Review: You Got To Be Kidding

Last updated on: December 13, 2012 at 2:52 pm by Billy Kangas

Review: You Got To Be Kidding 2012-12-13T14:52:00-04:00 Billy Kangas

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You Got To Be Kidding by Joe Wenke

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

So I recently read this book and I have to say is possibly the worst book on the Bible that I have ever encountered. There must have been some publisher who woke up in the middle of the night one day and said do you know what the world needs more of insipid nonsense and they tracked down Joe Wenke to create it.

The author of the book seems to be attempting to achieve three things at once and doing all of them quite poorly. The first thing is an attempt to be funny, something I support quite a bit in principle (who doesn’t like to laugh?) In fact, I fully support humor even humor about things that I take very seriously, like the Bible. I can even think of 1 or 2 examples where this is done very well. I found AJ Jacobs book “A Year of Living Biblically”, for example, to be both hilarious as well as filled with quality thoughtful reflections on some of the difficulties of the Bible. This book on the other hand it’s filled with adolescents nonsense. The humor is immature, the punchlines are predictable, and the jokes fall flat every time. I honestly felt like I was rolling my eyes the entire time i was reading the book.

The second goal of this book seems to be to criticize the Bible’s content. As someone who has spent much of my professional life critically analyzing the Bible, I find absolutely no fault in this ambition. The way it is done in this case, however, is atrocious. The reading of the Bible seems to have been done exclusively through a fundamentalist lens, I get the feeling that whoever wrote this book was raised in a conservative Christian home and has never taken the time to invest in any serious biblical scholarship outside that perspective. If you’re going to write a book about the Bible at least try to do some research.

The third goal of this book seems to have been to be offensive. This goal fails in so far as it did not offended me in the ways the author wanted it to. It did not offended my religious sensibilities nearly as much as it offended my good taste.It was so poorly written that I feel bad that some publisher was willing to publish publicly humiliate the author by publishing this thing. Its an embarrassment to everyone involved.

I hope this review can keep you from wasting a few hours of your life reading this book.

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