Chapter and verse

How to Read the Bible: History, Prophecy, Literature -- Why Modern Readers Need to Know the Difference and What It Means for Faith Today
By Steven L. McKenzie
Oxford University, 207 pp., $26

Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why
By Bart D. Ehrman
HarperSanFrancisco, 242 pp., $24.95

The Secret Message of Jesus: Uncovering the Truth That Could Change Everything
By Brian D. McLaren
W Publishing Group, 237 pp., $19.99

Imagine your surgeon assuring you, just before your heart bypass, that she had just learned some cutting-edge techniques in a book called ''Frankenstein" and was good to go in the operating room. You would nod politely, then lunge for the phone and switch HMOs.

Her mistake would be obvious. Sure, ''Frankenstein" deals with life science. But that doesn't make it a medical text. The surgeon mistook its genre; it is a novel, albeit a seriously philosophical one, whose author would not expect readers to take it literally.

The same unbridled leap in logic explains why a third of Americans tell Gallup pollsters that every word in the Bible is history. Many people who don't regularly plant themselves in church pews will be hearing the good book's words in their annual Easter pilgrimages today, so it's an apt time to revisit that sacred text.

Steven McKenzie's field is the Hebrew Bible, which he teaches at Rhodes College in Memphis, and most of ''How to Read the Bible" refutes the supposed historicity of the Old Testament. Scripture writers never intended to pen factual accounts of events, a modern conception that would have been alien to them, says McKenzie. They didn't lie in their writing, he writes; we are misreading them. In ''Misquoting Jesus," the University of North Carolina's Bart D. Ehrman tackles the New Testament, pondering a question that toppled this onetime fundamentalist from his high chair of religious certainty onto the hard floor of agnosticism: How can the Bible be the literal and inerrant word of God when we don't have his original words?

Ehrman's training at an evangelical Bible school taught him that ''we don't actually have the original writings of the New Testament. What we have are copies of these writings, made years later -- in most cases, many years later. Moreover, none of these copies is completely accurate, since the scribes who produced them inadvertently and/or intentionally changed them in places. . . . So rather than actually having the inspired words of the autographs (i.e., the originals) of the Bible, what we have are the error-ridden copies of the autographs."

This isn't as dire as it sounds, Ehrman assures us. Errors often are obvious, and scholars usually agree on which lines are deliberate alterations. But sometimes they don't agree (which is why you should always take individual scholars' interpretations with a grain of salt too). Anyway, Ehrman now sees the Bible not as God's word but as ''a very human book," not only preserved by fallible human scribes but originally written by fallible humans with their own purposes.

Among the deliberate changes were some to the Easter story. After the Resurrection, says Luke 24:12, Peter ''ran to the tomb, and stooping down he saw the linen cloths alone, and he returned home marveling at what had happened." Some manuscripts lack the line, and it probably wasn't in Luke's original, says Ehrman, because the writing doesn't reflect his style. A scribe likely added the line to stress the bodily resurrection of Jesus, in opposition to the notion of some early Christians that the risen Lord was a spirit.

McKenzie introduces his book by disemboweling the literalist interpretation of Jonah. A man surviving three days in the belly of a fish is the least of the challenges for a fundamentalist. The creature also has a sex change, with both masculine and feminine versions of the Hebrew word for fish being used in the manuscript, McKenzie says. Literalist readings miss the important point of the story, he argues, which is the ''stupidity of bigotry," as Jonah, the supposed man of God, is less devout than the book's pagans and sinners.

Whereas Christians believe that the Jewish prophets foretold the coming of Jesus, McKenzie prompts a pause: ''The intent of the genre of prophecy in the Hebrew Bible was not primarily to predict the future -- certainly not hundreds of years in advance -- but rather to address specific social, political, and religious circumstances in ancient Israel and Judah. This means that there is no prediction of Christ in the Hebrew Bible." He cites several examples, the most famous of which is the mistranslation of Isaiah 7:14, rendered by some Christians as referring to ''the virgin" giving birth to Immanuel, when most scholars agree the Hebrew word that Isaiah used actually meant ''young woman."

My own (Roman Catholic) church allows that Isaiah may indeed have been writing about contemporary events -- the birth of the future King Hezekiah -- without knowing that God planned an even greater fulfillment of his words in Jesus. If one shouldn't read all of the Bible as history, one must also grant people room for faith; even John Dominic Crossan, one of the best-known scholarly critics of biblical literalism, says that you can disbelieve Jesus' virgin birth and still believe that he was the son of God.

Evangelical author Brian McLaren threads the needle between piety and reason with ''The Secret Message of Jesus." McLaren, a Maryland pastor, is a liberal evangelical. He has said, for example, that a person can follow Jesus scrupulously without being Christian. ''The Secret Message of Jesus" argues that Jesus's teaching can only be understood in light of his Jewishness and his status as a man living under Roman occupation in the first century -- institutional Christianity, often uninterested in these facts, has sometimes mangled that teaching. Jesus wasn't preaching the kingdom of God as some blissful afterlife for good behavior on earth, says McLaren. He was calling for social justice in the here and now.

Calling this a ''secret message" is marketing hype; McLaren acknowledges that its parentage belongs to scholars who have written about it previously. He's a little too generous to the literalists, taking a pass, for example, on whether characters like Adam and Eve really lived. (McKenzie writes that those weren't proper names in biblical times; they were the Hebrew words for ''man" or ''human" and ''life," indicating that Adam and Eve were fictional symbols for humanity in general.)

Still, McLaren demonstrates that there are smart evangelicals (just as there are dumb secularists) for whom the Bible, while inspired, speaks in places as metaphor rather than history. On Easter, when churches swell with people who may not spend much time pondering their religion, it's worth remembering this: A faith that can't hold up against the wind of honest reasoning and scholarship wouldn't be much of a faith to begin with.