Wolf in the Sheepfold: Bible as Problematic for Theology

This provocative study, first published by SPCK in 1991, looks at how the Bible has been subjected to ideological manipulation. 'There must be very few works of theology which one can honestly recommend with, "You won't be able to put it down." The Dean of Divinity at Glasgow University, already well-known for his masterly commentary on Jeremiah and his delightfully iconoclastic When Prophecy Failed, has put together a deliberately provocative series of chapters to express his horror at the way Christian theologians have turned the Bible into a domesticated pet, when it is in essence, and remains, a ravenous wolf. Jesus used the image as a warning against false prophets lurking among his followers. Carroll turns it into a shout of anger at the theology which has so de-natured the Bible, and a gulp of fear at the revenge it may ultimately wreak on us' (H. J. Richards in Epworth Review). 'Robert Carroll's Wolf in the Sheepfold is precisely that: a vivid, intensely personal argument on the dangers which the Bible poses to those who would use it naively in support of their Christianity. As it points to the ferocities, contradictions and opacities of the biblical texts and of the influence of these texts on Christian persecutions of Jews, this taut tract recalls Marcion's sombre logic' (George Steiner in TLS 'Books of the Year' 1991). This second edition contains a substantial new Preface.