Never have I read a book so clearly at odds with the professional reviews. This book was supposed to be “erudite,” and “elegant” (Guardian), a “richly stimulating” (Sunday Times) “work of genius” (Times London) that is both “delightful” and “moving” (New Statesman). Unfortunately, The Book of the People is anything but.

This book was supposed to challenge fundamentalists—both believers and unbelievers (i.e., the New Atheists)—to embrace the Bible as an enduring work of literature. It doesn’t live up to the billing. Wilson’s semi-autobiographical style with characters like “L” ended up muddying his voice. When Wilson wrote about the misguided ways he had understood and dismissed the Bible in the past, even his humility-narrative sounded smug and entitled.

To make matters worse, when he did get into the specifics of the Bible, he wrote with a certainty that betrays a misunderstanding of current biblical studies. For example, he dismisses the work of the Jesus Seminar due to methodological issues (fair point), but then claims that nothing can be said of the historical Jesus at all—ignoring the work of biblical scholars and historians. He’s simply out of his lane.

What A. N. Wilson was trying to say is profoundly true: the Bible is a rich work of literature that has fired the imagination of people for millennia. However, there are so many good authors to read on this theme—Robert Alter and N. T. Wright come to mind immediately—that you need not waste your time with this.

Wilson, A. N. The Book of the People: How to Read the Bible. Harper Collins Publishers, 2016.