AN OLD JOKE declares that America and England are divided by a common language. In the same way, you could say that Judaism and Christianity are divided by a common Bible—except that, historically speaking, the consequences of that division have not been a laughing matter. It is exactly because Jews and Christians agree on the divine status of the Hebrew Bible that their disagreement about the New Testament has been so fraught. To a believing Christian, a Hindu who venerates the Vedas would simply be an unbeliever, a heathen, and so he would present no particular theological challenge. But a Jew, who accepts part of the Christian Bible but not the whole, is something more troubling—a critic, a breeder of doubts. From the Jewish perspective, meanwhile, the Christian demotion of the Hebrew Bible to the Old Testament is especially bitter: the suggestion that Judaism has been superseded is even more objectionable than the idea that it was never true in the first place.

In America today, thankfully, the ancient theological ire between Christians and Jews has been almost forgotten. But as Timothy Beal shows in his personal and accessible new book, there is still a profound difference between the ways in which the two faiths read their Bibles. The kind of Jewish education that most non-Orthodox American Jews receive leaves us familiar with the major biblical stories; and of course many Jewish holidays revolve around biblical episodes, from the Exodus on Passover to the Maccabees on Hanukkah. Jews who receive a traditional Orthodox education learn the Bible much more thoroughly, but the core of their study has to do with the Talmud and commentaries—a way of thinking about the Torah that treats the original divine text primarily as a subject for interpretation.

Neither of these Jewish approaches to Torah has anything in common with the fundamentalist, Bible-centered Christianity that is so potent in the United States—especially the parts where Jews do not live. Beal, an academic scholar of the Bible, is accustomed to thinking of it as the work of historically situated human beings—but he was raised in an evangelical Christian home, where the Bible was held to be quite literally the Word of God. He hastens to explain that this does not mean his parents were naïve or uneducated: “My parents’ biblical faith … was as seriously intellectual as it was devout.” His mother, who studied Greek in college, would “sometimes … pull out her old Greek New Testament to see how else the text might be translated.”

Still, growing up in this bibliocentric culture gave Beal an early sense that the Bible was “the go-to book for any serious question we might have, from sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll to heaven, hell, and why bad things happen to good people.” The Bible was “God’s book of answers, which if opened and read rightly would speak directly to me with concrete, divinely authored advice about my life and how to live it.” Beal cites an evangelical acronym that I had never heard before: it was “B.I.B.L.E.: Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.”

The Rise and Fall of the Bible is Beal’s attempt to shatter this popular understanding of the Bible as a combination of divine instruction manual and self-help book. While there is no denying that the Bible remains central—Beal quotes polls indicating that “65 percent of all Americans believe that the Bible ‘answers all or most of the basic questions of life,’ ”—he notes simultaneously that Americans are surprisingly ignorant of what is actually in it. “More than 80 percent of born-again or evangelical Christians believe that ‘God helps those who help themselves’ is a Bible verse,” he writes. Less than half of all adults can name the four Gospels; only one-third can name five of the Ten Commandments. In his own experience as a college teacher, Beal says, students “come to class on the first day with more ideas about the Bible derived from … The Da Vinci Code than from actual Biblical texts.”