quest for rationalist solutions to fundamental questions of Christian belief, offering a reinterpretation of Biblical chronology, people and events and fresh insights into their meanings. It sets the cat among the academic pigeons, and surely, such burning issues as McGrane raises can be…