This is certainly a simpler book, but it is also inferior to Bailey's works in more troubling ways. For one, Bailey makes it clear that the Middle Eastern culture is unique and that to understand the biblical accounts as they would have been understood by their original writers and readers, one must have an understanding of their worldview. Richards and O'Brien make a point in their introduction that human beings tend to be binary in their thinking -- Western/Eastern, good/bad, right/wrong -- but that reality often has more than two options; however, by choosing the "Western" worldview to denigrate, they absolutely do imply that the "Eastern" way is more biblical. The book could more accurately and less sensationally have been titled Misreading Scripture with American, Evangelical Eyes. I very strongly question the right of a couple of guys from a Baptist college in Florida to speak for Europe and North America as a whole, particularly when one of the blockbuster tidbits they drop is that Fanny is a girl's name in America but a rude, scatological term for female genitalia in England. Apparently, they've never heard of Fanny Burney, one of the most famous woman authors in England, or Fanny Price, heroine of the British Jane Austen's celebrated novel Mansfield Park. Such blatant ignorance does not predispose me to take their word on anything else they assert.
In addition, as opposed to Bailey's work, which is proffered in a spirit of humility and based on a lifetime of crosscultural immersion, there is a very strong sense of condescension toward American evangelicals in Misreading Scripture. Richards and O'Brien repeatedly assume that American Christians (despite the misleading title of their book, the focus is only and always on Americans, not Europeans) are jingoistic, xenophobic racists. "We won't even dare to consider the prejudice that some North American Christians might express [if a Korean missionary came to North America]." Really? Then don't consider it, and certainly don't put it in a snide endnote.
There is sadly more than a whiff of "I thank God I am not as other men, even these Americans" which pervades the whole book. I would certainly recommend that readers pick up Kenneth E. Bailey's Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes and Paul Through Mediterranean Eyes, despite their greater length and more intellectually demanding nature, before this book.
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