About this item
This epic, thrilling journey through Bible scholarship and ancient religion shows how much of Scripture is historically false--yet the ancient writings also resound with theologies that crisscrossed the primeval world and that direct us today toward a deep, inner, authentic experience of the truly sacred.From a historical perspective, the Bible is shockingly, provably wrong--a point supported by today's best archaeological and historical scholarship but not well understood by (or communicated to) the public. Yet this emphatically does not mean that the Bible isn't, in some very real measure, true, argues scholar of mysticism Richard Smoley. Smoley reviews the most authoritative historical evidence to demonstrate that figures such as Moses, Abraham, and Jesus are not only unlikely to have existed, but bear strong composite resemblances to other Near Eastern religious icons. Likewise, the geopolitical and military events of Scripture fail to mesh with the largely settled historical time line and social structures. Smoley meticulously shows how our concepts of the Hebrew and Christian God, including Christ himself, are an assemblage of ideas that were altered, argued over, and edited--until their canonization. This process, to a large degree, gave Western civilization its consensus view of God. But these conclusions are not cause for nihilism or disbelief. Rather, beneath the metaphorical figures and mythical historicism of Scripture appears an extraordinary, truly transcendent theology born from the most sacred and fully realized spiritual and human insights of the antique Eastern world. Far from being "untrue," the Bible is remarkably, extraordinarily true as it connects us to the sublime insights of our ancient ancestors and points to a unifying ethic behind many of the world's faiths.
About the Author
Richard Smoley is one of the world's most distinguished authorities on the mystical and esoteric teachings of Western civilization. Richard was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, in 1956. He attended the Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut, and entered Harvard in 1974. As an undergraduate, Smoley was managing editor of the university's venerable literary magazine, The Harvard Advocate, and edited an anthology entitled First Flowering: The Best of the Harvard Advocate, 1866-1976. Featuring prefaces by Norman Mailer and Robert Fitzgerald, the book was published by Addison-Wesley in 1977. After taking a bachelor's degree magna cum laude in classics at Harvard in 1978, Richard went on to the University of Oxford in the U.K., where he edited The Pelican, the magazine of Corpus Christi College. He took another B.A. in the Honour School of Literae Humaniores (classics and philosophy) in 1980, and received his M.A. from Oxford in 1985. The most important part of his stay at Oxford came from his contact with a small group that was studying the Kabbalah, one of the mainstays of the Western esoteric tradition. It was here that he was first introduced to many of the ideas he has discussed in his books and articles.After two years at Oxford, Richard moved to San Francisco in 1980. During this time he continued his spiritual investigations, working with teachings ranging from Tibetan Buddhism to A Course in Miracles. He was also a member of the board of directors of the San Francisco Miracles Foundation, an organization sponsoring the work of A Course in Miracles.In 1986, Richard started writing for a new magazine called Gnosis: A Journal of the Western Inner Traditions. After four years of writing for Gnosis and a brief stint as managing editor, he came on board as editor in November 1990. In his eight years as editor of Gnosis, he put together issues of the magazine on subjects as diverse as Gnosticism, Freemasonry, G.I. Gurdjieff, and the spirituality of Russia. In 1998 Gnosis won Utne Reader's award for best spiritual coverage. In May 1999, Richard's book, Hidden Wisdom: A Guide to the Western Inner Traditions, coauthored with Jay Kinney, was published by Penguin Arkana. (A revised edition was issued by Quest Books in 2006.) Richard's book Inner Christianity: A Guide to the Esoteric Tradition, was published in fall 2002 by Shambhala Publications. An audio version read by Richard is available from Berkshire Media Artists Inc. The award-winning literary magazine The Sun featured him in a lengthy interview on Christianity in its September 2003 issue.Richard has also worked as editor for Faith.com, a Web site on religion and spirituality, and as managing editor of Lindisfarne Books, a highly respected publisher of titles on the spiritual traditions. He is a consulting editor and frequent contributor to Parabola: The Journal of Myth and Tradition. He has served as guest editor of Science of Mind magazine, and works as a consultant for th
