God: An Anatomy - As heard on Radio 4

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Stavrakopoulou’s thesis is that even during the six centuries over which the books of the Old Testament were written, the immense physicality of this wilder divinity was being erased, not least under the sway of Platonism. “Reverence rather requires . . . an allegorical meaning,” Clement of Alexandria wrote around the turn of the second century CE, expressing a scholarly distaste for the experiential and somatic that remains highly influential. Translators, too, have long sanitised the text, privileging the abstract and metaphysical over the corporeal. But this more primal, vital Yahweh can be reconstructed from scattered passages in the Bible which still retain warm traces of his divine materiality. But that divine studmuffin began to deflate toward the close of the first millennium BCE and into the first centuries of the Common Era. Influenced by erudite Greek philosophy, Jewish and Christian intellectuals “began to re-imagine their deity in increasingly incorporeal, immaterial terms.” Since the Enlightenment, that transformation has grown more radical, Stavrakopoulou claims. “Prominent Western intellectuals have not only rendered the biblical God lifeless, but reduced him to a mere phantom, conjured by the human imagination.” The book presents this picture with a wealth of scholarly detail and much gusto (and occasional tabloidish hype). Stavrakopoulou is a distinguished scholar of the archaeological record and summarises its data with skill. But the interpretation of her material raises some large questions. We are told more than once that this book introduces us to “the real God of the Bible” – a phrase whose oddity becomes more marked the more you think about it. “The Bible” is a set of very diverse texts bundled together as a canonical unit by Jewish and Christian believers. It is certainly right to protest, as Stavrakopoulou does, when the traces of mythical language are ignored or blandly sanitised by pious reading; but that cannot mean that the mythical substrate is somehow “the real thing” as opposed to what later editors do with these traditions. The idea that the best reading of any text or tradition is one that privileges the oldest stratum needs challenging. Plus, if we are indeed taking Job literally, of course, Yahweh and the Satan have a bet. This isn't even sloughing off evil onto the Satan, contra Stavra, as Yahweh puts limits on what he can do. And, again, as we have it today, it's a bet, not Satan punishing evil. The Book of Mormon and the book of Moses were translated in 1829 and 1830, respectively. 4Thus, humanity’s physical resemblance to deity was one of the earliest truths restored in modern times—a truth which Joseph Smith himself surely understood even earlier thanks to his First Vision. 5

God: An Anatomy is a tour de force. Stavrakopoulou has created not just an extraordinarily rich and nuanced portrait of Yahweh himself, but an intricate and detailed account of the cultural values and practices he embodied, and the wider world of myth and history out of which he emerged. This Yahweh is a refutation of the opposition between the carnal and the divine expounded by the apostle Paul, who wrote that “what the flesh desires is opposed to the spirit”. If God himself is both carnal and divine, two millennia of Christian and post-Christian thought might be in need of some rethinking. David Cannadine (chair) | Dodge Professor of History at Princeton University, a Visiting Professor of History at the University of Oxford, the editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

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Of all these six books this one is the most accessible to the general reader. It is fascinating. It examines the fate of fallen statues of famous figures from the past. In contrast to an archaic, religious sacralising of the perfect, glowing, muscular, dominant body, there is a central strand in Jewish and Christian imagination which insists that bodies marked by weakness, failure, the violence of others, disease or disability are not somehow shut out from a share in human – and divine – significance. They have value and meaning; they may judge us and call us to action. The biblical texts are certainly not short of the mythical glorifications of male power that Stavrakopoulou discusses; but they also repeatedly explore divine solidarity with vulnerable bodies, powerless bodies. Is this a less “real” dimension of the Bible? Even a reader with no theological commitments might pause before writing it off. Dr Katherine Southwood is Associate Professor in the Old Testament in the Faculty of Theology and Religion in the University of Oxford, and a Fellow and Tutor of St John’s College, Oxford. Edmond LaB. Cherbonnier, “ In Defense of Anthropomorphism,” in Reflections on Mormonism: Judaeo-Christian Parallels, ed. TrumanG. Madsen (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1978), 155–171. What the judges said: “An engaging and often moving account of how religious life was woven into people’s everyday experiences from Anglo-Saxon times to the Reformation. A sparkling book.”

She makes two key points. The first is that Christianity and Judaism are not Biblical religions; they are post-Biblical religions. Most of the Hebrew Bible was written in and refers to very different times when the concept of God was very different to the monotheistic Christian and Jewish concepts of God. A biblical scholar sets out to recover the Bible’s clear image of God as a corporeal being, with a physical form both resembling the human body yet also magnificently superior to it. Witches, statues, God's body, the Ottomans, medieval church going and 17th-century England as a "devil land" are the topics explored in this year's shortlisted books. Rana Mitter interviews the authors ahead of the announcement of the winning book on June 22nd. Francesca Stavrakopoulou is fascinated by the Bible, and she’s a leading scholar of those ancient texts which have so profoundly shaped how we see the world. She’s Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Religion at the University of Exeter; she’s also a convinced and passionate atheist. She is the author of several books about the Bible, and her most recent is her most daring: called “God: An Anatomy”, it draws on the Bible to describe the body of God, from head to foot, in a way she herself describes as “very controversial”. In some specifications on the Developments in Christian Thought, there are units on liberation theology and feminism. Both of these can include discussions surrounding the work of various womanist scholars.It is often moving. It shows us how religious life was woven into people’s everyday experiences, from Anglo-Saxon times to the Reformation. It is richly illustrated, too. These churches were crucial to English, religious and social life, for church services on Sundays weekdays and for feast days, such as the celebrations at Christmas and Easter. The recurrent cycle of baptism, marriage, funerals, the everyday existence of ordinary people in parish churches are at the very centre of the story.