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Originally Posted by Angela  (both of whom happen to have very biblical sounding-names!) |
I take the origin of my name quite seriously.
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Originally Posted by Dimitry Is there any good book out there that just explains the history from a third perspective without starting to interpret it one way or another? |
I doubt it. You've got to recognize that good historianship is very, very difficult when it comes to religions. The Jewish culture (not the religion) started during the era when people didn't recognize a distinction between fiction and non-fiction. So whether or not God actually spoke to Moses through a burning bush was completely irrelevant to the writer of Exodus.
Fast forward to the birth of Christ. Neither the canonical Gospels (I haven't read the non-canonical ones) nor Josephus provide any details about Christ's early life, except a few light details, which some speculators have suggested were the foundation for Christ's more... radical ideas, ranging from a trip to India to living with the Essenes.
Continue onto the spread into Europe. Christians were actively persecuted until the advent of Constantinople: you don't leave records when you're being persecuted. It tells people where you are and you get torn to bits by lions.
The Catholic Church was more interested in uniting the faith than truthfully reporting its progress. You can't really fault them for this: at this point, there were very, very few historians and no one was all that big on a non-spiritual truth. Of course, as time progressed, more people became literate and we begin to get the large body of documentation that we interpret history from today.
My point is that the book itself would be very hard to write. Not only is it difficult, but there is a
lot to cover; I wouldn't trust a book claiming comprehensiveness that was under a thousand pages of small text and no pictures. And then you get into bias.
I mean, assuming they didn't make anything up... I personally had no idea that Jehova was a god of war, but I haven't really made a study of Mesapotamian mythologies. (I'm also surprised Campbell didn't mention it in Primitive Mythology, but it might be in Occidental Mythology, which I haven't read yet.)
I'd recommend you find a Christian scholar to get you a list of history books, and then get a similar list from an atheist scholar. Books that show up on both lists would probably be worth reading.