Customer Reviews

The Other Bible

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It should be made clear to any potential buyer that this book is composed primarily of EXCERPTS from the various texts, not the complete works. While Barnstone is a talented translator in his own right, the translations in this book are not his. Rather, they are culled from various sources, many in the public domain, such as the R.H. Charles editions of the Pseudepigrapha. While these translations are passable, they are often not based in the latest scholarship.

If you are looking for a Readers' Digest Condensed Apocrypha, this book might be worth it, but for serious study, your money would be better spent on the Charlesworth Pseudepigrapha, the Schneemelcher/Wilson New Testament Apocrypha, the Garcia Martinez Dead Seas Scrolls, and the Robinson Nag Hammadi.

This is a wonderfull compendium of Gnostic, Hermetic and non-cannonical Judeo-Christian scriptures. You will find selected chapters and passages from a ubiquitous array of ancient texts influenced by many faiths and philosophies.

Among other things, this book introduces you to:

-- The origin of the fallen angels and levels of heaven and hell (Book of Enoch et al) later depicted by Dante and Blake.

-- The Nag Hammadi Gonstic texts

-- The Hermetical texts

-- The Manachean texts

-- The Mystical texts of the Dead Sea scrolls and Kaballah

-- Strange Gnostic Christian beliefs from Simon Magus to the almost Satanic Cainites.

-- The complete 'Q'-sourced Gospel of Thomas

-- The Infancy Gospels of Christ

One of my favorite selections, The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, reminded me of the Jerome Bixby SF Classic "It's a Good Life." with little Jesus terrorizing the town (wishing bad people away).

You will clearly understand after reading this book just how hetergeneous the early Christian communities really were in their beliefs. In fact, the earliest beliefs seem more Gonstic in flavor than they later came to be with the establishment of the Roman Church.

I would highly recommend this book to both the scholar and faithfull alike. For the former, it offers a look at the hisotry and development of Western religion and philsophy through original source material, while to the latter, the origin of some widely held notions, particularly about Heven and Hell, can be found here.

Willis Barnstone did an excellent job in compiling "The Other Bible". This book is one of the best that I've encountered as to having almost all the Gnostic, Pseudepigrapha (Jewish), Apocrypha (Christian)books, and the Dead sea Scrolls translated into common english. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in alternative scriptures for use in problimatic archaeological writing where other written material would be useful. The only problem with the book is the bias I detected on the part of the editor, and the fact that other Christian-Jewish apocrypha were left out of this publication (Ex: The book of Adam and Eve 1 & 2, most all Apocrypha of the early church letters , The Story of Ahikar, and The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs). However, this book does rate very highly as compared to other apocrypha translated books I have read in the past. A must for anyone interested in this type of literature.

This volume, in it's summary of the ancient Haggadah (Jewish myth creation, invovling Lilith, 7 heavens, etc.), Early Kabbalah, New Testament Apocrypha, and Gnostic scriptures, was intriguing to say the least.

Mr. Barnstone clearly asserts in the introduction that if history were altered in favor of these scriptures, that we would have these in our Holy Bible today.

However, what I found were some shocking similarities between Roman Catholicism and Pagan traditions. In the same way Solstice became Christmas, and Easter into a celebration of Christ's ressurection, religions that were forced into the Church under various popes and rulers had no option but to submit 'holy scripture' of their own.

Some of these truths went on to form extra-biblical views found in Roman Catholicism and other denominations. 7 heavens, Prayers to Martyred Saints, Purgatory, it's not in the Bible folks! It's in "The Other Bible"!

I reccomend this book to advanced thinkers and armchair theologians who want a better understanding of early christian influences. But do be careful of Mr. Barnstone's radical assumptions.

Willis Barstone, the compiler of the paralell text 'The Gnostic Bible', has here collated a wide range of diverse ancient religious literature.

In his introduction, Barstone concludes 'We have recieved a highly distorted and censored version of ancient religious literature...and now we can see these traditions free of their doctrinal strictures.' The historical evidence does support this thesis, though authors like Dan Brown tend to greatly exaggerate a 'conspiracy' to hide certain ancient documents.

What is true was that during the first few centuries after the ministry and teaching of Jesus, there was not one canonical Bible like the one we had today, but instead a very wide range of Christian movements, from Gnostics to Marcionites to the Proto-Orthodox, who all claimed to faithfully represent Jesus and his teachings. During this time all these movements produced countless Gospels, Acts, accounts of the creation of the universe, Infancy Stories and legends about Jesus and the Apostles, as well as bizarre myths about the fall of the female wisdom, Sophia, from the heights of the pleorama and the tragic creation of the God of the Old Testament, the 'Demiurge.'

With the victory of the Proto-Orthodox and the laying down of a fixed Biblical canon, the Church authorities were keen to bring the Christian religion under tight ecclesiastical control, and many works disagreeing with official doctrine were burned or destroyed, and movements deemed 'heretical' persecuted. A lot of 'Gospels' and other works of literature, as well as the literature of the Gnostics, was lost, until discoveries in the 19th and 20th centuries by scholars unearthed much material, such as the Nag Hammadi Library and the Dead Sea Scrolls. What these discoveries have shown is that Christianity was far more diverse and less unified in its beliefs than was originally thought.

In truth, the works used in the other Bible are well known to scholars of mysticism, ancient literature, philosophy, and theology, so they do not necessarily present a danger to your faith, though to the unprepared the notions in much of the literature can seem odd. In our 21st century age, we are used to finding truth in logic and science, whereas the writers of these ancient works found it in inner visions, mystical experience, and processes somewhat like the creation of art, music or poetry. As Barnstone says, there is a lot of very beautiful material material here, from the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas which emphasizes finding the divine within rather than hell and judgement, to the remarkable visions of the Books of Enoch which later were a source of imagery for the writers of Christian apocalyptic works, to the hauntingly beautiful poetry in the Odes of Solomon.

Somewhat less attractive are the rambling stories of the Aggadah, the confused and frenzied visions of the Gnostics, and their bizarre and pathological hatred of the universe, the world and the human body, the violent visions of doom and hell in the Apocalypse of Peter, and the overly long legends of the travels of the Apostles and their tedious focus on fantastic miracles. Still, there is much of religious worth and beauty in this collection, and Barnstone appropriately ends the book with quotes from the mystical Neo-Platonic Philosopher Plotinus and the shadowy Pseudo-Dionysius the Aeropagite, who would later found the mystical tradition in Christianity itself.

This book is well worth owning if you are interested in how we got the Bible, what got into it, and what didn't. In the end my view is that a lot of the material excluded is just as beautiful in a literary and religious sense as what was in the Bible (i.e. The books of Enoch, Gospel of Thomas, Odes of Solomon) and one wonders how our religious history would have unfolded had we had a different bible, or bibles, handed down to us by history.

This book is a good choice to begin to learn about the amazing historical writings that were not included in the traditional holy books.

Especially Gnosticism and the early Christian Church, and especially the creation of the New Testament Bible. For a different review....here is my review of books that build on these interests, especially the "lost" books of the New Testament Bible and the concepts of Gnosticism.

Nearly all knowledgeable Biblical scholars realize there have been a wide range of writings attributed to Jesus and his Apostles..... and that some of these were selected for compilation into the book that became known as the Bible.....and that some books have been removed from some versions of the Bible and others have been re-discovered in modern times.

The attention focused on Gnosticism by Dan Brown's DaVinci Code may be debatable, but the fact is that increased attention on academics tends to be predominately positive, so I welcome those with first-time or renewed interest. At least first-timers to Gnosticism are not pursuing the oh-so-popular legends of the Holy Grail, Bloodline of Christ, and Mary Magdalene.

This is great......I seldom quote other reviewers, but there is one reviewer of Pagels' books who confided that he had been a Jesuit candidate and had been required to study a wide range of texts but was never was told about the Nag Hamadi texts. He said:

"Now I know why. The Gospel of Thomas lays waste to the notion that Jesus was `the only begotten Son of God' and obviates the need for a formalized church when he says, `When your leaders tell you that God is in heaven, say rather, God is within you, and without you.' No wonder they suppressed this stuff! The Roman Catholic Church hasn't maintained itself as the oldest institution in the world by allowing individuals to have a clear channel to see the divinity within all of us: they need to put God in a bottle, label the bottle, put that bottle on an altar, build a church around that altar, put a sign over the door, and create rubricks and rituals to keep out the dis-believing riff-raff. Real `Us' versus `them' stuff, the polar opposite from `God is within You.' `My God is bigger than your God' the church(s)seem to say. And you can only get there through "my" door/denomination. But Jesus according to Thomas had it right: just keep it simple, and discover the indwelling Divinity `within you and without you.'"

Here are quickie reviews of what is being bought these days on the Gnostic Gospels and the lost books of the Bible in general:

The Lost Books of the Bible (0517277956) includes 26 apocryphal books from the first 400 years that were not included in the New Testament.

Marvin Meyers' The Secret Teachings of Jesus : Four Gnostic Gospels (0394744330 ) is a new translation without commentary of The Secret Book of James, The Gospel of Thomas, The Book of Thomas, and The Secret Book of John.

James M. Robinson's The Nag Hammadi Library in English : Revised Edition (0060669357) has been around 25 years now and is in 2nd edition. It has introductions to each of the 13 Nag Hammadi Codices and the Papyrus Berioinensis 8502.

The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English (0140278079) by Geza Vermes has selected works....a complete work is more difficult to achieve than the publisher's marketing concept indicates. His commentary generates strong reactions.

Elaine Pagels has 2 books (The Gnostic Gospels 0679724532 and Beyond Belief : The Secret Gospel of Thomas 0375501568) that have received considerable attention lately. For many, her work is controversial in that it is written for popular consumption and there is a strong modern interpretation. She does attempt to reinterpret ancient gender relationships in the light of modern feminist thinking. While this is a useful (and entertaining) aspect of college women's studies programs, it is not as unethical as some critics claim. As hard as they may try, all historians interpret the past in the context of the present. Obviously there is value in our attempts to re-interpret the past in the light of our own time.

If you want the full scholarly work it is W. Schneemelcher's 2 volume New Testament Apocrypha.

Also, to understand the Cathars......try Barbara Tuckman's Distant Mirror for an incredible historical commentary on how the Christian Church has handled other points of view

The Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data designates The Other Bible as, "A collection of ancient, esoteric texts from Judeo-Christian traditions, excluded from the official canon of the Old and New Testaments". Observing that I borrowed The Other Bible from the library repeatedly, my daughter purchased it for me. The more than 700 pages of sacred literature appeared altogether foreign at first, but now that I'm comfortable with a few favorites, I'm ready to become aquainted with unfamiliar chapters as well. Although the ancient writings don't yield their cryptic secrets easily, the chapters' introductions, provided by Editor Willis Barnstone or other scholars, provide the background necessary to tackle pages otherwise too daunting. Tackling is what it takes for this reader to arrive at a modicum of understanding, but the effort is worth it. Speed reading won't do in grasping its contents, thus The Other Bible promises to provide years of facinating struggle to decipher these unusual manuscripts.

Most typical scriptures that many hear about touch on the writings in this book and sometimes even refer to them (Secret of Enoch). If you feel that there are holes in the traditional canon of today, these fill them splendidly. They helped me see that there is more to God than we previously imagined. It is a real eye-opener and I give it full merits for Barnstone's endeavors.

It gives readers a sense of knowledge and understanding of what they presently know. A definite compendium on the whole spectrum of Christianity and Gnostic beliefs. These "Lost Books" gave me alot of insight into the true meaning of Christain belief.

The only problem with it is that there are some writings in this book that others would not agree with or refuse on the basis of that it is not similar to what they already know. Read it with an open mind and heart. I wish I could give it more than 5 stars. Such books are becoming more and more available which can be searched on Amazon.com.

With the diverse Gnostic texts, added to new christian writings of the disciples, gives good reason to call it The Other Bible. These scriptures should be selected and added to the King James. Wonder if someone could put the Sophia of Jesus Christ in there as well. The Gnostic content is a gold mine of knowledge lost down thru the ages because of the worldwide accepted King James version. Read along with "The Nag Hammadi Library". Some of the same books are in this book, but I found them easier to understand reading from the Other Bible. This book is easy reading even with missing pieces. Those who have been awakened by the Logos to Gnosis should diligently study these scrolls. The scrolls were not touched by human hands for 2,000 years. Original insight to early Kabbalah, treasure of prophecies, accounts of how the world was called into existence, and events preceding the creation.

Willis Barnstone has gathered a number of non-canonical writngs together into what he calls _The Other Bible_. It is not that these other writings ever formed a canon or were ever a part of a canon with the possible exception of the Book of Jubilees. Rather Barnstone has collected writings which have parallel themes to those found in the Bible. He begins with writings in creation myths and follows it with histories, wisdom literature, gospels, acts, and apocalypses. Sounds like the way the Bible is organized, doesn't it? Barnstone has gathered these writings from diverse sources, from Jewish pseudepigrapha, Gnostic writings, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Christian apocrprypha, and Manichaean sources.

Barnstone has selected the best of the best for _The Other Bible_. On page 255 he calls the psalms collected from the DSS the literary jewel of the DSS. In my opinion all of the writings collected by Barnstone are literary jewels. For example, if one wanted to read all of the ancient gospels, one could read Schneemelcher's first volume of _New Testament Apocrypha_. Barnstone has chosen such jewels as "The Secret Gospel of Mark."

This book is especially for readers who have wondered what else there was besides what was in the Bible.