This book was okay, but very brief and cursory. It's written for every possible audience, so a lot of its very few pages are taken up with Biblical explanation and backstory that most practicing Christians and Jews probably already know.

It seemed like it didn't trust you to be interested or continue reading unless it tried to make every stage of the Bible's history into some Indiana Jones adventure and threw in a lot of references and "but you WONT BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENED THEN" and "but that's NOTHING compared to WHAT'S NEXT" clickbait-style teasers at the end of every chapter.

Honestly, it reminded me of those books people re-write for teenagers that are exactly like the adult version except trying way too hard because teenagers' brains can only read 140 characters at a time, right? It also seemed to be not-so-subtly name-dropping the museum that published it a lot.

I wanted:

• More about the apocrypha!!!!!!!!!!! This ranks among a lot of people's, even Christians', top questions! The book explained about the different Bible compilations different denominations and church fathers have approved of, and listed five tests the early church used to evaluate supposedly-divine manuscripts, but that was about it.

What I want to know is: WHY. Why, using these five tests, did different early churches come up with different lists of divine books? What was their reasoning? What is the content of the book that is debated over? The World's Greatest Book talked about some Gnostic gospels, and other letters that claim to be of inspired origin, but "scholars believe were authored in the 3rd century."

Like, okay, but... why? Why do scholars believe that? Why did the early church not credit these books? Why did the early church dispute over whether 1, 2, 3 John were inspired? You can't just say "scholars believe" without saying why! You can't just tell me an apocryphal book's origins are shady and not tell me why.

• More about the "oral Torah" compiled in the Mishnah. This I had never heard of before, and I needed way more information about it than I received. Where did the idea of Moses's "oral law" alongside the written Law come from? What are these oral laws? How do they make it possible for Judaism to be practiced "more flexibly" in different circumstances? GIVE ME THE DETAILS YOU COWARDS.

If you already know the top three Wikipedia facts about Moses, Martin Luther, the Vulgate, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Council of Nicaea, and Henry VIII, I would advise skipping this book and going for something a little more in-depth.