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The Uncensored Bible | 
 enlarge | Manufacturer: HarperCollins e-books
Category: EBooks
List Price: $15.95
Buy New: $9.99
You Save: $5.96 (37%)
Avg. Customer Rating:  4 reviews
Sales Rank: 22629
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 224
Dewey Decimal Number: 221.6
ASIN: B001AD8I7I
Publication Date: June 10, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Product Description
We all know the story of how Eve was created from Adam's rib. But what if, perhaps, "rib" was a mistranslation and the body part she was really created from was Adam's penis bone? This would explain why human males don't have such a bone, unlike other male mammals. That's only one of many surprising and fun biblical twists readers will encounter in The Uncensored Bible. Here readers will learn that King David swore like a sailor, mandrakes were the biblical equivalent of Viagra, Cain was depressed, and Joseph's "coat of many colors" might have actually been a dress (which may explain why his brothers picked on him).Authors Kaltner, McKenzie, and Kilpatrick bring some of the most outrageous speculations about the scriptures to light -- all based on legitimate scholarship -- revealing a stranger, bawdier side of the Good Book. The Uncensored Bible is a shocking, hilarious, and thought-provoking collection of the most recent, compelling, and racy interpretations of the Bible from the newest voices of Bible scholarship.
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| Customer Reviews:
 The "Good" Book August 16, 2008
The Uncensored Bible is an intriguing and scholarly text that explores the myriad of possible interpretations of some Bible stories. It is written in an engaging and readable style, and the authors aptly realize that they are writing for a wide audience, not a bunch of scholars at a conference. Kudos to them for acknowledging that fact. This is a serious work, and I was greatly impressed by the rigorous standards that the authors gave to each "questionable' theory that they examined in the text. They are not trying to shock people, but rather to investigate the aspects of the Bible that are unseemly, and to come up with reasonable conclusions that are based on reliable research, and the Bible itself. Again, it is refreshing to read a work by a scholar that seems to be absent of the scholar`s personal biases and beliefs.
The main flaw with this text is the hideous amount of bad jokes. They are so many, and so lame, that they begin to detract from the text. Had the amount of bad jokes, puns, riffs, etc been reduced I would have given this text 4 stars.
If you know your Bible, and are open to thinking critically about it, then this is a quick and engaging read and worth your time.
Uncensored Bible revealed July 21, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Light reading, funny and illustrative. It was a good bargain and I definitively recommend this book if you are into humane interpretations of the bible. Though is not that daring as I would expected, it is very scholar without being boring.
 Funny and interesting July 20, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Don't give this book to your fundamentalist friends, but do tell everybody else about it. It is education, interesting, and amusing.
Terrific content, marred by irritating style July 16, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The Publisher's Weekly review on this page describes this book as an "unexpectedly delightful (if juvenile) little book". It's a fair comment; I would stress the "juvenile" a little harder than PW did, though. That is to say, the subject of the book is fascinating, or more descriptively the several subjects of the book are all fascinating. If you've ever felt like there must be more behind the frequently terse, and occasionally quite puzzling, stories of the Bible, such as Abraham's seemingly odd, repeated denials that Sarah and he were married (in Genesis 26), or Job's bizarre response when his neighbors in Sodom threatened his angelic houseguests (Genesis 19), or many other cases, you'll find fascinating and informative (and brief!) discussions in this book. Some of the discussions involve conjecture and even guesswork, and the authors are pleasingly up front about what is a guess and what is more solid. More generally the discussions in this book cast a lot of useful light on the extent to which the translations that most of us read today are themselves guesswork; often Biblical passages include words whose proper translation is just not known for sure (often because a given word of ancient Hebrew is used only once or a few times throughout the Bible, providing little context for translations). Altogether, very valuable stuff for the lay reader such as myself.
But my goodness, they lay it on thick with the juvenile business. As the two primary authors (Kaltner and McKenzie) say in their acknowledgements, the book was composed in two stages: first they wrote the book, then they handed it off to the third author (Kilpatrick) to give their presumably academic prose a more popular, humorous style. It was a good idea, I suppose, and that sort of thing is fine in the proper amount, but I found the implementation here much too heavy handed. They seem to get a juvenile and, to be blunt, rather lame joke into every second or third sentence; juvenile I can deal with, but the jokes mostly just aren't that funny, and their frequency gets in the way of enjoying the main narrative, rather than enhancing it. I'm currently about two thirds of the way through and, while the subject matter is terrific (see above), the style is so bad I'm finding it hard to continue. On the whole I find the intrinsic interest of the material wins out over the lameness of the style, but it is a struggle.
I do recommend this book, but because of the style, guardedly rather than enthusiastically.
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