How did the Bible come to be written? How did Israelite religion grow out of the surrounding cultures? How did Israelite religion become Christianity and rabbinic Judaism? How did scholars discover this history in the last two centuries? This book is about such questions, and about the ways that Christianity in the modern world became confused, looking for acts of God in the interstices of natural causation rather than in the living-in-history in which the Bible was born. The modern challenges to Christianity are historicism, relativism, and pluralism; and Christianity can learn to receive them as blessings and as offers of grace–as old friends, not as new enemies.