These days it seems to require a Western intellectual to provide a worse reading of a biblical text than a fundamentalist. Driven by ignorance, or perhaps prejudice, intellectuals leave their minds and souls behind as they come up with readings as ludicrous and reductionist as those they frequently criticise. They mock the fundamentalist’s literalism, but make the same category errors themselves. There was no better example of this than Anna Funder’s appalling reading of Genesis that she inflicted on her unsuspecting and innocent children as she explained the biblical mythology behind some Titian and Rubens paintings. (Her article “What the…