This is a two-for-the-price-of-one book. The real prize within its covers is an erudite, elegant and quietly impassioned plea from AN Wilson for us all, believers or not, to read the Bible more. The modern generation is missing out, he says, on the magnificence of its prose, the power of the stories it tells, and its extraordinary track record for inspiring the best and worst of human endeavours.
But included in there, too, is a distracting, half-formed eulogy to a shadowy would-be biblical scholar, a “sad gypsy”, more an acquaintance than a friend of Wilson’s, referred to only as “L”, who led an unhappy life and died prematurely and unfulfilled.
What links the two parts is the fact that “L” had spent decades researching and obsessing over, but never quite writing a book on, the relationship between the Bible and its readers. When she died the notes that she had stored inside her own Bible were given to Wilson. It was the spur for him to take on her subject, in part as a kind of tribute to her.
But his approach is so very different from what she had planned. This is not your standard academic’s tome on the Bible. Indeed, Wilson’s contention is that most scholarly approaches to the Bible are a dead end. He dismisses the “archaeological” school, forever searching after historical proof that what it reports actually took place. The Bible is something more interesting than history, he insists.
And he is equally impatient with those in the opposite camp who say that it may be the greatest story ever told, but it is a story nonetheless, written by different authors, over the course of thousands of years.
The truth, he suspects, lies somewhere in between. “L” preferred to see the books of the Bible as a kind of poetry, a way of approaching an ineffable truth, and so Wilson embarks on a journey around a number of his favourite texts to probe her thesis.
He begins with “wisdom” books of the Old Testament, or Hebrew scriptures, and to assist him in assessing their importance in the history of humankind, he heads off on a pilgrimage to Hagia Sophia, “Holy Wisdom”, the great church commissioned in Constantinople by the Emperor Justinian in the sixth century, then the largest building in the world, later a mosque and now a museum. Wilson proves a beguiling travel writer, but the relevance of what he is describing to understanding the enduring power over the human imagination of the texts he is examining remains opaque.
Arguably, he has a clearer focus when he turns specifically to the Book of Job, with its dramatic tale of the trials and tribulations of God’s faithful servant, pushed to the limits of endurance by Satan. Job is, Wilson proposes, “one of the biblical books which is also a stupendous work of literature… in which Hebrew poetry is never more hauntingly musical or sad”. He made me want to read it again.
Next, he bathes in the Book of Psalms, marvelling at their “raw truthfulness”, but quickly gets diverted into chronicling their influence on the poetry of the 17th-century priest George Herbert. And that is the big problem with this book. Just as Wilson is poised to get down to a truly compelling analysis of a particular section of the Bible, or its historical significance, he is too easily distracted, either by another anecdote about the enigmatic “L”, or a beautifully evoked trip to illustrate a point he hasn’t yet quite made.
It undoubtedly makes for an easy, pleasurable read, but it is also a muddle. Perhaps it comes down to Wilson’s own on-off relationship with religion, which is never really addressed in the book. In his youth, he studied for the Anglican priesthood. Later, he wrote an angry pamphlet, Against Religion, but in more recent years, he has spoken publicly of a return to Christianity.
Yet when he visits the nuns who cared for “L” in her last days, and they invite him to join in their liturgy, he starts to say: “I don’t…” but never completes the thought. And that’s the way, I’m afraid, with far too much of The Book of the People.
Peter Stanford’s Judas: The Troubling History of the Renegade Apostle is published by Hodder.
