Barton - History of the Bible: The Story of the Worlds Most Influential Book

The Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye (191291) wrote of the Bible: this huge, sprawling, tactless book sit[s] there inscrutably in the middle of our cultural heritage... frustrating all our efforts to walk around it. In a secular age, some might think it surprising how much interest there still is in the Bible, as the celebrations for the fourth centenary of the King James Version (KJV), sometimes known as the Authorized Version (AV), in 2011 showed clearly; even those who do not believe in Christianity continue to be fascinated by its presence. For believers, the Bible is often seen as inspired by God and having a high level of authority in matters of belief and practice. For non-believers, it is a central document of western culture: it continues to interest many readers as a collection of major literary works. The history of these works, and of how they have been disseminated and interpreted, is a central part of the history of western literature.

This book tells the story of the Bible from its remote beginnings in folklore and myth to its reception and interpretation in the present day. It describes the Bibles genesis, transmission and dissemination, and shows how it has been read and used from antiquity to the present, both in its original languages and in translation. Among other things, this will, I hope, dispel the image of the Bible as a sacred monolith between two black-leather covers, recapture the sense of it as the product of a long and intriguing process, and illustrate the extraordinary variety of ways in which it has been read over the centuries. Centrally, it also illustrates the difficulty in moving from the Bible to religious faith: neither of the two religions, Judaism and Christianity, that claim biblical books as their foundation can be read off from the Bible. Indeed, the Bible contains many elements that are problematic for Jewish and Christian belief. These include not only widely known morally objectionable features, such as Gods destruction of innocent people in the stories of the Israelite conquest of the Promised Land, but also the variety of genres (narrative, prophecy, poetry), many of them not conducive to doctrinal definitions, and the setting in ancient cultures many of whose features we do not share. At the same time I aim to show that the Bible is an important source of religious insight, provided it is read in its original context and against the conditions prevailing when it was written.

The history will necessarily include a great deal of pre-history, as I explain how biblical books were composed, since few if any are the result of simple composition by one author: most are highly composite, and some even depend on others, so that there is a process of reception of older books going on in younger ones. The Bible is thus in itself already the record of a dialogue among authors and transmitters of tradition, and contains commentary in many of its books on many others. On the grandest scale, the New Testament frequently comments on the Old, nearly all of which was already regarded as Holy Scripture (I will explain the meanings of that deceptively familiar term) in the world into which the New Testament came. The extent to which the Old Testament remains authoritative for Christians and, if it does, how then it is to be read alongside the new ideas introduced by Jesus, Paul and others is one of the main issues in Christian theology, and always has been. The New Testament speaks of the Old Testament as inspired by God (literally God-breathed) in 2 Timothy 3:16, and Christians have extended that idea to the books of the New Testament too. It is not clear, however, how this affects the way the Bible actually functions, or the kind of authority it exercises over believers. To call the Bible inspired implies that God had a hand in its production, but exactly how that worked in practice is seldom defined.