The Unholy Truth covers the gap between what biblical scholars know and what most people sitting in pews on Sunday have ever been told. Letters written in Paul’s name by people who weren’t Paul. A Yahweh who started out as one god among many in the Canaanite pantheon. Creation and flood stories borrowed from older neighbors and rewritten for Israel’s God. Gospels written decades after the fact by authors who never met the man they wrote about. Councils where doctrine got hammered out by majority vote and everyone on the losing side got branded a heretic.

It’s standard material in seminaries and university religion departments. It just never makes it to the people raised to take the whole thing literally, and closing that gap is the work here.

That means how the Bible’s books were written, copied and edited, who decided which ones made the cut, the politics behind the doctrine, and the parts of Christian and Islamic history that got sanded down or buried outright. No reverence for claims that can’t survive scrutiny, and no contempt for the people who hold them, only the evidence, laid out plainly, so you can decide what to make of it.

New pieces go out Monday through Thursday, each one reporting where the scholarship stands, and each one ends with a bonus section for paying supporters. Supporters also get the Friday Edition, where I set the reporting aside and ask the questions the scholarship raises.

If you grew up being told the Bible fell from Heaven intact and you’ve started to suspect the story is more complicated than that, you’re in the right place.

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