Today I want to introduce you to three books about the Bible not written by PhDs yet are outstanding enough to be well worth reading. As always, I get a commission on anything you buy on Amazon after clicking any link on my website—in fact, on everything in your cart when you check out within 24 hours after following a link from my site, even if you don’t buy the item you clicked on but instead wander around Amazon and buy, say, a giant castle-fish rug or the actual D&D campaign in Stranger Things complete with cool retro playing components instead (those links might not convert outside the US; but follow a link that does—books usually do—and then find products to add).

Here are today’s recommendations:

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Ken’s Guide to the Bible requires very little explanation. It’s own curt description is stupendously accurate: “An insider’s guide to the Bible with a focus on sex, gore and lunacy.” By the travel writer Ken Smith, it works like a travel book but of the Bible (mainly the Old Testament). This is a brief, funny, yet accurate introduction to what’s weird and fucked up about the Bible. It’s been decades and it still remains the single best intro book to give to anyone who hasn’t been clued in yet on what a bizarre cockup the Bible actually is. For example, it was Ken’s Guide that taught me that there is a full-on porno scene in Ezekiel, and you can tell how reliable a Bible translation is—or not—by how honestly they translate the “she loves donkey dicks” passage (I, really, just, cannot emphasize enough how much I am not kidding here). You simply won’t get that in any standard stodgy academic treatment of the Bible. And there’s so much more.

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On The Origins of YHWH: The Gods | The Wars | The Messiahs by James David Schoelles advances a thesis that I think is largely correct, yet is rarely explored: that depictions and understanding of the god Yahweh (and the entire ensuing idea of holy wars and ravaging messiahs that never really existed before) evolved over time as a psychological reaction to collective trauma among a particular tribe of disastrously-led Canaanites we now call Israelites, and you can see this temporal development in the Bible itself, especially in light of the corresponding archaeology, which exposes where the Bible is fabricating. It is in that nexus where Schoelles finds an opportunity to detect why things were fabricated, not just whether they were (the point where most studies stop).

It’s actually quite timely, as it gives you the psychoreligious backstory for why the world ended up as I explained just this month in Let’s Be Honest about Why You Are a Christian or a Muslim: Your Forebears Murdered Their Way into Your Mind. It gives a credible explanation for why the Israelites wrote the genocidal fantasy novel of Joshua, for example, and everything else.

Schoelles gives you well-cited surveys of the scholarly findings on: where Yahweh came from, both concept and name, and how that god changes when you see it in its actual religio-historical context, and how everything in early Judaism is an adaptation of stuff already around at the time; discussions of ancient stele and inscriptions that focus on theological details usually underplayed that inform how all this was evolving; the role of failure and defeat in generating ever more ridiculous conceptions of the divine and divine plan, as a grinding output of cognitive dissonance; and he not only surveys the actual politico-historical context generating the books of the Old Testament but continues through intertestamental political history, the context that inevitably created Christianity, and then the politico-historical context generating the books of the New Testament.

Always the focus is on building factual context, and then showing the role of a response to failure in building subsequent transformations. This is a very illuminating way to survey this evidence, and it is rewarding to follow, and well cited for follow-up.

I can aver, this is no tinfoil hat or hack job. Schoelles’ study is methodologically careful and thoroughly based on established peer reviewed sources. It is clear about what is an argument and what a speculation. And its premises are pretty much all mainstream academic facts or positions. The rest you can then evaluate yourself as he lays it all out. It is, really, a model for how a lay researcher can accomplish something like this. For both the value of its probably correct thesis, which teaches us a lot about how we ended up with the religio-political world we now do (one of the very purposes of history as a field to explain), and for its being a model example of how to do this right, I highly recommend it.

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The Savior Complex: How Jesus Became the World’s Ultimate Influencer by Be Scofield takes a remarkably different tack: she analyzes the Gospels to identify the profile they create of Jesus as one matching exactly that of abusive cult leaders across history. Scofield is an expert cult journalist and thus sees in the text what most don’t. And the effect is hard to dismiss. She nails numerous points of comparison without fudging any facts or leaping over any logic. I found the journey eye-opening and informative. And unique.

No one else has done this. Hector Avalos wrote smartly on the villainy of Jesus from a philosophical and theological perspective in Bad Jesus and I’ve summarized why the Gospel Jesus is actually an asshole in a single paragraph (in The Real War on Christmas: The Fact That Christmas Is Better Than Christ). But no one has run the analysis from the perspective of psychological cult tactics and the personality profile of sociopathic cult leaders. The Gospel Jesus is exactly the guy they would want to take cues from.

Scofield’s not entirely an amateur—she just doesn’t have a PhD, but does have a Masters in Divinity (from my own old stomping grounds at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, whose library I mined for all my books on Christian origins) and an undergraduate degree in philosophy and psychology. And her conjunction of skills makes up for not being a doctorate in this subject. Scofield’s description of her book is correct: she “places Jesus back inside the world that made him: a world of prophets, emperors, miracle workers, messiahs, myths, cult leaders, sacred branding, and imperial spectacle,” and “rather than treating Jesus as a figure floating above history,” she “shows how he was shaped by the stories and power struggles of his time.”

Of course, I would say, his inventors were so shaped. Just as Valerie Tarico aptly argued in The End of Christianity that Yahweh is a reflection of actual ancient tyrants of the era, and thus exactly matches their personality profile—without actually existing (an observation well supported by Schoelles above)—I think the same has happened here to Jesus. The inventors of Yahweh were projecting their “ideal leader” onto their god and depicting him accordingly, based on their own observations of admired warlords and tyrants. The inventors of the Gospel Jesus were projecting their “ideal leader” onto their demigod and depicting him accordingly, based on their own observations of admired cult leaders and charismatic missionaries. I have long thought (and noted in several of my books) that one of the functions of the Gospels, certainly the Synoptics, was to provide a storytelling manual for traveling missionaries to sell their religion with, providing them with a pithy tale to tell in response to every generic challenge they faced. It is natural, then, that their “ideal missionary” should reflect the personality traits of their ideal “cult leader.”

And if we take the position instead that the Gospels record embellished legends originating in a real ministry of Jesus, Scofield’s results become even more damning, as then Jesus fits exactly the profile of a dangerous and abusive cult leader, not a peace loving moral genius who saved the Western world from whatever. Her result reminds us of “be careful what you wish for” when it comes to literalist and historicist “Jesus fans.” Because “Jesus and the God of the Bible reproduce familiar patterns of control: obedience, fear, submission, purity, sacrifice, group identity, and salvation through dependence.” And that’s how he became a “franchise. A story engine. The world’s ultimate influencer.”

This is another example of how to do this right, especially applying one’s own earned expertise to gain and communicate insights overlooked by others, and which we must reflect on and think about even if we aren’t convinced or don’t agree (though I found little to disagree with here myself). It’s now my go-to reference alongside Avalos. Highly recommended.