Appendix 1: Apologetics and “Biblical Criticism Lite”

In this excerpt from Kugel's controversial "How to Read the Bible," the author argues—with rich citation and documentation—that academic biblical studies is rife with an "unmistakably apologetic tone" of which even its most self-avowedly "critical" practitioners are largely unaware. The implication is that academic biblical studies, practiced as it is overwhelmingly by people of faith, does not achieve the honesty about the texts' "strangeness" characteristic of other corpus-oriented disciplines. (2014)