> This does sound interesting - Perhaps the holy writings were a mix
> of those that used metaphor and understood and those that did not,
> and refered to people and supposed gods.
I suspect that is true. What's more interesting is the rise, after the
writting, of orginizations which took the books at face value and
presecuted the *original* *writers* into extinction. It shines a whole new
light on the gnostic battles of the 2nd 3rd and 4th centuries, as well as
the early Roman persecutions of the Christians.
However, irregardless of the truth of his thesis, I found the book very
interesting just because of the concentration on words and their origins --
a subject which interests me, but which I've never studied very much.
ERiC