Gregory Dolphin’s new book explores how early scripture may have preserved law, health guidance, identity, and community memory before modern institutions existed.
Gregory Dolphin takes an unconventional approach to biblical history in The Bible – Post Christianity!, asking what practical purpose early scripture may have served for the communities that preserved it.
One of the book’s most distinctive sections appears in the chapter “Original Function of the Bible.” Rather than looking at the Torah only as a religious text, Dolphin considers how it may also have functioned as a source of law, social instruction, community memory, health guidance, and cultural continuity.
The argument begins by placing ancient readers in a world without modern information systems.
There were no public health agencies, searchable databases, television reports, mass education systems, or instant legal resources. Important knowledge had to move through people, communal gatherings, oral tradition, repeated teaching, and eventually written material.
Dolphin suggests that scripture could therefore perform several jobs at once.
Stories about ancestors and origins could preserve a shared identity. Laws could define acceptable conduct and establish consequences. Rituals could strengthen community bonds. Instructions involving food, cleanliness, contamination, and periods of separation could help people respond to health concerns long before modern medicine explained why certain practices worked.
This perspective gives the early Bible a social function alongside its spiritual one.
Dolphin is particularly interested in the pressures ancient Jewish communities faced through migration, foreign rule, exile, cultural contact, and the risk of losing a shared identity. In his interpretation, a common body of teachings helped communities maintain continuity when political and social conditions were unstable.
The book also places biblical law beside older legal traditions from Mesopotamia. Dolphin references the Code of Ur-Nammu and the Code of Hammurabi as evidence that societies were formalizing rules about crime, punishment, property, and social order long before the Torah reached its later written form.
He does not use those comparisons to dismiss the biblical material. Instead, he asks readers to see it as part of a wider human history of communities trying to survive, organize themselves, preserve experience, and pass useful knowledge forward.
That approach also allows Dolphin to make an important distinction between historical value and religious authority.
He strongly criticizes some biblical passages involving violence, conquest, and punishment, yet he still considers the text valuable as evidence of how ancient people understood their world. A document, in his view, can contain remembered events, symbolic stories, practical rules, political interests, and later interpretation at the same time.
The modern world distributes many of those functions across specialized institutions. Governments create civil law. Medical researchers and public health agencies issue health guidance. Schools provide formal education. Archives, libraries, museums, and digital databases preserve history.
Dolphin argues that this transformation changes what people need from scripture.
He predicts that the Bible may eventually be read primarily as a historical and cultural record rather than a comprehensive authority over modern life. In that role, it would still offer important material for historians, students, religious scholars, and readers interested in ancient society.
The Bible – Post Christianity!—therefore presents a different kind of challenge. Instead of asking readers to accept or reject the entire Bible at once, Dolphin asks them to consider what different layers of the text may have meant to the people who first depended on them.
For readers interested in scripture without an all-or-nothing debate, that framing offers a way into the subject. The Bible can be questioned as divine instruction while being examined as a document shaped by communities and historical pressures.
About the Book
The Bible – Post Christianity! examines biblical origins, ancient writings, organized religion, institutional authority, education, and the possible future of scripture. The book combines historical discussion with personal reflection and encourages readers to investigate source material independently.
About the Author
Gregory Dolphin writes from decades of personal study and life experience. His background described in the manuscript includes military service, manufacturing, engineering, and longstanding personal interests in history, religion, science, and human development. The Bible – Post Christianity! follows his earlier work, Man, God, and the Man-gods of Antiquity.
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