A Year of Living Biblically: AJ Jacobs

The Year of Living Biblically

by AJ Jacobs

So, 'Stunt Journalism' then. You know the sort of thing - one man tries to do something wacky for a while: Morgan Spurlock eats only McDonalds, Danny Wallace says 'yes' to everything for a year, you get the drift. That was my original thought when I heard of this book. Esquire journalist AJ Jacobs decides to spend a year of his life trying to follow the rules of the bible. As a 'secular Jew', the easy and obvious thing for Jacobs to do would have been to point out all the inconsistencies ("the stuff that contradicts the other stuff" - Ned Flanders) and all the people who believe in them. It makes for a better book that he tries and succeeds to do more with it.

Jacobs is a self-confessed agnostic - but he admirably enters into this enterprise with openness. If he is going to try to follow the Bible for a year, then the most difficult thing to do is to actually make yourself 'believe'. There are plenty of quirky rules that Jacobs delights in trying to follow - not shaving for a year and taking on a 'slave', for example. However, what the book is really about is trying to examine what the bible means to people, and what was behind the original rule making in the first place. 

Jacobs speaks to a huge amount of Biblical experts and consults a huge amount of books in his quest. His thank-you list and his bibliography at the end of the book are both enormous -which I suppose is not surprising when studying the most popular book in the world. Jacobs makes a point of speaking to an extremely wide range of people - pointing out that the Bible means nearly as much in the Jewish faith as it does in the Christian one. 

There is definitely a schism between those who believe the New Testament makes much of the Old Testament unnecessary, and those who take the entire thing as equally important. This is something even the most casual observer is aware of. However, what I wasn't aware of was just how many different opinions and interpretations of the Bible there are. Estimates say there are between 3000 and 7000 different bibles. That's not different interpretations, that published bibles with different words - extra bits added in or left out. 

There is not one rule or law that isn't in dispute amongst bible followers - even "thou shalt not kill" has a number of different translations and interpretations. It's also a mistake to assume all fundamentalists believe the same thing: there are gay fundamentalists, socialist fundamentalists (Red Letter Christians). There's a number of different schools of thought even within Creationists. Catholics, Protestants and Jews don't even agree on what should be in the Bible. Jacobs doesn't point this out to make fun of the Bible, but to observe it is practically impossible to follow certain rules, when no-one can agree what that rule means. 

There is a lot of Jacobs' personal life in the book - his wife and child - and their attempts to have more children (the Bible may or may not have something to say about IVF - Catholics don't like it but Jews do). This is possibly where the book falls down - Jacobs is the amiable bumbling man, while his wife is the uptight sensible one - just like a Judd Apatow film, or in fact a Morgan Spurlock film/Danny Wallace book. His attempts to explain why he can't touch or sit in the same seat as his menstruating wife are pretty funny though. 

He is at his best when he talking to the numerous theologists and believers about their version of what the Bible means. He is open and non-judgemental - and takes seriously his attempts to at least try and believe what they believe.