A lot of my usual audience may be doing other things this week, so this is just a quick list of a few books that atheists, agnostics, and religiously open-minded people in general may find interesting for post-Christmas reading.
Misquoting Jesus by Bart T. Ehrman. It isn’t as specific to Jesus as the title suggests. It discusses the process of translating and transcribing the Bible over the centuries and the changes, intentional or unintentional, that have resulted.
Pagan Christs by J. M. Robertson. I actually haven’t read this one in a long time. It presents a theory of how the Christ story may have evolved without there ever having been a real Jesus. Most of the book is about his pagan antecedents.
Why I Am Not a Christian, a collection of essays by Bertrand Russell. I disagree with some parts of his philosophy, but the title essay is good, and the book includes “The Fate of Thomas Paine,” which Joe Fineman mentioned in a comment on my post about The Age of Reason.
All of these books can be found for sale online.
For next week, I’m looking at Joseph Campbell.
I have such a list too:
Matthew 1-2; Luke 1-2 (c. 100)
Clement Clark Moore, “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (1823)
Charles Dickens, “A Christmas Carol” (1843)
Winwood Reade, “The Good Tidings”, in “The Christians”, in _The
Martyrdom of Man_, 23rd ed., pp. 236-237 (1872)
Rudyard Kipling, “Christmas in India”, “Eddi’s Service”, in _Verse:
Definitive Edition_, pp. 53-55, 512-513 (1886, 1910)
James Joyce, _A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_, Chap. 1
(Penguin Books, pp. 27-39) (1916)
Edna St. Vincent Millay, “The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver”, in
_Collected Poems_, pp. 177-184 (1922)
Hugh MacDiarmid, “The Innumerable Christ”, in _Collected Poems_,
pp. 21-22 (1925).
Jean Ritchie, “Brightest and Best…The Ritchies Take Christmas”, in
_Singing Family of the Cumberlands_, Chapter 10, pp. 146-178 (1930) *
Ogden Nash, “I Remember Yule” (1939); “A Carol for Children”
W. H. Auden, “For the Time Being”, in _Collected Poems_, pp. 269-308
(1941)
George Orwell, “As I Please”, in _The Collected Essays, Journalism and
Letters_, Vol. 4, pp. 256-259 (1946)
James Agee, “Lines Suggested by a Tennessee Song”, in _The Collected
Poems_, pp. 71-75 (1949)
John Betjeman, “Christmas”, in _Collected Poems_, pp. 153-154 (1954)
David McReynolds, “The Bowery: A Ghetto without a Constituency”, in
_We Have Been Invaded by the 21st Century_, pp. 38-43 (1968)
*Best of all.