Reply #15: I loved the Bible section of my "Western Thought" class ...

[Lisa]

Reading this thread sure brought back memories! Our prof was Louis Greenspan, the self-described "dissolute brother" of a famous Toronto criminal lawyer. Anyway, this was in the mid-1980s, and Dr. Greenspan came into class (the very first college lecture for my group) with a grizzled grey beard, sandals -- all he needed was a string of lovebeads and he would have been like a Berkeley prof out of Central Casting. He said, "This month we're going to talk about the Bible." We all stared at him timidly, and he said, "Oh come on people, I'm not going to ask you to burst into hymns!"

It was an awesome course. He had us read "The Jerusalem Bible", and until then most of us didn't realize that there were different versions of "The Bible", with bits that had been left out because they were labelled as heretical later on. As Dr. Greenspan put it, "If God wrote this, we can be sure that He did a lot of drafts. Just as you will on your final paper. Actually my people wrote this book, and one of these days we're going to be demanding royalties. I told my brother to look into this."