100 Books Like The Misunderstood Jew

I’ve read a number of books about the Bible over the years, from academic monographs to commentaries to popular and devotional reads. Hands down, Rohr’s Things Hidden is my single favorite book about scripture.

It’s accessible—not academic, although clearly informed by good scholarship. It celebrates the Bible for its spiritual meaning, rather than getting mired in dogma, philosophy, or moralism.

Most important of all, it provides insight into how the Bible tells a centuries-long story of how people (first, the Jewish community, and later on, the earliest Christians) over time grew to understand God as an infinite, loving creator.

I truly was inspired by Jennifer Bird’s intelligent yet inviting introduction to the Bible—and her explanation of why ordinary people can read it for personal spiritual benefit.

For many years, I felt intimidated by Biblical commentaries because they were written by brilliant scholars and researchers who devoted their entire lives to the Bible. How could I ever reach their depth of knowledge?

But along came Jennifer Bird, who reminds readers like me that it’s okay to bring a layperson’s perspective to scripture. As her title indicates, she gives everyone permission to mind our own ways of relating to this ancient text.

She’s not promoting fundamentalism, but rather gives us permission to balance an academic appreciation of Biblical knowledge with a personal encounter with the Spirit of love who truly inspired the Biblical writers.

I grew up in a conservative church in the American South, the home of evangelical fundamentalism—but Marcus Borg offered me a great pathway out of the narrow-mindedness of literalistic, authoritarian religion.

The subtitle of this book says it all: there is a path to taking the Bible more seriously (as a spiritual book) when we stop insisting on reading it literally. Borg combines quality scholarship with an almost mystical appreciation of the wisdom encoded in the ancient scripture.

For me, reading his book was an invitation not only to read the Bible anew, but to fall in love with it all over again.

Growing up as a Christian, I learned a Christian understanding of the Bible, but my appreciation of scripture took a quantum leap when I was exposed to Jewish perspectives, including this brilliant study of the Hebrew Bible (the Christian “Old Testament”) as a guide to meditation.

Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan unpacks how instructions for meditation are often carefully encoded in the ancient writings, thereby revealing not only how the Bible supports a meaningful spiritual practice, but also how it is filled with subtle mystical teachings.

I’ll never accept the criticism that “mysticism isn’t in the Bible ever again”—this book shows how that perspective is based on misunderstanding Biblical wisdom.

In 1893 the eminent scholar of Jewish studies, Moritz Steinschneider, astutely identified Jews as “Dolmetscher”— mediators between East and West, Christianity and Islam, ancient and modern languages. While early academic interest in Jewish translation primarily focused on the Middle Ages, the past two decades have seen a burgeoning fascination with translation across other periods (and spaces) of Jewish history.

Several outstanding books have emerged by literary historians such as Abigail Gillman, Aya Elyada, Tessa Rajak, and Omri Asscher, making it challenging to single out just one recommendation. But Naomi Seidman’s book had me hooked from page 1, where Seidman recounts the story of her father’s strategic mistranslation between Yiddish and French in Post-War Paris. For Seidman, whose brilliant analysis of this translation narrative offers one of the best introductions to an academic book I’ve read, such strategic mistranslations are emblematic of the complexities of Jewish-Christian dialogue and of the Jewish… show more.

This book was published in 1992, prior to the recent revolution in our understanding of Jewish and Christian origins, but no book has done more to revolutionize my own understanding of Jewish and Christian origins than this one. What is so important about this book is not any specific fact or revelation, but rather the framework that Margaret Barker establishes for understanding the complex development of Jewish concepts of divinity. Barker shows how the polytheistic roots of Semitic religion led to ongoing turmoil within ancient Judaism and interpretations of the scriptures in ways that indicated there were two or more divine beings, not one.

In Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews, James Carroll, a former Catholic priest turned journalist and novelist, delivers a powerful indictment of the politicized religion that from the time of Constantine the Great persecuted heretics, non-Romans, and, most of all, Jews. Carroll’s historical account is colorful and accurate, but what this book mostly does is exorcise a demon that plagued the author personally for years: his shared responsibility as a Catholic believer and official for an anti-Semitic tradition that helped generate the Holocaust. This is a stirring job of writing that looks forward to Carroll’s later work as a novelist, including his lovely take on the story of  Abelard and Heloise, The Cloister (Anchor, 2019).     

This book invites questioning very established Christian ideas that many are afraid to bring up. On the opposite end, it provides a helpful resource to those looking to have tough conversations with friends about their faith. I loved this book because it helped me wrestle with my own questions about my faith and provide tools for helpful discourse with friends and family. Not exactly a light read, but immensely important.

Christianity is a syncretic religion, incorporating elements from earlier religious traditions, not only in the eastern Mediterranean basin but also in the lands where it spread. In each of the national shrines to the Virgin Mary in Europe, for instance, she is depicted with indigenous symbols or elements. Nowhere is the presence of the preChristian, indigenous sacred female stronger in such syncretic blendings than in Mexico with the Virgin of Guadalupe. The editor of this anthology refers to her as Guadalupe-Tonantzin, one of the variations of her name in the indigenous Nahautl language. These essays are scholarly, cultural, and engagingly personal. Don’t miss the brilliant essay by the late Gloria Anzaldua, as well as other memorable pieces by several well-known Mexican-American authors. This is lived religion.

This rich book lays out the vivid (and extensive) evidence for mixtures of Christianity and village traditions all over the post-Constantinian world (feasts and sacrifices, local saints and spirits, sacred trees and fountains).

Clearly, the notion of “the conversion of the Empire” is a vast overstatement since the Christianities we discover in early Christian literature and archaeology are highly idiosyncratic.