Whose Bible Is It?: A History of the Scriptures Through the Ages

Jaroslav Pelikan's wide-ranging book follows the origins of the Bible from oral tradition and early writing, the gathering of the canon, translations from the Septuagint to modern missionary translations, the impact of the Reformation on use of the Bible and historical-critical study and the ways in which this has changed our view of Scripture. He writes with a wonderfully light touch, adding occasional flashes of humour and referring to history and scholarship within the Jewish, Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox traditions as well as commenting on the Qur'an. His chapter which outlines the books and message of the Old Testament (Hebrew Tanakh) is masterful and there are many other highlights of the book which offered new insights into how modern Christians see this amazing piece of literature that has so shaped our western culture in the last 3000 years. This is the best book that I have read on the history of the Bible and it is a wonderful resource as well as a fascinating read.

Jaroslav Pelikan is a well-known religious scholar who writes for us laypersons in "Whose Bible Is It?" Solid scholarship as well as readibility (and it is not a huge tome) make it a useful tool for those of us who lead Bible-related discussion groups.

This is an introduction to the History of the Bible, but even readers who are already familiar with the outline of the subject will, I think, discover many details that are new to them in this very well told story. The first half of the book deals with the establishment of the Jewish and Christian Canons. The summary of what is in the books of the Old and the New Testament is perhaps a little pedestrian, but I found the discussion of the Septuagint and its importance interesting. In the second half of the book, Pelikan discusses how the Bible was used, revised and interpreted from the Middle Ages to the present time. It includes, for instance, a discussion how Christians squared the making of sacred images in illuminated manuscripts or icons with the prohibition against such a practice in the Old Testament; a section on the Qur'an's relationship to the two parts of the Bible; one on new translations of the Bible during the Renaissance following the revival of Hebrew, Greek and classical Latin; and one on the hugely important role the Bible played during the Reformation. He discusses `lower criticism' - the clearing up of linguistic problems presented by the texts - and `higher criticism' - the work done from the 17th century onwards which examined the Bible as one might examine a text attributed to, say, Homer: as a patchwork put together by human beings of human writings produced at different times, rather than, as in the case of the Five Books of Moses, being the text by one author working under divine inspiration. Other challenges to the literary truth of the Bible were to come from historical, archaeological, anthropological, and finally of course scientific disciplines, starting with a critique of the Pentateuch but eventually reaching the figure of Jesus himself. Pelikan suggests interestingly that the Roman Catholic understanding of the Bible was slightly less vulnerable to these developments, since the medieval Catholic Church had long taught that the Bible could be understood on four different levels: the literal, the allegorical, the moral and the eschatological, whereas the Protestant beliefs had based themselves firmly on the literal meaning of the Bible. Even so, it was Protestant scholars who were most active in Higher Criticism. None of this, Pelikan points out, affected the increased circulation of the Bible. In English the Authorized Version has been followed in recent times by a flood of revised versions in more modern English. In 1986 the American Bible Society distributed nearly 290 million bibles. There has been an explosion of bibles in Africa (Pelikan gives a charming extract from a Masai creed in which `Jesus was always on safari doing good'). The last chapter and the Epilogue are Pelikan's own eloquent meditations on the eternal value of the Bible to him, to our culture, but first and foremost to the Jewish and Christian communities, `neither of whom would be anything without it'. I regret the abse

To answer the title question by saying that the Old Testament belongs to the Jews and the New Testament to Christians is far too simple. The Septuagint not only made the Tanakh available to the Greek-speaking Jews of the Diaspora, it also made those texts available to early Christians, who promptly ransacked them for prophetical "proof texts" foretelling the story of Jesus Christ and the New Covenant. In Christian eyes, Jewish Scripture was properly appropriated to become their Old Testament. The closing of the Hebrew canon was partly motivated by this incursion as, ironically, the closing of the Christian canon was later to be in part motivated by Marcion's preemptive strike. Scripture originated in oral form, only later "reduced" to writing. Even then it was transmitted primarily by being read aloud to assemblages of believers. It was only relatively late in the game that the authority of commentary and interpretation, also originally oral, was seen to depend on a reading of the texts in their original, spoken languages. But the communicative superiority of the spoken word was never entirely superseded. Pelikan quotes Luther as observing that "nowhere in the New Testament does Jesus command his disciples to go out into the world and write books." In 250 pages, Pelikan provides summaries of the biblical texts, reviews a range of issues concerned with problems of translation (Jesus said "Repent," not "Do penance" as the Vulgate mistranslated it), describes and evaluates the Protestant reformers approach to the Bible ("Calvin maintained that whatever church practice was not commanded by Holy Scripture was forbidden, whereas for Luther it was permitted but could not be required"), considers the challenges presented by rational and historical analyses ("If it is profoundly true that there are truths in the Bible that only the eyes of faith can see, it is also true that the eyes of unfaith have sometimes spotted what conventional believers have been too preoccupied or too bemused to acknowledge"), and much more. Many questions are raised that cannot be handled in depth, but there are entry-level bibliographical suggestions in the notes for each chapter. The focus of the book is on the competing claims of Jews and Christians for ownership rights to the Old Testament, or Tanakh. The problem has been simplified by more accurate translation; but it can't be solved that way, because precisely the same text may be subject to quite different interpretations. For Pelikan, the Bible is God's book, and thus does not belong to any religious community. We can only be temporary custodians of tradition, and to claim ownership of the Bible is, he argues, not only presumptuous but blasphemous. That's probably about as judicious as it's possible to be on the question, but if I were Jewish, I'm not entirely certain I could look at it that way.