The Origin of the Bible by Lee Martin McDonald presents a guide for the perplexed, asking complex questions such as:

How did the Jewish and Christian Bibles come together?
Why were some ancient texts excluded? Or included and later rejected?
What were the criteria?

In this volume of the book, Lee examines and deals with many significant issues of the ancient sacred and the religious that were not included in the Jewish or Christian Bibles. Looking into why some books include such text and others don’t, maybe there was a church cover up as the media has suggested. We now see that attention is focused on the use of function of non-canonical religious texts that are not now a part of the Bibles of various religious communities. The book looks into how such exclusions of religious text has come to be and who has made these decisions

Currently there are no useful volumes on this subject that is geared to them. Scholars continue to talk past them and all too often only to each other about these matters. This volume is designed to fill this void and make the topic more clear for those without the technical academic skills to explore these matters in the ancient languages. The methodology employed in the writing of this book is described below. It is important to take this discussion outside of the scholars' guild and into the hands of the laity, especially those educated college graduates and undergraduates whose interest in this subject has grown over the past twenty or more years.