Yesterday I started describing a trade book that I’m thinking about writing, tentatively called (in my head) “The Battle for the Bible.”    Here is the next part of my self-reflections: ******************************************** A major part of my book will deal with one of the great puzzles in the history of religion:  Why does the Christian Bible even have an Old Testament?   And how did the early Christians, most of them gentiles, manage – in their own minds -- to wrest it from the Jews by and for whom it was originally written?  If Christians chose not to keep the biblical laws and follow its customs, why did they retain the book? In my experience, many Christians still wonder about that.   I frequently hear Christians claim there are essential differences between the Old Testament and the New Testament and the religions based on them:  Jews have a religion of laws and judgment, but Christians have a gospel of grace and mercy; Jews think they have to earn their way into heaven on their own merits, but Christians [...]

A month or so ago I posted a series of blogs about the next trade book I’m hoping to write, which I’m tentatively calling “Expecting Armageddon.”   As I explained then when I decide what I want to write next, I do a lot of preliminary research to get my ideas together and then write up a kind of overview statement about why I’m interested in the topic, what I imagine the book would cover, why I think it’s both interesting and important, and how I would probably structure it (at least how I’m imagining I would – the end product is never what I anticipate at the outset).  This kind of overview statement to myself ends up being the basis for what I send to my publisher as a Prospectus. The publisher takes the Prospectus, mulls it over, talks about it among themselves, and then decides whether they want to offer a contract on the book.  If not, I take it somewhere else.  If they do, then we enter into negotiations about the terms of [...]