I can recommend this slim volume by Edith Hamilton for anyone interested in the Bible yet not interested enough to pull out the King James version they received in Sunday school and start at “ In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”
Hamilton is masterful at providing a considerable amount of fodder in a condensed format without losing you, the reader. All those famous events that you’ve seen references over the years show up in an ordered format. You get to know the apostles instead if simply reading their version of Christ’s story.
Also, new to me yet the second time I’ve read about it lately, is the demonstration that the roots of Christian thought find their way back to Socrates. As in this section.
He believed with an unshakeable conviction that goodness and truth were the fundamental realities and that every human being had the capacity to attain to them. All men had within them a guide, a spark of the true light which could lead them to the full light of truth. This was Socrates’ basic belief, in the words of the Gospel of John, “The true Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” His own mission he believed was to open blind eyes, to make men realize the darkness of their ignorance and evil and so to arouse in them a longing for the light; to induce them to seek until they caught a glimpse of the eternal truth and goodness “with-out variableness or shadow of tuming” which underlay life’s confusions and futilities.
Edith Hamilton was a late bloomer. She took up writing as a second career and her first book was publish when she was a spry woman of 62.
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