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She's working on a book right now about young evangelicals, aged 19 to early 20s, and she has become friends with many of the people she is profiling. Many of them like the Bible blog. In fact, just before you called, I was e-mailing some of them about a recent post.

Who reads "Blogging the Bible"? What kind of feedback do you get?

When I started, I expected that the response would be heavily negative from observant people—orthodox Jews and evangelical Christians—but it has been just the opposite.

There are two components that make up a small group of negative readers: atheists who say the project is grotesque because I'm taking this book of lies seriously, and biblical literalists—both Jewish and Christian—who think what I'm doing is grotesque because I'm taking the Bible too lightly.

There is another fairly small group of people who are like me. They are secular people who are using the blog as sort of a cheat sheet. They have some kind of religious background, but they don't know very much, so they're interested in what I'm uncovering.

But the bulk of my readers is evangelical Christians (with some mainline Christians) and observant Jews who are incredibly enthusiastic about what I'm doing. Christians love it because I am reading the Bible the way they do—alone, as opposed to how Jews read the Bible. Jews always read in groups. You never read alone. I think evangelicals appreciate this personal relationship with the text.

Jews are positive, too, for the most part, even though I'm not reading the way you read if you go to a yeshiva. One of the reasons that Judaism is an intellectually challenging religion is the love of engagement and gamesmanship.

So people are generally positive about your blog?

Most people sense this is a project from the heart. It's an act of love and a kind of genuine wrestling with the text that they hold so dearly. Even when they disagree or they think I've missed something, which is often, they appreciate what I'm trying to do.

Because I'm overt and enthusiastic about my ignorance, people feel, rightly, that I welcome their corrections and answers to questions. Also, I'm reading the book of my own religion, and that makes a difference. I'm probably not going to continue and read the New Testament. It would be much harder to read something that is not from my religion.

As you've read passages that Christians consider messianic—Isaiah 53, for example—do you see why they believe what they believe?

I see where Christians are coming from. You read those passages and that's how the Gospels describe Jesus. My way of describing it, though, is that the people who were writing about Christ wanted to put him in that prophetic tradition. They looked at things retrospectively and fit him into the prophecies.

But certain things can't be fitted retrospectively.

Well, I want to make it clear that I don't have a dog in this fight. I really don't know. I'm talking as someone who doesn't have a stake in it.

Recently, you referred to God as "the big guy" in a post. Do you use that casual tone because it's a blog, or is that how you approach your faith?

The danger is that if you sound too casual, then people might think you're not taking the Bible seriously. But it would be a lie for me to write in portentous language. If I were using high liturgical language or high rabbinical language, that wouldn't be me.

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February (Web-only) 2007, Vol. 51