Bible

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Bible has sold over five billion copies, making it the best-selling publication of all time. No other ancient work survives in more manuscripts. Yet not one original page has survived. The books began as songs and stories passed by voice from one generation to the next, written and copied by hand on papyrus scrolls that crumbled long ago. The people who wrote them are mostly unknown. They lived across a span of time wide enough to hold the lives of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Caesar, and Cicero. So how did a collection this scattered, this anonymous, this old, come to anchor entire faiths? Which books belong inside it, and who decided? And why does a single text exist in versions that do not agree, copied with reverence yet riddled with small differences that scholars still argue over today? The answers run from a Phoenician seaport to caves above the Dead Sea, from scribes in Alexandria to councils that fixed the canon centuries after the ink dried.

• 2. The Books Of The Books

  ›

  The English word Bible descends from the Greek ta biblia, meaning the books. The singular, biblion, literally meant scroll, and it became the ordinary word for book. That word is a diminutive of byblos, meaning Egyptian papyrus. The name may trace to the Phoenician seaport Byblos, also called Gebal, from which Egyptian papyri were shipped to Greece. Hellenistic Jews used ta biblia to describe their sacred books. The scholar F. F. Bruce notes that John Chrysostom seems to be the first writer to use ta biblia for both the Old and New Testaments together, in his Homilies on Matthew delivered between 386 and 388 CE. The Latin biblia sacra means holy books, a translation of the Greek tà biblía tà hágia. In medieval Latin the plural quietly hardened into a feminine singular noun, and so the word entered the vernaculars of Western Europe as a single thing. A Bible is an anthology, a compilation of texts in many forms. Its pages hold instructions, stories, poetry, letters, prophecies, and other genres. The exact set of texts a tradition accepts is called a biblical canon, and that boundary is where the real disagreements begin.

• 3. A Collection Built In Three Stages

  ›

  The Torah, meaning law, instruction, or teaching, was accepted as Jewish canon by the fifth century BCE. Greek speakers called it the Pentateuch, meaning five books. Its first eleven chapters in Genesis recount the ordering of the world and God's early relationship with humanity. The rest follows God's covenant with the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the story of Moses, who leads the Children of Israel from slavery in Egypt to Mount Sinai. The Torah ends with the death of Moses. Tradition counts 613 commandments within it, the taryag mitzvot. A second collection, the Nevi'im or prophets, was canonized in the third century BCE. It tells of the rise of the Hebrew monarchy and its split into the Kingdom of Israel and the Kingdom of Judah, ending in conquest and the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. The third collection, the Ketuvim or writings, gathers psalms, proverbs, and narrative histories. It was the last to close, fixed only between the second century BCE and the second century CE. Together these three form the Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh, an abbreviation built from the first letters of Torah, Nevi'im, and Ketuvim. The writing Against Apion by Josephus, from 95 CE, already treated the Hebrew Bible as a closed canon to which no one had ventured to add, remove, or alter a syllable.

• 4. Scribes And The Pointing Of Vowels

  ›

  The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in the caves of Qumran in 1947, date from between 250 BCE and 100 CE. They are the oldest existing copies of the books of the Hebrew Bible of any length that are not mere fragments. Using a linguistic and historiographical approach, Hendel and Joosten date the oldest parts of the Hebrew Bible, including the Song of Deborah and the Samson story, to around 1200 BCE in the early Iron Age. The earliest manuscripts were probably written in paleo-Hebrew, a cuneiform pictograph. The exile to Babylon most likely prompted a shift to square Aramaic script in the fifth to third centuries BCE. By the eighth century CE the Masoretes added vowel signs, since the older texts carried only consonants. These scholars worked in the Galilean cities of Tiberias and Jerusalem and in Babylonia, modern Iraq. The community at Tiberias, active around 750 to 950, copied without a standard master text to follow, so the pronunciation they developed, Tiberian Hebrew, differed from the Babylonian tradition. Those differences were resolved into the standard Masoretic text in the ninth century. The oldest complete copy still in existence is the Leningrad Codex, dating to roughly 1000 CE. The Samaritan community kept its own version of the Torah alone, rediscovered by European scholars in the 17th century, its oldest copies dating to about 1100 CE.

• 5. The Translation Of The Seventy

  ›

  The Septuagint, called the LXX, is a Koine Greek translation believed to be the work of about seventy or seventy-two scribes and elders who were Hellenic Jews. It began in Alexandria in the late third century BCE and was completed by 132 BCE, probably commissioned by Ptolemy II Philadelphus, King of Egypt. It served the primarily Greek-speaking Jews of the Graeco-Roman diaspora. As the translation grew it absorbed newer books such as the Maccabees and the Wisdom of Sirach. These additions, along with claims of mistranslation, led to the Septuagint being seen as careless and eventually rejected as a valid Jewish scriptural text. Yet the picture has since complicated. Among the Dead Sea Scrolls, many differences from the Masoretic text agree instead with the Septuagint. In the Septuagint, Jeremiah is shorter than in the Masoretic text, and a shortened Hebrew Jeremiah turned up at Qumran in cave 4. The Book of Daniel survives in the Masoretic text and in two Greek versions, the original Septuagint from around 100 BCE and the later Theodotion version from the second century CE. Both Greek texts add three stories absent from the Hebrew, including Susannah and the Elders, and Bel and the Dragon. Theodotion's Daniel was copied so widely that it virtually superseded the Septuagint's. The priest Jerome recorded in 407 CE that churches publicly read Daniel according to Theodotion, not the Septuagint.

• 6. The New Writings In Greek

  ›

  Paul's letters circulated during his lifetime, and his death is thought to have come before 68, during Nero's reign. New scriptures written in Koine Greek emerged as Christianity rose in the first century CE, and believers eventually called them the New Testament while renaming the Septuagint the Old Testament. Most early Christian copyists were not trained scribes. Many copies of the gospels and Paul's letters were made by individual Christians soon after the originals were written. Bart Ehrman explains that because texts were copied locally, different regions developed different textual traditions. Manuscripts in Rome shared many of the same errors, copied from one another as in-house documents. The scribes in Alexandria, a major intellectual center, were particularly scrupulous, preserving a very pure form of the text decade after decade. These differing histories produced what scholars call text types, the four most commonly recognized being Alexandrian, Western, Caesarean, and Byzantine. The New Testament holds 27 books across four genres: the Gospels, the single account of Acts, the Epistles, and the Apocalypse. Stanley E. Porter notes that the Greek New Testament text was relatively well established and fixed by the second and third centuries. By the time the fourth-century Fathers approved the canon, they were doing little more than codifying what was already universally accepted.

• 7. Errors In Every Copy

  ›

  One variant for every ten words appears in the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, the recent critical edition of the Hebrew Bible, which leaves 90 percent of the Hebrew text without variation. A variant is any deviation between two texts. The textual critic Daniel B. Wallace explains that each deviation counts as one variant regardless of how many manuscripts attest to it. The Hebrew scholar Emanuel Tov stresses the term is not evaluative; it simply recognizes that the paths of different texts have separated. The majority of all variants are accidental, such as spelling errors, but some changes were intentional. In the Hebrew text, memory variants show up as shifts in word order, as in the differences between 1 Chronicles 17:24 and 2 Samuel 10:9 and 13. Intentional changes in New Testament texts were made to improve grammar, eliminate discrepancies, harmonize parallel passages, and for theological reasons. The fourth edition of the United Bible Society's Greek New Testament notes variants affecting about 500 out of 6,900 words, roughly 7 percent of the text. Even the most precise medieval Hebrew manuscripts, considered the most authoritative to copy from, still contain some variants, as the scholar David Carr asserts. These small divergences feed directly into a larger question: which books, in which form, each community would finally accept as its own.

• 8. Many Canons, One Best-Seller

  ›

  The 73 books of the Catholic Bible were affirmed step by step across more than a thousand years. The Council of Rome set the canon in 382, followed by the Synod of Hippo in 393 and the Council of Carthage in 397, and finally, as an article of faith, by the Council of Trent between 1545 and 1563. The Catholic total breaks down to 46 Old Testament books and 27 in the New. Most Protestant denominations hold a 66-book canon, their Old Testament numbering 39 by a different method of division rather than different content. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church carries the widest canon of all, 81 books, including Enoch and Jubilees, which survived only in Ge'ez, three books of Meqabyan, and Psalm 151. Judaism has long accepted a single authoritative text, while Christianity has never had an official version, holding instead many different manuscript traditions. Between 385 and 405 CE the early church translated its canon into Vulgar Latin, the speech of ordinary people, a translation known as the Vulgate, which the Council of Trent later authorized as official. The first complete printed Hebrew Bible appeared in 1488, and the Gutenberg Bible was the first book printed in Europe using movable type. Today the Christian Bible is being translated into about half of the world's languages, carrying its influence on law, art, literature, and education into tongues it has never before been read aloud in.