Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

A while back I told my wife that I thought someone ought to publish a Bible organized chronologically to make reading and understanding it easier, especially for biblical neophytes. So I was initially excited when she found a copy of "The Chronological Study Bible" and gave it to me as a gift for Christmas. Although there will always be some disagreement between scholars as to the exact order of events, a pretty good job is done of interweaving the history of the kings of Judah and Israel with words of the prophets of the times and the collections of poems and wisdom from authors of the times; similarly, the gospels show similar events in the life of Jesus from the perspectives of the different witnesses. Where I took issue was with the very secular approach to history, especially early history, described in the side-panels outside the biblical text. The authors freely admit that "early dates are based on theories of evolution and geology," an approach most believers would find troubling. They also appear to consider the biblical accounts to be on par with myths of the ancient Near East: the Flood and other events in Genesis are discussed as being similar to accounts in Egyptian and Mesopotamian mythology. Another example is found in the discussion of cherubim, when they state, "The cherubim of the Bible are representatives of" other ancient Near Eastern "winged, mythological creatures." These commentaries seem to put forth the idea that the Bible took its ideas from other religions and cultures, not from divine inspiration (and not postulating that false religions may have borrowed from the true faith of the Hebrews). In summary, this might be a good study resource for a student in a comparative religions class at a secular college, but believers and true seekers could do better.