Rating: 
Summary: Secular Screed on the Bible
Review: This book possesses echoes too much textual criticism common to humanist critics of Christianity. The tone and views of many contributors is sharply cynical over the inspiration of the Bible and the truth of Christianity in general. Some reference material is informative and okay, but this book should be left to egghead intellectuals, humanists and unitarians.
Rating: 
Summary: Critical, but opens a whole new perspective
Review: This is the required text at my college and when I bought it I imediately went to my room and read. I must say I disagreed with most of the positions I read, but nevertheless, it was very emlightening and gave me a different perspective in the book. The theological position of the book varies: ranging from liberal to evangelically conservative. However, overall it adapts a mainline, critical, slightly evangelical appraoch to the bible. That is important to know before one reads the book, this is not an objective work. These writers, like all, have their own presuppositions (several of them outdated) and naturally, like you or I would, they put them into the text. This should not discourage the reader, a different perpsective is always needed. I would say that one should consult a book with a differnt approach at the same time one studies this. A book I would recommend would be The Evangelical Dictionary of Theology.
Rating:
Summary: Critical, but opens a whole new perspective
Review: This is the required text at my college and when I bought it I imediately went to my room and read. I must say I disagreed with most of the positions I read, but nevertheless, it was very emlightening and gave me a different perspective in the book. The theological position of the book varies: ranging from liberal to evangelically conservative. However, overall it adapts a mainline, critical, slightly evangelical appraoch to the bible. That is important to know before one reads the book, this is not an objective work. These writers, like all, have their own presuppositions (several of them outdated) and naturally, like you or I would, they put them into the text. This should not discourage the reader, a different perpsective is always needed. I would say that one should consult a book with a differnt approach at the same time one studies this. A book I would recommend would be The Evangelical Dictionary of Theology.
Rating: 
Summary: Not a 'Companion' per se
Review: You'd expect a 'companion' to the Bible to be something that you would read or use alongside the bible, perhaps as a guide with background data, some commentary, and other pertinent, salient or supplementary information. That is, however, not at all so with The Oxford Companion to the Bible, which is more a dictionary than anything else, with wide and varied entries concerning biblical topics and other issues laid out in a -- you guessed it -- dictionary format (alphabetically arranged).Having said that, The Oxford Companion to the Bible is a great referential source of considerable scholastic weight. Articles range from half-page biographies on biblical characters and multi-page synopses of biblical books to a 3-page precise on 'Jung and the Bible' and a massive 21-page entry on 'Literature and the Bible'. Nonetheless, I have no regret buying this title even though it was a misconceived purchase. As a dictionary, The Oxford Companion to the Bible would have received a 4-star rating, but I must subtract a star for the misleading title -- something you wouldn't expect a reputable and respectable publisher like OUP to err on. I'd recommend The Cambridge Companion to the Bible (Howard Kee, Eric Myers, John Rogerson, Anthony Saldarini; ISBN 0521343690) to anyone who, like me, expects a 'companion' to keep up with a trek through the Bible in a sequentially logical, systematic and unobstrusive manner.
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