Sources and Bibliography

The Abingdon Bible Commentary (1929) Abingdon Press.

Peter Ackroyd won fame in 1995 with the publication of his magisterial biography of William Blake.

Donald Harmon Akenson, Saint Saul: A Skeleton Key to the Historical Jesus (2000)

Charlotte Allen, said to be a 'freelance writer' and presumably a lay person, has written a learned book called The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus (1998). It begins with a chapter on The Jewish World, setting the scene for the gospel story, a detailed history of the Jewish nation in the years before Jesus and much information about ordinary life in Galilee.
This book, written by a laywoman, is a valuable survey of the studies used by the Jesus Seminar. It is comprehensive and employs simple language.

Karen Armstrong, A History of God (1993) A more precise name for her book might have been A Survey of Religious Ideas in Western Civilization. However choosing the title she did, made it a best seller.
      Not a religious writer per se, but a historian, Armstrong produced perhaps the most exhaustive, inclusive and concise descriptions of the evolution of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Once I got into A History of God, I realized she was doing very much what I have tried to do with my History of the Church, only in a more scholarly way.
      Since then Armstrong became a primary source, and I have in fact patterned the structure of my History very much after hers. The primary distinction is that I continue to write from the perspective of Christian faith, whereas she was perfectly secular and objective.
      In 1996 she published In the Beginning - A new Interpretation of Genesis.
      The Battle for God (2000) is a very ambitious study of Judaic, Moslem and Christian fundamentalism. She dealt with the wars of these groups, but found that the divisions within each culture between the fundamentalists and liberals was fully as acute as the international discords.
      In 2001 Karen Armstong came forth with a biography of Buddha, and in 2005 a valuable little book entitled A Short History of Myth.

David Aune wrote The New Testament in its Literary Environment (1987)

William Barclay compiled numbers of Bible commentaries; the one used here is The Making of the Bible - Abingdon Press 1961)

Tom Beaudoin (b. 1969), in his book, Virtual Faith (1998), gives a vivid description of the life of his generation. He calls them a "generation of latchkey children", without much parental direction, nurtured by TV and youth culture music. They were largely without loyalty to conentional religious institutions, but they showed a fundamentally spiritual outlood, what Beaudoin referred to as The Irreverent Spiritual Quest of Generation X.
Tom, himself......

Blake: "Both read the same Bible day and night; but you read black where I read white." One of the gems with which William Blake opens our eyes to worlds of spiritual truth from which many of us have been closed off by the "mind forg'd manacles".

Blake has been referred to as a "Bible soaked Protestant", and it is the basic source of all of his poetry and thought. In his own language he read it white while conservatives tend to read it black. His ideas were revolutionary, which earned for him the ire and contempt of establishment types--in his day and in ours.

Edith L. Blumhofer, Restoring the Faith (1993)

Marcus Borg, related to the Jesus Seminar, has written several books elucidating his liberal, highly rational theology, some discussing God, others the Bible and yet others Jesus.
      He used the term 'domination system' to refer to the various secular powers who for centuries have oppressed the people of God.
      For a bird's eye view of Borg's Jesus look at his sermon in Religion-online. Borg's theological position is summed up by an online document in Early Christian Writings.
"Borg makes two negative claims about the historical Jesus: he was nonmessianic, which means that he didn't claim to be the Messiah or have a message focused on his own identity, and he was noneschatological, which means that he did not expect "the supernatural coming of the Kingdom of God as a world-ending event in his own generation" (Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, p. 29)."
      In a later book, The Heart of Christianity (2003) Borg described what he called the emerging paradigm of the Church with a series of chapters treating various aspects of theology, Bible, faith, one of the best treatments I've seen for a layman anxious to come to terms with progressive Christianity as contrasted with fundamentalist Christianity.

Raymond Brown:
The Birth of the Messiah (1977)
The Death of the Messiah (1994)

Joseph Campbell, one of America's foremost mythologists, has written many volumes on the subject. One of the most readable, and probably the book that made him famous, was The Hero of 1000 Faces (1949), a book that made a powerful impression on me many years ago. Campbell's primary legacy for me was his definition of tribalism, part of which asserts that all positive affect is directed within the tribe and all negative affect outside the tribe. This is sort of the polar opposite of the brotherhood of man preached by Jesus.

Campbell was a lapsed Catholic, and for most of his life his writings reflect a subtle depreciation of Christian myths in comparison to all other myths, toward which he was almost uniformly positive.
In one of his later books he confessed his negative feelings about Catholicism; his reason was that they had literalized the metaphors of the Christian faith. This confession led to a remarkable freedom thereafter to criticize creatively the Western religion traditions, something that earlier in his life he seemed unable to do. [IMO]
In 2001, near the end of his life he published Thou Art That, a small but dense treatment of the metaphors and myths of judeo-christianity. [Near the top of my my reading list as I write this.)

Edward Burns, Western Civilizations (1941)

Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for this Highest (1935). It was compiled by Mrs. Chambers after his death. In point of sales it is one of the top ten devotional classics of the present day.

David Chidester, a South African church historian wrote Christianity, a Global History (2000).

Bruce Chilton of Bard College, a noted gospel scholar, wrote Pure Kingdom, Jesus' Vision of God. (1996)

Larry Clayton, the writer of this cd, has also written a careful study of the spiritual ideas of William Blake, entitled Ram Horn'd with Gold.

Coote and Coote, man and wife, both on the faculty at San Francisco Theological Seminary, have written a fascinating brief, but comprehensive history of Israel (and the church) from pre-biblical times to Constantine. They wrote this short book (less than 200 pages), Power, Politics, and the Making of the Bible, published by the Fortress Press in Minneapolis in 1990, with a completely secular perspective and give a fairly low view of the political leaders through the centuries who they feel inspired the various writings which make up the Bible. They perceived the writings primarily as political propaganda legitimating the power which the principals had often seized through purely worldly ways.

The Bible presents David for example as miraculously chosen by God to replace Saul as king and living under the special favor of God throughout his reign. In contrast Coote and Coote saw him as an opportunist who had seized power and maintained it with skillful and often underhanded methods. Similarly they saw Solomon as seizing the crown on David's death through a palace coup. Both of them commissioned portions of the Bible, primarily to legitimate their political position and power. Both were excessively oppressive to the poor. Indeed Saddam Hussein and others of his sort might well have patterned their political careers after David's, and produced propaganda very similar to David's sponsorship of the earliest part of the Bible.

Near the end of this book the authors summarize their approach to the writing of the Bible- and state their thesis as follows: "The Bible was produced by demands for legitimacy following changes in rule-- from David's usurpation, though Jereboam, Jehu, etc. , the Persians, Aaronids, Hasmoneans and Herodians and finally to the Romans and Byzantine emperors and their ecclesiastical clerics." In other words they express the view that these rulers primarily inspired the Bible, and primarily for the purposes of political progaganda.

Although I certainly don't agree with these authors and particularly not the secular current of their thought, I did find a great deal of interesting and valuable data that appears here and there through my commentary. It appears unfortunate that they at times seem to stretch the truth in support of their thesis.

One can see however how things happened in that day much as they do today (good and evil were in continuous contest). The writers attempted to provide a spiritual dimension to the things that happened: good things happened when people respected and obeyed the Lord, and bad things happened when they didn't. There is certainly a germ of truth in that. The Cootes perceived the rulers as primarily bad, perhaps from a Marxian bent.

Page 41:
"[Jeroboam's] revisions to the J document are known as E, standing for Elohim, the designation Jeroboam used for Yahweh in order to distance himself from Solomon's version of Yahweh."

John and Kathleen Court, English teachers and writers, have compiled a voluminous and scholarly book entitled The New Testament World (1990). It includes much interesting and factual material, a good deal of which is pertinent to the concerns of this commentary.

Harvey Cox, long term professor of religion at Harvard, was for many years at or near the apex of the developing liberal Christian tradition of the second half of the 20th century.
1. In Many Mansions he described his relationships with many adherents to other religions throughout the world.
2. When Jesus Came to Harvard (2004), a beautifully written and scholarly treatment of N.T. themes, especially the Sermon on the Mount.

John Dominic Crossan, a one time Irish Catholic priest, wrote The Historical Jesus (1991) and believed that in this charge to the disciplies Jesus was influenced by Cynic philosophers who wandered around barefoot, with a walking stick, a cloak, and an empty wallet.

William G. Dever, an archeologist, wrote What did the Bible Writers Know and When Did They Know It? (2001)

S.R.Driver wrote the authoritative classic, An Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament (1897).

Alvar Ellegard, of Univ. of Goteborg (Sweden) has written an interesting study of the antecedents of the gospel (Jesus: 100 Years Before Christ 1999). He placed Jesus in the Essene Community 100 years before the generally accepted date of Jesus' birth. For a good review of this book look at the one in the American Library Association booklist.
      Like most scholars he placed Paul's letters 40-60 A.D. as the first books of the New Testament, but he named four non-canonical books (presumably Christian) which he felt were contemporaneous with Paul (page 31):
      Didache
      1st Clement
      Barnabas
      Hermas
      Ellegard thinks that these books gave a more accurate picture of Jesus than did the gospels, supposedly written many years later.

David Erdman edited the most authoritative version of the Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake (1965) and also a book entitled Blake, Prophet Against Empire (1954) with many later editions of both books.

Bart D. Ehrman, professor of Religious Studies at UNC (Chapel Hill), published Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (1999) Oxford, a well written and encyclopedic account of the literature of N.T. times.

Early in my theological career I came across a little book by Nels Ferre that I found extremely enlightening, The Sun and the Umbrella. The first chapter is a modern adaptation of Plato's Myth of the Cave: the first enlightened man turns away from the shadows on the wall and walks out into the sunlight. But he soon finds it too bright for his consciousness and erects an umbrella. Gradually others come who join him under his umbrella. But it eventually proves inadequate so they erect another umbrella. And so on. Today in the 21st century we are under a long succession of umbrellas, each one under the previous one. What we find impossible is to look into the sun. (But Jesus did!). Ferre's talking about levels of consciousness; each level eventually proves inadequate for the spirit that penetrates like the bright sun. (I wish I could describe this better, but unfortunately the little book escaped from my library many years ago.)
Ferre later wrote a book entitled The Universal Word: A Theology for a Universal Faith (1969) (A review of it may be found at Theology Today.)

A.H.Armstrong's chapter on Greek Philosophy and Christianity, in The Legacy of Greece (1981) Editor: M.I.Fenley, gives Platonism as the primary Greek influence on early Christianity (page 358).

On the following page Armstrong presents his own "personal and subjective" thumbnail description of Platonism with three points:
A "transcendent immaterial reality...gives reality and value to the empirical world" and points to "the ultimate source of reality and value, the Good".

Attainment of this knowledge requires "a lifelong intellectual and moral discipline".

Since we have this capacity, our life may transcend mortality and live on, although this depends upon how we have lived our material lives. (Armstrong emphasized that this evaluation is perfectly subjective.)

Measuring the sayings of Jesus, not to mention Paul, you may get the idea that these criteria fit his mind as well as Judaism does. In particular the after life, dependent upon our conduct here (as set forth in the description of the Last Judgment in Matthew 25), appears closer to Plato's Republic than to Moses. (The O.T. contains very little comprehension of an afterlife; it concerns tribal destinies more than personal ones.) For more on Platonism look at the Wikipedia Article.

Eric Fromm, an atheistic 20th century psychiatrist, wrote a little book entitled The Art of Loving. Here he demonstrated with startling clarity that the two great commandments go together in such a way that it is impossible to love God, or self, or neighbor in any other way than he does the other two elements of the law.

In my mind that was a monumental contribution, especially for an atheist. The key to his mind, as I understand it, may be that God for Fromm was a psychic construct.

Richard Elliott Friedman wrote a beautiful little book entitled Who Wrote the Bible (1987) with up to date findings about the organization and authorship of the Bible. It includes brief and very helpful synopses of certain periods in Israelite history, used extensively in preparing this Commentary.

Friedman outlined the development of the source theory of the Pentateuch, dividing it into 4 basic sources:

The J text contains material in the Pentateuch in which the name, Jehovah is used for God (thought to be the earliest source).

The E text contains material in which the name for God is Elohim.

(These two are said to be the earliest and most primitive parts of the Bible. In the Pentateuch they appear as couplets, parallel accounts placed in close proximity. They are said to depict an earlier form of nature/fertility religion. They place Jehovah/Elohim alongside a multitude of "Baals", the gods of other tribes, although always claiming superior power.)

The D source involves Deuteronomy, as well as the following 7 books: Joshua through 2nd Kings. Friedman refers to this as the Deuteronomist and offers his informed conclusion that the writer was Jeremiah.

The P document came during the post-exilic period and focuses primarily on laws and priestly considerations.

Finally a redactor (R) had his hand in bringing the whole thing up to the present state of the O.T.

As a major thesis Friedman (and other modern scholars) grouped Deuteronomy and the subsequent seven books into a category called the Deuteronomistic Writings. He placed the authorship of all seven of the books in the days of King Josiah.

A few years after Josiah died the Temple was destroyed and all the "best people" of Judah went into exile in Babylon. This confounded some of the promises made in 2nd Kings. Friedman (and others) believe that an exilic writer worked over the Deuteronomistic Writings to rationalize that seeming contradiction. (Later in his book he concluded that the two writers were the same man--writing before and after the Babylonian Captivity.)

For some of Friedman's proposed changes or additions look at:
Deut. 4:26-27;
Joshua 23:16
1st Kings 9:7.

After reporting on a complex web of events yielding scholarly evidence Friedman reached the conclusion on page 146 of his book that the deuteronomist was Jeremiah. He massed the evidence, but we might here look at a few:

Jeremiah was a priest from Anathoth who came from a family of Shilonite priests (thought to be descendants of Moses). These priests were favored by King Josiah. His high priest, Hilkiah, discovered the book of the law in the Temple. Jeremiah's father was named Hilkiah: perhaps the same man.

Jeremiah valued King Josiah, as did the writer of Kings. Friedman also tells us the Jeremiah's language was very similar to that of the deuteronomist, "the same favorite terms and phrases, the same metaphors, the same point of view on practically every important point (page 146)

Thomas Friedman, columnist for the New York Times: The Lexus and the Olive Tree (1999)

Northrup Frye was a lifelong student of the Bible, not from the viewpoint of a Bible scholar, but as a professor of Literature at the University of Toronto. Although an ordained minister he wrote from a literary rather than a religious viewpoint.
In a two volume work,
I. The Great Code (1982) and
II Words with Power (1990) he had creative and insightful things to say about how one can read the Bible with understanding. The subtitle of both volumes was The Bible and Literature; he showed with considerable success the coincidence between the two subjects.
Back in 1947 in Fearful Symmetry he had established his reputation as one of the most profound scholars and interpreters of William Blake's poetry. He referred to Blake as a "Bible soaked Protestant" and showed how much of Blake's work had a biblical source or referrent.

Peter J. Gomes, The Good Book (1996), a lucid and readable introduction to reading the Bible.

Edwin Hatch (1881-47), the author of the hymn, Breathe on me, Breath of God, also wrote The Influence of Greek Ideas on Christianity, republished by Harper and Row in 1957.

Richard H. Hiers wrote the Trinity Guide to the Bible (2002). He is Professor of Religion at the University of Florida.

Stephan A. Hoeller, a practicing and institutional Gnostic, wrote Jung and the Lost Gospels (1989). He displayed a very strong bias against our cultural religious establishment and traditional Christian doctrine.

On pages 50-51 he described a "mythic pattern of impressive proportions": the three fold embodiment of an archetype of the saviour, namely Joshua, the conqueror of the 13th century B.C., the gnostic Teacher of Righteousness of the 1st century B.C., who died a cruel death at the hands of the "wicked priest" (from the Dead Sea Scrolls), and Jesus, whose death bore a close resemblance to the one of a century before. Note that 'Jesus' is the Greek transcription of Joshua.

Paul Hutchinson and Winfred Garrison wrote 20 Centuries of Christianity (1959), a splendid "Concise History" as they call it. To adequately deal with 20 centuries of history in a single volume requires a genius of concision, and these two old timers came out of the best school of scholarship and historical research.

The authorship of J is placed by Israel Finklestein and Neal Asher Silberman, and many other researchers at a much later date, during the reign of Josiah in the late 7th century. In their book, The Bible Unearthed (2001) they report that archeological evidence reveals a lack of literacy or "any other attributes of full statehood" in the 9th century when David and Solomon lived (page 23).

The Commentary of Jamieson (actually Jamieson,Fauccet and Brown) in on line at gospelcom.net and some other places. (The website also has the commentaries of Wesley, Matthew Henry and many others.) I have used Jamieson's Commentary extensively perhaps in every book of the Bible that I've commented on.

Thomas Jefferson translated the gospels from the Greek and left out the miraculous dimension. His work is variously named The Jefferson Bible and The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.

This simply proves that Jefferson, a deist like many of the founding fathers, did make a serious effort to come to terms with the Christian tradition.

Robert A Johnson, a popular Jungian author wrote He, She, We, and finally Owning Your Own Shadow (1991)

Robin Griffith-Jones wrote The Four Witnesses (2000), an insightful commentary on the meanings of the words of the four gospels, and particularly the relations between the gospels in terms of the various churches they addresse.

Carl Jung

Many psychologists see no spiritual dimension to life; Carl Jung is the most notable exception: on this point he departed from Freud fairly early in his career. Unlike most traditional religionists he believed that we primarily access God through the images in our psyche. Whereas most religionists focus primarily on a transcendent God, Jung (along with Quakers) put the overriding focus on God's immanence or the images in the psyche (or soul).

Hans Kung of Tubingen (Germany) wrote a short book entitled Great Christian Thinkers (1994) (translated by John Bowden). His second chapter is an insightful 35 page description of the 2nd and 3rd Century theologian, Origen. He presents Origen as a liberal thinker who managed to escape excommunication (probably because Rome had not yet established its preeminence).

Fritz Kunkel, a hybird scholar and teacher, was a German surgeon in the First World War. Then he became a psychiatrist. Unlike so many of those he was also a Christian. Coming to the USA in 1939 he lectured at the Quaker study center at Pendle Hill; he taught at the school of religion in Berkeley and practiced psychotherapy in Los Angeles. He wrote many books, but the only one that concerns us here is Creation Continues, Word Books (1973), (Matthew and the Evolution of Consciousness), his last book.

For many years Creation Continues has been a primary source in my study of Matthew.

Jona Lendering, a Dutch freelance teacher and archeologist, has assembled a prodigious web site called Livius - Articles on ancient history. It includes 1526 webpages on Egypt, Greece, Rome, Persia and Judaea, worthy of extensive study and reference.

James G. Leyburn, The Scotch Irish: A social History (1962). Speaking of the southward migration Leyburn wrote, "The course of migration from Ulster to America was closely paralleled by a large migration from Germany" (page 186).

Raymond Martin wrote a very instructive survey of New Testament Criticism.

George MacDonald, a Scottish writer contemporaneous with Dickey, was a master of mythopoeic treatments of an Arminian theology.
Many of MacDonald's works are on-line at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library.
A blogspot has a lot of interesting discussion of the works of MacDonald.

Burton L. Mack, The Lost Gospel, The Book of Q and Christian Origins, (1993) HarperSanFrancisco and Who Wrote the New Testament (1995). Mack expresses an advanced discussion of how the earliest New Testament data arose; he thinks, as an expression of the various successive generations of communities of faith. He systematically discounted everything in the N.T. not within the purview and understanding of modern science.

In The Lost Gospel Mack built a theory of a pre-Christian Jesus movement, a community gathered around the hypothetical "Q document", devised from those sayings of Jesus common to Matthew and Luke, but not found in Mark.

Mack's theory echoed a viewpoint espoused by people (notably Ernest Renan and Thomas Jefferson) since the days of Jesus and based on a radical rationalism.

Stephen Mitchell wrote The Gospel According to Jesus (1993). It was quoted widely by Nelson in his book, Jesus Against Christianity.
      Mitchell quotes an 1814 letter from Thomas Jefferson to John Adams: "The whole history of [the Gospels] is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute inquiry into it."
      Going on Jefferson wrote: "In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds" (Mitchell, page 4).
      Those who like to think of America as a Christian nation, founded by Christians should bear in mind that Jefferson, Adams, Washington and many other founders did not avow Christianity, but Deism. Jefferson and the others revered the moral teaching of Jesus and put no credence in the "supernatural" dimension of the gospel stories. This is very close to the perspective embraced by the scholars of the Jesus Seminar.

Dom Sebastian Moore, born in India, but an English "monk at the Abbey" from 1938 wrote a book entitled No Exit (1968), a searching, meditational work on the meaning of Christ's life and death and resurrection. Although Catholic censors declared it "clear of doctrinal or moral error", Moore expressed remarkable freedom from the conventional institutional strictures of the church. I quote two especially pungent phrases:

"...the bane of Catholic thinking: the static equation. People waxing 'incarnational' and building up a provincial cake-shop of holy things" (page 107).

"it is I that know that priests and messiahs and whatnot are a load of codswallop" (page 113). (This reminds one of the childhood dream of C.J.Jung, a scion of the Lutheran clergy, in which he wached a large turd fall on a cathedral.)

The point of all this, and of Moore's thesis is that true religion transcends any and all institutional forms.

Dr. Catherine M. Murphy, of Santa Clara University, a noted authority on the Dead Sea Scrolls, has written in detail about the relationships between John the Baptist, the Qumran community, and Jesus. Her book is entitled John the Baptist (2003).

Richard Neihbur wrote Social Sources of Denominationalsm.

Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer of the Univ of St. Paul wrote Jesus Against Christianity (2001). This appears to be a cogent and candid report on the ways tradition was used by the N.T. writers and other early leaders of the church to change the character and flavor of the religion of Jesus. On page 138 of Jesus Against Christianity we read of the gospel writers' "idealization of the Jewish tradition. Jesus is placed in a context based on idealized readings and sanitized renditions of selective texts." Nelson correctly accused us of looking only at the spiritual depth and beauty and ignoring the rest.

Nelson went on to say "Progressive interpreters glorify the Exodus, the sabbatical, jubilee and prophetic traditions, censor the pathological violence of God and ignore the disturbing ethnocentricism..." And on page 335: "Pathological images of God shore up mens' abusive power, strengthen traditional associations between violence and power, and feed the spiral of violence that Jesus exposed and invites us to counter." (Nelson's perspective was nurtured by years of experience in Central America where common people lived under oppressive and abusive institutions much like the ones that Jesus faced in 1st Century Palestine.)

Nelson found little to approve in the O.T., and also felt that a great deal of residue of the violent and horrid dimension found its way into the N.T. Further, he saw the violence and horror in the whole course of church history as a natural consequence of the violent God of the O.T.

Writers like Nelson don't always seem able to distinguish between the early and progressive visions of God and the real-time God that we worship today. They may look for a modern consciousnes and psyche in the ancient records, and not finding it, they may condemn the primitives and their Bible.

My own approach envisions a record of progressive spiritual evolution from primitive, savage, ancient cultures to the apogee of "Our Lord and Saviour". I have found spiritual depth and beauty in what purport to be the earliest writings, although I have to agree with Nelson that the O.T. does in fact contain a great deal of barbarism.

For a bit of the flavor of Nelson's book go to the article on God.

Maurice Nicoll's little book, the New Man, first published in 1950, subtitled An Interpretation of Some Parables and Miracles of Christ: an extremely valuable text introducing one to what Nicoll refers to as the esoteric interpretation. It may expose many of us for the first time to a metaphoric approach to scripture, a necessity to perceive the spiritual meanings in the Bible.

Adam Nicholson, with God's Secretaries (2003), wrote a fascinating account of the translation of the King James Version of the Bible. He expressed very ambivalent feelings about the Translators: he described many if not most of them as pure politico-ecclesiastical opportunists and lackeys of the court of King James; he also described many (or most) of them as thoroughly capable and talented scholars. He feels that they expressed the essential ambiguity of the elite of that age: corrupt to the core and intellectually gifted and disciplined. Quite a conundrum.

Elaine Pagels, in Beyond Belief (2003) focused on a comparison of the Gospels of Thomas and of John. Within that context she traced the evolution of Christianity from a spirit filled life and community to the enforced belief in a set of intellectual propositions.
      Pagels argued that high christology came into vogue with the appearance of John's gospel. (The synoptic gospels don't make the claims of divinity that we find in John. Baldly put for them Jesus was a man (even though called son of God while to John Jesus was God.)
      In Beyond Belief Pagels described in much detail the conversion of the early church from an experiential community to what became orthodoxy (a required belief in certain theological propositions). The thesis is encapsulated in her discussion of the 4th Chapter of John.
      Her discussion is framed as a comparison between the 2nd Century approaches of the gnostic, Heracleon (a disciple of Valentius) and Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons and an early stalwart and bulwark of orthodoxy.
      John 4 can be read as a story about a Samaritan woman (and a town) that Christ converted and/or as a type of the psychological dimension of spiritual evolution. Irenaeous read it the first way and Heracleon focused on the second. In those days many local churches leaned toward Bishop Irenaeous and many leaned toward the viewpoint of Heracleon. Through the years Irenaeous' viewpoint increasingly became dominant. It included hard nosed disapproval of an experiential approach to the point of declaring it heresy.
     See also Pagels' description of orthodoxy and gnosticism in Beyond Belief.

Elaine Pagels' The Gnostic Gospels (1979) was the first authoritative and popular work on gnosticism. In pages xix and xx she cites three ways that the theology of gnosticism differs from orthodoxy: i. For orthodox Jews and Christians God is wholly other and "a chasm separates humanity from its creator" (certainly not according to the N.T.). Gnostics believe that "self knowledge is the knowledge of God; the self and the divine are identical" (not conventional, but Jungian, and perhaps quakerly). ii. The N.T. Jesus speaks of sin and redemption while gnostics speak of illusion and enlightenment (once again very quakerly). iii. The orthodox say that Jesus is "forever distinct from the rest of humanity", while gnostics say that Jesus is a member of mankind (there is that of God in everyone).

By these criteria the Society of Friends are out and out gnostics, as well as a great many other liberal Christians. Of course this is only Pagels' take on Gnosticism; there are many other views of it. (You may find a good discussion of Elaine Pagels life and work emphasizing Beyond Belief in a sermon by Dr. Edward Frost, a UU minister.)

Martin Palmer wrote The Jesus Sutras (2001), a fascinating description of his life long search for documents relating to the ancient Chinese Church.

Norman Vincent Peale, a celebrated evangelist and cult leader of the mid 20th Century, wrote a monumental best seller named The Power of Positive Thinking. His doctrine did closely resemble that of the Old Testament covenants, but in the book he combined positive thinking with a hypnotically persuasive statement of God's personal and active love for all of us, which converted your compiler from a deist to an evangelical Christian.

Peloubet's Bible Dictionary (1925)

Norman Podhoretz, biblical layman (or renaissance man, if you will) has written a book entitled The Prophets (2002) that will likely become one of the classics. With great lucidity, readability, depth, and even entertainment value, The Prophets may be the best introductory essays on the O.T. prophets that we are likely to find.

I especially leaned on the chapter on Micah for my commentary. Although exactly contemporaneous with Isaiah, Micah was treated by Podhoretz first, and thereafter he wrote about the prophets in the order in which he judged they came chronologically rather than as the Bible had put them.

Uta Rank-Heinemann, Putting Away Childish Things (1994).

Ernest Renan won renown (or infamy according to your viewpoint) for his Life of Jesus (1863) in which he presented only the naturalistic dimension of the gospel.

Revised Standard Version (1952)

A. Gregory J. Riley wrote One Jesus, Many Christs (1997), a lucid and fascinating introduction to the influence of Greek thought and culture upon the New Testament and the early church.

B. In The River of God (2001) Gregory J. Riley describes the genealogy of Christianity, which is to say the various cultural streams leading to the development of Judaism and then Christianity. For example he believed that Persian Zoroastrianism influenced the writing of "2nd Isaiah" (see Isaia 45:7.) This kind of dualism is said not to appear in the Bible prior to the the Exile.

Professor Vernon Robbins of Emory University has published much of his written material on the internet, including an article entitled "Making Christian Culture in the Epistle of James" published in Scriptura 59.

John Sanford (son of Agnes Sanford) is an Episcopal priest in Sou. Cal. and a highly trained Jungian analyst.
His books include (a) Mystical Christianity and (b) The Kingdom of God.

Schonfield; "The Jesus Party" (1974)

Russell Shorto, a young journalist and former Catholic, has written a popular report about the findings of modern scholars entitled Gospel Truth (1997). It is primarily a presentation of modern critical scholarship for the layman.

The book includes material about the Jesus Seminar and in fact got a jacket recommendation from two Jesus Seminar luminaries: Robert Funk and Marcus Borg, as well as from Bishop John Spong.

Alan F. Segal, Paul the Convert; the Apostolate and Apostasy of Saul the Pharisee (1990) (quoted in Allen pages 325f).
Paul was a Jewish mystic, thoroughly conversant with the theophanies found in the O.T., for example (Exodus 24:9ff, Ezekiel 1, and Daniel 7, this last one pretty obviously served as the source for Son of Man statements in Matthew.

Bishop John Spong, a radical Episcopal potentate, sometimes call a theological revolutionary, has written many books evaluating the theology of the church and most generally finding it lacking. He began by completely discounting any literal interpretation of scripture. I've found little evidence that he's been able to perceive it as a metaphorical document, except selected passages that he gives his stamp of approval of.

in Why Christianity Must Change or Die (1998) he tells us that "the vast majority of the traditional Christ language has become inoperable" (page 98). One may say that, or one may say that there are (many) other modes of interpretation that Spong has pretty completely neglected, especially expressing (all) biblical language as susceptible to manifold poetic and metaphoric interpretations.

William Stringfellow, a devout Episcopal attorney, worked in the East Harlem Cooperative Ministry, an activity that radicalized him to a significant degree; he wrote An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land, and his primary thesis was that principalities (which includes all worldly social organizations) were devoted to the idolatry of death.

Albert Schweitzer, I. Quest for the Historical Jesus (1904). One of the most famous christians of the 20th century, Schweitzer had outstanding success as a doctor, a theologian, and a musician in Europe. However he went to Lambarene in Africa, where for most of his life he treated the ills of the natives.
For an online version of the Quest try Early Christian Writings.

II. Some 50 years after the "Quest" Schweitzer wrote a work entitled The Kingdom of God and Primitive Christianity (published posthumously by his widow).

Phyliss Tickle was for many years the religious editor of Publisher's Weekly, which of necessity must have involved reading of thousands of religious books over the years. She has put her special experience to good use in her 1997 book entitled God-talk in America (Crossroads Publishing Co.)

Stephen Tomkins, of London Bible College: John Wesley (2003)

Arnold Toynbee wrote the superlative history of civilization for the 20th century: A Study of History (1947)

Evelyn Underhill, our primary authority on Mysticism, wrote a book with that name (1911) (12th Edition 1961).

Michael Walsh, a British Jesuit wrote The Triumph of the Meek.

Leslie D. Weatherhead, a famous preacher, teacher and scholar of the mid 20th century, wrote The Christian Agnostic (1965).

Henry N. Wieman wrote "The Source of Human Good (1947) (American Academy of Religion Texts and Translations Series)" (1995).
      He was a naturalistic theologian (1884-1975) who studied at Harvard and in Germany and taught at Univ Chicago Divinity School (1927-47) He was the son of a Presbyterian minister and became one himself until 1948 when he became a Unitarian.
      At 23 he made a decision "to seek a better understanding of that which should rightfully command the kind of absolute self-giving which goes by the name of religious faith."
      Wieman decided that the usual academic activities and intellectual pursuits of religionists are irrelevant to the primary religious question, which he described as follows:
      "Religion is committing oneself with the kind of self-giving called faith to what one holds to be the source of all human good, to serve and obey it above all and to be transformed by it in any way that it may require. It is important to notice that the word "belief" is not used: one commits himself to what "he holds to be," not merely what he "believes to be." (For a fuller description as to how he came to this life-guiding conclusion look at The Confessions of a Religious Seeker.)
      Obviously this definition of religion hinges on one's understanding of the meaning of "human good". It also resembles Tillich's definition of God (your ultimate concern).
      Wieman has been placed in a school with Teilllard de Chardin, and the mathematician-philosopher Alfred North Whitehead
These 20th century thinkers moved religious faith in the direction of scepticism and a perspective colored by modern science.
      Wieman's thought has special meaning for me because I came across it early in my seminary training, and for many years described myself as a naturalistic theologian. From The Source of Human Good I have retained to the present two formative ideas placed in opposition, which he called the creative event and the created good.
      This pair of concepts may be expressed in several other dichotomies as for example:
           conventionalism and originality
           tribalism and universalism
           orthodoxy and direct experience (The one that has inspired much of my Church History.

John Wesley, founder of Methodism wrote a short book on the doctrine of perfection. He also kept a very detailed journal for most of his life, one of the religious masterpieces of the 18th Century.

The Bible notes of Wesley found considerable use in this (hypertext) commentary. They are available online at gospelcom.net and several other places.

Alfred North Whitehead was a seminal philosopher and theologian who lived most of his life in British universities and ended it at Cambridge, MA. We have a useful account of his life and work at religion-online.org.

Charles Williams, 20th Century writer and friend of C.S.Lewis, and a prominent member of The Inklings, the circles made up of Lewis, Williams, Tolkien, and a few other habitues of Oxford.

Walter Wink has written a series of books about the use of the power principle which he calls the domination system: The last book, which presumably incorporated the distilled wisdom of the earlier books, he called. The Powers that Be (1999)

In Unmasking the Powers Wink talked about Satan, demons, and angels. Chapter Three concerns the 7 angels of the 7 churches that appear in Revelations.

2. Engaging the Powers (1992) seems to be a compendium of 3 earlier books written on the subject.

3. Many other earlier books.

A blog named Signposts contains a good brief description of Wink's thesis.

John Woolman, a famous and gifted American Quaker, was instrumental in changing the minds of many slave holders, among them Quakers. His Journal, readily available, is a good source book for the Bible.