A new book is set to shake things up like Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code” when it hits shelves this March. “Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World” aims to make the “deeper conversation” around the Bible more accessible to everyday Christians who are left out in the scholarly jargon tossed to and fro in scholastic analysis for two centuries.

Written by former Episcopal Bishop of Newark, N.J, John Shelby Spong, the book is designed to take readers into the contemporary academic debate about the Bible. According to Harper Collins (Australia), Spong frees readers from a literal view of the Bible while opening the possibility that some of the characters in the New Testament are imaginary composites or even literary creations. What if Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, Judas Iscariot, Nicodemus, the Samaritan woman by the well, and Lazarus who was raised from the dead didn’t exist historically? That will definitely pose a serious question on how we read and understand the Bible.

Spong, a visiting lecturer at Harvard and at universities and churches throughout North America, presents the Bible as an ever-changing and always growing story. In the book, he demonstrates that it is possible to be both a deeply committed Christian and an informed 21st-century citizen.

Reaching far beyond the familiar Sunday-school stories that have provided the content of most people’s biblical knowledge, Spong’s journey into the heart of the Bible is his attempt to call his readers into their own journeys into the mystery of God.

“One does not,” he asserts, “have to twist one’s brain into a first-century pretzel in order to take the Bible seriously in this increasingly non-religious world.”

John Selby Spong is one of the leading spokespersons for liberal Christianity in the English-speaking world. His books include "Eternal Life: A New Vision," "Jesus for the Non-Religious," "Why Christianity Must Change or Die" and his autobiography, "Here I Stand."