The Bible is a collection of books with a long history. Not surprisingly, there is little agreement as to precisely which books it contains and what their collective importance might be. In The Making of the Bible, a distinguished Old Testament scholar, Konrad Schmid, and an equally prominent New Testament specialist, Jens Schröter, have combined forces to produce a volume (elegantly translated from the German by Peter Lewis) that outlines how different forms of the Bible came into being. Their focus is historical and philological rather than theological or literary. Yet the story they tell is engrossing: that of an unstable world needing to attend to the values of God’s kingdom. They help a non-specialist reader appreciate the fascinating diversity of ways in which the Bible’s message was regularly reinterpreted in a changing political situation.
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