How God Became God by Richard Smoley

How God Became God by Richard Smoley

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.

RICHARD SMOLEY is one of the world's foremost specialists on Western civilization's mystical and esoteric traditions. He was a longtime editor of the revered spiritual journal Gnosis and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Oxford. Inner Christianity, The Essential Nostradamus, The Deal: A Guide to Radical and Full Forgiveness, and Forbidden Faith: The Hidden History of Gnosticism are among Smoley's works. Quest: Journal of the Theosophical Society in America is his present position as editor.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780399185557
ISBN 10	0399185550
Title	How God Became God
Author	Richard Smoley
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Penguin Putnam Inc
Year published	2016-06-07
Number of pages	320
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.