These are people whose early lives were dominated by an intense religious commitment, in many cases fundamentalism, but whose adulthood is marked by quiet acculturation to the secularism of the academic world and often by a slow but steady dissatisfaction from all religious institutions. Among biblical scholars, even some of the most outspoken and effective debunkers of traditional views are — though you would never guess it — ex-clerics or graduates of theology departments.

Here in the ghetto of Biblical Studies, we are still working with a mental image of text as a word-search puzzle that can be ringed and solved, or as a box stacked with precious things, all co-ordinated by an author who imitates the foreplanning and prescience of (the secure and protecting kind of) God.