This is the wonderful story of how the Bible as a human document was put together and how this should guide our interpretation of it. The Bible is at once a human construction as well as the word of God. Henry Wansbrough OSB gives us the facts and helps us deal with the questions that arise from the facts. This is the first chapter of his book, “The Story of the Bible: How it came to us”.
HOW DID THE BIBLE COME INTO BEING?
The Old Testament
The Lindisfarne Gospels, a lavishly illustrated gospel-book probably penned in Lindisfarne about AD 800, has a marvellous illustration on the title-page of Matthew’s gospel. Matthew is sitting, writing his gospel into a book. Just coming to meet him, with a finished gospel-book in his hand is God the Father, who at the same time draws back the curtain of revelation. Just for good measure, and to make doubly sure, hovering above Matthew’s head is an angel with a long scroll, also contributing certainty to the gospel. Such was the ninth-century idea of inspiration and the production of the Bible. The reality is far less tidy.
The Jews divide the Hebrew Bible into three sections: the Law, the Prophets and the Writings. It would be neat to think of at least the first of these, the Law or the Pentateuch (‘fivefold’, meaning the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy) as being written by Moses. Tradition holds that Moses is indeed the author of the Pentateuch, despite the fact that it narrates his death in the final chapter (Deuteronomy 34:5). This must be regarded as a myth, that is, a theological truth expressed in historical form, for the truth is far more complicated and far richer. Moses was indeed the ‘author’ in the sense that, by coaxing out of Egypt a rabble of fractious and depressed runaway slaves, and leading them to experience the meeting with God on Sinai which made them God’s special people, he initiated or ‘authored’ the whole movement which led to the Pentateuch.
The Pentateuch
From a literary point of view, however, the Pentateuch has a fascinatingly diverse origin. Oral tradition was, of course, paramount, as the folk-stories of the wandering pastoral nomads, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, were handed down from generation to generation by word of mouth for half a millennium with astonishing accuracy – but nevertheless as folk-history. One little couplet, the triumph Song of Miriam at the crossing of the sea (Exodus 15:21), could well go back word-for-word to the time of Moses, for poetry is remembered much longer than prose. There were stories of the great heroes of the people, and other stories explaining features of Hebrew custom or landscape, for every culture has such stories. Kipling’s Just So Stories are favourite examples. A Shona story explains why the chicken scratches the ground! These were supplemented by a body of laws, outlining how it was necessary for these tribesmen and women to live as the People of YHWH.
Again, the important myth of Moses’ descent from the mountain, with the Ten Commandments inscribed on two tablets of stone, is an oversimplification. In the nineteenth century the discovery of the Code of the Mesopotamian legislator Hammurabi (1728-1686 BC) caused consternation among Christians, for this and other law-codes of the ancient Near East had laws largely similar to the Mosaic Code. Were they then not revealed to Moses by God? Even Cardinal Newman held that the Ten Commandments were inscribed on stone by the finger of God (does God have fingers?). Only in the sense that Moses and his successors, steeped in the laws and customs of the Near East, developed a case-law which laid down how people must live if they were to have God in their midst. They must protect the stranger and orphan as YHWH had protected them in Egypt. They must foster human dignity, allowing every person to stand tall before YHWH, dependent on no other lord. Such case-law continued to develop over centuries, revealing the successive living-conditions of Israel, first as pastoral nomads, then as agricultural farmers, finally as city-dwellers with king, temple and cult. The stories placed first in the Bible (Adam and Eve, Noah, the Tower of Babel) are among the latest to be composed. They show most clearly the preoccupations of a people living in exile in Babylon at grips with idolatry and other religions. They use the ‘vocabulary’ of the Babylonian myths to distinguish the exiles from their captors, to express their belief, not in a pantheon of quarrelling deities, but in a single, all-powerful God, who is hurt but never alienated by human failure and disobedience. Thus the Pentateuch grew and developed gradually, not reaching its final form until after the return from exile in Babylon.
The Prophets
The books of the great prophets, who attempted to shepherd Israel in God’s ways, cannot be assumed to have been written from cover to cover like a modern book. The prophets were oral teachers, proclaiming the truth aloud by their words and often weird prophetic actions. Stories and sayings were subsequently gathered by disciples of these prophets, arranging them and linking them together by theme or subject-matter or merely linkwords (Jeremiah 22 contains sayings about four successive kings over a period of more than 20 years; Ezekiel 21 contains five different prophecies linked by the word ‘sword’). Around a nucleus of sayings and stories thus assembled were added – over decades or even centuries – other sayings, adaptations, liturgical doxologies, so that scholars are often at a loss to discern the kernel which goes back to the prophet under whose name the book stands. The same prophetic saying sometimes occurs in more than one book, and the variety within a single book makes it difficult to distinguish the core of the message. The sayings united in the book of Isaiah span at least two centuries, united by the awesome awareness of God as ‘the Holy One of Israel’, but those united under the name of Jeremiah are so diverse that he has been described as ‘that Protean personality’ (R.P. Carroll), with the implication that there is no single centre, no single common factor. Some scholars hold that this development of the prophetic literature spread over half a millennium, and that it was barely two hundred years before Christ that the prophetic corpus reached its final form and stopped growing.
The third component of the Hebrew Bible, ‘the Writings’, remained more flexible. It included such works as Proverbs, Ecclesiastes (Qoheleth) and the Song of Songs, as well as Psalms and the fascinating edifying stories of Esther and Ruth. It was not until nearly 200 years after Christ that decisions became firm within Judaism on which of these books ‘soiled the hands’. (This expression was used because washing the hands before and after contact with the sacred books symbolised the transition from profane to sacred and from sacred to profane). The Dead Sea Scrolls suggest that other books, The Book of Jubilees and First Henoch were equally revered at Qumran as sacred writings. On the otherhand, among the many thousands of fragments at Qumran, not one has been identified as containing any verses of Esther. Perhaps the sectaries at Qumran, rejecting the whole business of the Temple, disliked its focus on the Temple festival of Purim.
A Bible for Greek-speaking Jews and Christians
For Christians there is also a most important question concerning the value of the Greek Bible. In the Jewish colonies of the Diaspora, scattered over the trading cities of the eastern Mediterranean, there were many who no longer understood Hebrew. For them a Greek version of the Bible was produced. Legend, stemming from the Letter of Aristeas (310-311), has it that Ptolemy II in 275 BC ordered 72 scholars, working separately in 72 isolated rooms, to translate the Bible into Greek. At the end of 72 days they all emerged with an identical translation. Not surprisingly, the translation became known as the Septuaginta (Latin for 70, abbreviated LXX). The work of translation was in fact spread over two or three centuries, starting probably in Egypt in the third century and ending in the early first century before Christ. The importance of the legend is that it shows that the translation was regarded as authoritative and inspired. Besides the books translated from Hebrew, this Bible contained several books originally written in Greek. The importance of this translation is vast:
1. It became the Bible of the early Church. It is from this rather than from the Hebrew that the New Testament authors, writing, of course, in Greek, normally quote the scriptures.
2. We possess a full text of the LXX from the fourth century AD in the Codex Vaticanus, much of it in another fourth-century manuscript, the Codex Sinaiticus, and from the fifth century in the Codex Alexandrinus. Until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1946, these were half a millennium older than our oldest Hebrew witness to the biblical texts. At Qumran some quite extensive Hebrew Bible texts were discovered, including the whole Book of Isaiah. Apart from that, the earliest full copies of the Hebrew text are the Leningrad Codex of the tenth century and the partially complete Aleppo Codex of AD 925. Both of these important Hebrew texts belong to a single ‘school’ of manuscript tradition, stemming from the city of Tiberias on the shore of the Lake of Galilee, so known as ‘Tiberian’. The Greek text of the Bible provides access, therefore, to a version free of another five or six hundred years of copyists’ mistakes. No matter how religiously careful – and there were dreadful threats against those who made mistakes – a copyist is, errors are bound to occur.
3. In certain cases a real advance in theology occurs in the LXX. The most famous case is Isaiah 7:14 where the original ‘young woman’ (not necessarily a virgin) is translated into Greek with the word ‘virgin’, a text used by Matthew 1 :23 to confirm the virginal birth of Jesus: ‘a virgin shall conceive and bear a son’. Another important theological advance is that there is also a whole series of passages where the hope of resurrection from the dead is far more robustly affirmed in the LXX than in the Hebrew. At Job 14: 14 a tentative question in the Hebrew, ‘Can the dead come back to life?’ becomes a firm statement in the Greek, ‘If a man dies, he shall live,’ and similarly at Hosea 13:14. (1) It may be that the Greek, perhaps influenced by philosophy of the time, has been too positive in the translation, or that the Hebrew text which the Greek translator had before him was different from the Hebrew text we now possess, and that the Hebrew we now possess is less positive than the text seen by the Greek translator a thousand years earlier. In the intervening centuries the question could have been introduced into the Hebrew text by copyists.
There are plenty of other examples of differences and patterns of difference between the Hebrew text and the Septuagint, despite the care taken by the translators to keep close to the Hebrew text. Indeed, Hebrew word-forms and constructions are retained to the extent that the language is obviously translation-Greek, revealing the Hebrew thought and words beneath the Greek. One example of this is the retention of the infinitive for emphasis: the Hebrew expression clumsily translated ‘listening you shall listen’ really means ‘you shall listen attentively’. The repeated word is used, for example, in Exodus 15:26. This very common Hebrew form often penetrates into English translations. It is hard to say which is the authentic Bible. Has the Greek progressed from the Hebrew or does it represent an older version? Which, in either case, is to be regarded as the Word of God? Should it be the older version (whichever that may be), or the version which was used by the early Greek-speaking Christian writers?
A further difficulty is that the extent of the LXX, and so of the canon accepted at Alexandria, is unclear: different great manuscripts of the LXX have different books. Thus the oldest complete manuscript, the mid-fourth-century Codex Vaticanus, altogether omits the Books of Maccabees, while the fifth-century Codex Alexandrinus has four Books of Maccabees and fourthcentury Codex Sinaiticus includes 1 and 4 Maccabees. To this day the standard edition of the LXX by Alfred Rahlfs (Stuttgart, Priviligierte Wiirttembergische Bibelanstalt) prints 151 Psalms.
The New Testament
‘Here! Read this!’ It is natural and easy to imagine Peter at Pentecost distributing a boxful of copies of the New Testament to his listeners, or at least copies of the gospels. That would explain his message! Perhaps Paul would enclose a few copies of the gospels with his letters to the Thessalonians or the Romans. This would explain why he so seldom mentions the words and miracles of Jesus. But is the genesis of the New Testament any simpler than that of the Old?
Of course, the New Testament did not exist until some centuries later than these early actions of the first followers of Jesus. The normal vehicle of literature was a scroll, about the length of a single gospel. The Christians were among the first to pioneer the form of a book. A scroll was written on one side only, whereas a book – or codex, to use the technical term of the time – consisted of leaves of papyrus written on both sides, back and front, and bound together. In the second and third centuries of the Christian era the codex seems to have been largely a Christian speciality. It is suggested that a codex was easier for the itinerant messengers of the gospel to carry around with them. However, it was still a couple of centuries before a codex could be made large enough to take all the books of the New Testament, let alone those of the much larger Old Testament.
Books were expensive, and copying them by hand was laborious. In any case, in an oral culture where learning by heart easily and naturally, the written word was less valued than spoken word. In about AD 110 Papias, bishop of Hierapolis in Asia Minor, claims to have known presbyters who received the message directly from the disciples of Jesus. He gave more credence to the living voice than to books:
I inquired as to the words of the presbyters what Andrew or what Peter had said, and what Aristion and the presbyter John, the Lord’s disciples, were saying. For I did not suppose that information from books helped me so much as that from a living and abiding voice. (quoted by Eusebius, HE 3.39)
The Letters of Paul
The first Christian writings were letters, probably those of Paul, though some scholars consider the Letter of James still earlier. These were written to respond to specific problems put to Paul by the communities which he had founded round the seaboard of the eastern Mediterranean, or problems of which he had heard from messengers. So probably the first letter of all, to the Thessalonians, was written to explain to them how it was that Christians could have died, when Paul had taught them that Christ had conquered death. To the quarrelsome community at Corinth he wrote a whole series of letters, only some of which have survived, chiding them and urging them to put their differences behind them for the sake of Christian love. To Rome, a community he had not founded, he wrote in a very different tone befitting a letter written to the magnificent capital of empire. He needs their help for his projected mission to distant and unknown Spain, and hardly dares to give them any advice or guidance. He apologises profusely for his temerity in writing to them at all.
Official imperial letters were sent by a well-organised and efficient system of carriers. Only officials had access to this. Paul made use of his own messengers, who were probably travelling anyway in that direction. In making use of the widespread practice of writing letters he evolved his own variation of it, for there was no precedent for such long letters of admonition and guidence, to be read out to communities, nor for the specifically Christian greeting and blessing with which they begin and end. It was not till half-a-century later that these letters were collected. Clement of Rome 47.1, writing to Corinth in 96, refers to Paul’s letters, and so does Ignatius, the martyred bishop of Antioch, a decade later. It is, however, not till the latest writing of the New Testament, 2 Peter 3: 16, well into the second century, that a collection of the letters is implied, ‘He [our brother Paul] makes this point in all his letters’. We do not know how the collection was organised. Did someone write round to all the Pauline churches, requesting them to send in copies of the letters? At any rate, it was not a total collection, for Colossians 4: 16 mentions a letter to the Laodiceans which has perished totally. In the Corinthian correspondence Paul mentions (1 Corinthians 5:9) a previous letter which has perished, and a ‘letter written in distress’ (2 Corinthians 7:8), sent between the First and Second Corinthian letters which we do possess. There may have been others, too, besides these ones which Paul happens to mention. The first collection of which we have details was promulgated by Marcion in the midsecond century, containing ten letters, omitting the Pastoral Letters (to Timothy and Titus), thereby agreeing with most modern scholars who discount their authorship by Paul, but including Colossians and Ephesians which are also often denied to Paul by modern scholars.
The Four Gospels
The genesis of the remainder of the New Testament is more obscure. We hear tell of a couple of passages of the early tradition memorized by heart. Paul prefaces these with the claim that he ‘received’ them from the Lord and ‘passed them on to you’, using two technical terms of the rabbinic process of passing on the oral tradition (1 Corinthians 11:23; 15:3). He then slips into a vocabulary and style which differ slightly from his own, and show that he is quoting rather than composing freely:
On the night he was betrayed the Lord Jesus took some bread, and after he had given thanks he broke it, etc.
Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures and he was buried and on the third day he was raised to life, etc.
These are presumably passages learned by heart by Paul himself, taught to his converts and memorized by them as the essentials, the institution of the eucharist, and the death and resurrection of Jesus. We are still a far cry from the written record of the ministry of Jesus given by the gospels. The work of the Form Critics, beginning with Karl Ludwig Schmidt in 1919, and Rudolf Bultmann and Martin Dibelius in 1921, has established that the component units of the gospels, stories, sayings, parables, were handed down orally in the communities, undergoing a certain process of development and elaboration typical of oral tradition, before they were welded into gospels. It has even been possible to establish (3) (from clumsy translation into Greek) that certain of the units of tradition were handed down originally in Aramaic.
The oral origin of much of the material is still discernible in the earliest gospel we possess, the Gospel of Mark, for Mark uses techniques typical of oral teaching, such as superfluous repetition, known in the trade as Markan duality. ‘At evening, when the sun had set’ (Mark 1:32), ‘then, on that day’ (Mark 2:20), ‘when he was in need and was hungry’ (Mark 2:25), are all phrases typical of oral teaching, which works on the assumption that much of what is said will escape the listener. A listener adverts to only a portion of what is said, and cannot look back to check, as a reader can. An oral teacher therefore often needs to say something twice, slightly more focused the second time, to get a message across. Mark also, just as the editors of the prophetic books, gathers together groups of Jesus’ teachings, not necessarily in chronological order, groups of parables (Mark 4), groups of controversies with Jewish leaders in Galilee (Mark 2:1-3:6) or in Jerusalem (Mark 12).
There is general agreement that Mark was the first of the three gospels, Mark, Matthew and Luke, to be written. We do not know what specific reason or occasion led Mark to write his gospel. The usual reason given is that the original disciples, the original tradents of the tradition, were getting old, forgetful or dying out. But the quotation from Papias, given above, shows that the process of handing on information about Jesus orally was still lively and thriving in the second century. No doubt conditions and requirements varied in the different Christian communities, just as personalities would have done. Scholars generally date the gospel of Mark to AD 65-75. This conventional dating is a means of expressing that the preoccupation, especially in Mark 13, with the Fall of Jerusalem in AD 70 shows that it was written about that time. No one, however, can be sure whether it was written when the sack of Jerusalem was simply a menacing prospect (the Roman troops began advancing on Jerusalem in AD 66) or whether it had already recently occurred.
Careful reading shows the audience for which each of the gospels was written. Mark wrote for an audience which was familiar enough with Judaism to appreciate the force of the biblical quotations as evidence, but unfamiliar enough to need explanation of such customs as washing up to the elbow before eating (Mark 7:4), unfamiliar enough with Aramaic to need a translation of Talitha kum (5:41), ‘young girl, get up’. Was his audience perhaps proselytes to Judaism, ‘god-fearers’, gentiles who were attached to the synagogue but not indigenous Jews nor yet fully committed to Judaism? Mark might have been chosen for his brilliant skill in telling a story, and his ability in organising the gospel story. Although the Greek he writes is fairly primitive and has been described as ‘kitchen Greek’, the sort of Greek which would have been spoken by slaves all around the eastern Mediterranean, he is a superb story-teller. His description of the unfortunate Gerasene demoniac, a massive hulk, too strong for anyone to master, deranged, gashing himself with stones and howling in the tombs, is memorable (Mark 5:3-5). The contrast between Peter, the hunky great fisherman, and the little wisp of a serving-girl who blows him away during the trial of Jesus is brilliantly witty (Mark 14:69-70). One of Mark’s talents is to zoom in on a ‘stage-prop’ such as the cushion on which Jesus was asleep (Mark 4:38) or the horrifying, bloody head of John the Baptist (Mark 6:28). Another of Mark’s talents is his ability to communicate with the reader; he is also a master of irony, writing on two levels, so that the actors convey to the reader more than they know themselves. When the Roman soldiers mock Jesus as ‘King of the Jews’, little do they know (as the reader does) the truth of their gibe. When the Roman centurion acknowledges Jesus as ‘son of god’ he has little idea of the depth of his statement. The interest in things Roman and the use of Latin loanwords (centurio, denarius) has suggested to some that Mark wrote at Rome, but these are features of the milieu which included the whole of the Mediterranean world. My use of ‘milieu’ or ‘rendezvous’ does not mean that I am writing in Paris.
Matthew, on the other hand, was clearly writing for a community sprung from Judaism. So he constantly stresses that Jesus fulfils the scriptures, that (in the first two chapters) he is son of David, a second Moses, bringing the Law to perfection (in the Sermon on the Mount). Matthew’s audience is thoroughly familiar with Jewish customs like tithes and ritual purity (Matthew 23:23, 26), with the three Jewish good works of almsgiving, prayer and abstinence (Matthew 6:1-18). Matthew’s community must have found that Mark does not give enough of the teaching of Jesus, so asked Matthew to include more of the sayings of Jesus. Matthew also illustrates them with a clutch of parables, narrated with his characteristic stark contrast between ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’ (one who uses his talents, another who buries them; sheep and goats at the Last Judgement). While, however, being thoroughly Jewish, Matthew also warns that Christians will be handed over to sanhedrins and scourged in ‘their’ synagogues (10:17 – as opposed to ‘our synagogues’?); so his readers were persecuted by Jews. One suitable community for which he may have been writing is Antioch, where there was a flourishing Jewish community, and where the followers of Jesus were first called ‘Christians’ or ‘Messianists’ (Acts 11:26). At Antioch after the Fall of Jerusalem the Jews were persecuted by the other citizens. If Matthew’s community was a persecuted minority of a persecuted minority, they would need encouragement.
The community to which Luke seems to be directed was utterly different. Luke presupposes little familiarity with Judaism, and stresses that Jesus’ message included the gentiles, right from the beginning (Luke 4: 16-30). His whole style is far more sophisticated, both in the words he uses and in delicacy and allusiveness of his writing. He depicts not ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’, but mixed characters who do the right thing for the wrong reason (the Unjust Judge, the Prodigal Son). He uses larger sums of money and warns against the dangers of wealth, which suggests that he is writing for a well-to-do audience. They are expected to understand about banking and interest rates (Luke 19:23), which would be far beyond Mark’s limited world.
The extensive similarities between Matthew and Luke have led many to argue persuasively that both writers must have filled out the bare outline of Mark by drawing teachings of Jesus from the same collection of Sayings of Jesus. This collection of Sayings subsequently disappeared, but has been reconstructed in considerable detail by modern scholars.(4) If indeed it existed, it would provide valuable evidence of a pre-gospel collection. In itself it should perhaps not be called a gospel, for it seems to have no mention of the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus. The sayings recorded in this collection, nicknamed ‘Q: (from the German die Quelle – the source), reflect a group that rejects the comforts of a stable society. One of the problems about this hypothetical document, which no one has ever seen, is to explain its disappearance. One would expect such a document to be carefully treasured by the early Christian community. Was it discarded by Christians because of its silence about the Passion or because of its rejection of society? Or was it simply not copied in Egypt, from whose arid sands have come most of the papyrus finds of recent years? If it existed, it could well be one of the ‘accounts of the events that have reached their fulfilment among us’ which Luke studied when preparing his gospel (Luke 1: 1-3). Luke is normally considered to reflect its shape more closely than does Matthew.
From our point of view, the interesting point about the Gospel of John, which stands under the authority of the Beloved Disciple, is its independence of the other three gospels. It follows a quite different geographical and chronological pattern, showing Jesus visiting Jerusalem four times during his ministry, not just during the final week, as in Mark and the other two gospels. Instead of a host of miracles and many parables, John’s Jesus tells no parables, and works a few, highly significant miracles. Some of the miracles (the Walking on the Water, the Multiplication of Loaves) are basically the same in all four gospels. Others seem to be different accounts of the same event (the Cure of the Royal Official’s Son in John, similar to the Cure of the Centurion’s Boy in Matthew
and Luke). Still others are unique to John. The same is true of Jesus’ sayings: some are the same, some different versions of basically the same saying, others quite different. The long Johannine discourses, with their elevated, meditative style and concentration on Jesus’ personality, have no equivalent in the other three gospels. At all events John seems to represent a different stream of oral tradition, which overlaps occasionally with that which lies behind the other three gospels. There is just a touch of special similarity between the traditions behind Luke and behind John in the narrative of the passion and resurrection (no high priestly trial, a similar meeting between the Risen Christ and the Eleven in the upper room).
It has long been conventional wisdom to see John as the ‘fourth’ gospel, the latest of the canonical four gospels, and some have even seen its purpose as being to supplement or correct the others. This presumption has recently been challenged, 5) and it is the independence of the Johannine tradition, rather than its earlier or later date, which now seems more striking. The principal reason for dating it later is the assumption that the greater stress on the dignity, and indeed the divinity, of Jesus should be regarded as a later development. It could, however, equally well be argued that different developments took place at different times in different centres of the Christian community. It is notoriously difficult to give a concrete date for any of the gospels. Ironically, the earliest scrap of text of any New Testament writing is a fragment of John, conventionally dated about AD 125, a date by which the overwhelming majority of scholars is agreed that all four gospels had been written.
The Text of the Bible
Variations in the Books Accepted
The problem of deciding which are the books of the Bible has already been mentioned (p. 8). Is the authentic and authoritative text of the Bible the Hebrew original or does the authentic Bible include the books of the Greek version used by the writers of the New Testament? Furthermore, the edges of the collection are fuzzy. Different traditions include different books (how many Books of Maccabees and what about The Shepherd of Hermas, the ‘Psalms of Solomon’?), different chapters (Bel and the Dragon, Susanna, The Prayer of Jeremiah, Psalm 151), different verses (the Greek prayer of the Three Young Men in Daniel 3).
A decision between the Greek and the Hebrew arises repeatedly in the course of the centuries. Jerome reverted to the Hebraica veritas and insisted that only the books written in Hebrew have full authority, a decision picked up again by Luther and the Protestant tradition for doctrinal reasons. What, then, is the status of Ben Sira (Ecclesiasticus), a book originally written in Hebrew, but received in a Greek translation, of which the vast majority of the Hebrew text was discovered only in the 1964 excavations on Massada? What would be the status of Paul’s Letter to the Laodiceans (mentioned in Colossians 4: 16, but never seen or heard of since then) if it were ever discovered? These are problems of the canon of scripture, solved for some traditions by the authoritative decision of the Church. The Roman Catholic Church made its decision at the Council of Trent in 1546, listing the individual books ‘and all their parts’ which are to be included. The Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England in 1562 took a middle position, excluding certain books, originally written in
Greek, as doctrinally definitive but allowing them ‘for example of life and instruction of manners’. A century later the Puritan Westminster Confession totally rejected these ‘Apocrypha’.
Variations in the Text of the Books
Besides the problem of the canon there is the problem of the text itself: which is the authentic text of the Bible? We do not possess any text of any book of the Bible as it left the final author’s hands or as the author corrected it (as a modern author correcting drafts of a printed text). There are plenty of varied translations, but it might be thought that they are all translating the same original Hebrew, Greek or (occasionally) Aramaic text. For well over 95 per cent of the biblical text this is the case, but again there are fuzzy edges. For the first millennium and a half of its life, before the invention of printing, the New Testament (and the Old Testament for nearly two millennia) was being painstakingly copied and re-copied, each time with variations and mistakes. Sometimes copyists made matters worse by correcting what they considered to be mistakes. Jerome, in the fourth century, already complained of the variety of texts, pointing out that there were as many variations as there were copies. At the Renaissance Erasmus attempted to reconstruct the text of the New Testament for its first printing, using only what we now know to be late and mediocre manuscripts of one particular type, the type standardized and approved by the Greek Orthodox Church. Since that time several great, ancient manuscripts have been found, which show how faulty this type of text was. In the last century quantities of papyrus fragments have been recovered from the arid sands of Egypt, much older and often less corrupted that even those great manuscripts. After the Second World War major finds were made in the Judean desert, west of the Dead Sea, which give us portions of the text of the Old Testament a thousand years older than any biblical Hebrew text hitherto known. These included a practically complete scroll of the Book of Isaiah, and the first Hebrew text of Ben Sira, known since it was translated into Greek in biblical times.
Most of the variations between all these texts are slight, for they were copied with extraordinary care and fidelity, but it is worth listing a few of the more striking variations in the gospels:
In these cases, which is the authentic biblical text? There is a moving account in the Memoirs of Père Lagrange, the founder of modern Roman Catholic biblical movement, of his distress at a textual decision of Church authority which he knew scientifically to be wrong. In 1897 the Holy Office pronounced that 1 John 5:7 was authentically part of the text: ‘My distress was great. If the Holy See was setting up such barriers in the way of textual criticism, what were we to make of its views on matters reputedly much more serious? I took to the olive groves of Gethsemane [he was in Jerusalem] and immediately began a week’s retreat, which brought me peace.’ (6) In fact the decision of the Holy Office was later withdrawn.
Some editions of the New Testament choose one option, some another. Reputable scholars differ among themselves. One of the most distinguished of all textual scholars, Bruce Metzger, the chairman of the panel which produced the latest United Bible Society Greek text and the chairman of the committee for the NRSV, wrote a book explaining the decisions made by the panel for the UBS Greek text, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament (Stuttgart, United Bible Societies, 1971). Occasionally, with the utmost courtesy, he supports a decision different from that of the panel of which he was chairman.
Biographies of Manuscripts
A few short ‘biographies’ of manuscripts will outline the raw material on which textual scholars operate. They are all interesting characters!
The Qumran Scroll of Isaiah
In 1947 a shepherd-boy, throwing stones on the shore of the Dead Sea, hit his target, a hole in a cliff-face, and heard the sound of broken pottery. Dad was summoned (for fear of evil spirits), a cave was broken open, and jars full of rolls of manuscript were found: the ‘Dead Sea Scrolls’, including a complete scroll of Isaiah. During the next decade, despite the Israeli War of Independence raging round that area, ten more caves containing manuscripts were found and a settlement. The scrolls were the precious library of the inhabitants of the settlement, hidden in the cliffs at the approach of the Roman army in AD 66 as it advanced to besiege Jerusalem. Most of the scrolls are now in the Israeli Museum, though some are in the Museum of Amman in Jordan. The scroll therefore dates from the time of the settlement at Qumran, 170 BC-AD 66, probably about 100 BC.
The Masada Scroll of Ben Sira
After the sack of Jerusalem in AD 70 the extreme militant party of the Jews, the Zealots, made a final stand in the great fortress-palace built by King Herod high above the western shore of the Dead Sea. This in its turn was captured by the Romans in AD 73 after two years of siege and a desperate last stand by the Zealots. Josephus tells us that the defenders committed suicide to a man, and when the Romans broke in they discovered only a couple of women, cowering in a bunker. In the ruins of the synagogue was discovered Chapters 39-44 of Ben Sira in Hebrew. Until then the book had been known only in a Greek translation.
The Magdalen Papyrus
In 1901 a former scholar of Magdalen College, Oxford, acquired at Luxor in Egypt and donated to his old College a fragment of papyrus. Papyrus is a form of writing material made from the soft, pithy stem of the papyrus plant which grows well in Egypt. Two layers of the plant are placed flat at right-angles to each other and then pressed flat. It takes ink well and clearly. On the Magdalen papyrus the stems at right-angles to each other are clearly visible, and the writing on both sides can be read easily, a few words from Matthew 26, verses 7-8 and 31. I was shown it in June 2004. To add to the significance of this fragment, two other fragments are known from the same codex, one now in Barcelona (containing parts of Matthew 3 and 5) and one in Paris (containing parts of Luke 1-6). They were all dug up in 1889 in Luxor, but sold separately. The handwriting and layout shows that this codex was written well before AD 200. If it contained two gospels, it probably contained all four, and is therefore evidence that there was already a book of the canonical gospels at that date.
[ Note on Ancient Book Production
At this time scrolls were still the normal means of book-production. A scroll is written on one side only and rolled up. A codex has leaves written on both sides and bound together down one side. When and why did codices begin to be produced? They were originally rough and temporary notebooks, just two or four wooden ‘leaves’ (codex means ‘block of wood’), bound together down the side, the face being recessed a few millimetres to receive a coating of wax, on which notes could be scribbled (and later wiped out) with a sharp point.
As a form of book, with many leaves, it looks as though it was invented, or at least popularised, by Christians. Of all the fragments of pagan writings from the second century hitherto found only two per cent are written on both sides, so come from codices; the rest are from scrolls. On the other hand, 99 of the 111 biblical fragments from before AD 300 are from codices. Why did Christians favour this form of book? Was it because they wanted to put the four gospels together and no scroll would have been long enough, or because codices were easier for Christian missionaries to carry around?]
Codex Vaticanus
Possibly the best of all manuscripts of the whole Greek Bible, this was written in Egypt in the mid-fourth century, and has been in the Vatican library since at least 1475. Comparison to papyri of the early third century shows that it is faithful to the text current soon after AD 200. It was carefully checked, and occasionally corrected, by another scribe soon after it was written.
Codex Sinaiticus
This priceless fourth-century Greek manuscript was found in 1844 in the monastery of Saint Catherine’s on Mount Sinai by the German scholar Constantine Tischendorff. It is one of the chief witnesses to the Septuagint, beautifully clear and legible. On the grounds that the monks were not caring for it properly, Tischendorff was determined to get it out of the monastery, and – with a promise that it would be returned – persuaded the monks to lend it to the tsar of Russia, their Protector, just so that he could have a look at it. It was never returned, and in 1933 it was sold by Stalin for a paltry sum to the British Museum (it is now on show in the British Library). In 1975 a fire in Saint Catherine’s revealed another dozen leaves of the manuscript, which the Abbot allowed me to examine in 1992. Theoretically these are now being prepared in the monastery for publication, but in 2004 the librarian told me that they will never be published till Tischendorff’s slur on the monks has been officially denied.
Codex Bezae
This manuscript, containing the four gospels and most of the Acts of the Apostles, was presented to the University of Cambridge (in whose library it may still be seen) by the Renaissance scholar Theodore Beza in 1581. The interest of this one is that it is bilingual, written on facing pages in Greek and Latin respectively. It was written before AD 400, probably at Beirut, already an impottant centre for Roman law studies. The Latin text is particularly fascinating because it is much the best and fullest representative of the pre-Jerome Latin texts, the ‘Old Latin’. The Greek also differs considerably from the conventional text, is often longer (especially in Acts, where it is some six per cent longer than the standard text), and may well be much older. After Luke 6:4 it adds the odd little story:
On the same day, seeing someone working on the Sabbath, he said to him, ‘Man, blessed are you if you know what you are doing; but if you do not know, you are cursed and a transgressor of the Sabbath.’
This manuscript often tends to brighten the text with slight emphases and exaggerations. However, the Greek text also contains a quantity of nonsense readings, which suggests that the scribe may have been more at home in Latin than in Greek. It is not easy to decide whether the Codex Bezae represents an older tradition than the standard, ‘Alexandrian’, text or whether it is a re-working of that text, but minute analysis of the text of Acts has led one scholar to the latter alternative. She concludes that it is ‘a carefully crafted work of a skilful writer who was animated by a clear theological purpose’. (7)
Which is correct?
In deciding between the readings a number of factors must be considered. The oldest text is not always the best, for a younger manuscript written in Egypt may have escaped a corruption suffered by an older text from Antioch or its ancestor. The most widely attested is not necessarily the best; the true reading may have been preserved by only a minority of manuscripts. Further, a scribe has sometimes ‘corrected’ his text for theological reasons, to express a more familiar theology, or has harmonized a reading in one gospel with the reading familiar from another. One principle is lectio difficior, potior: the harder a reading is, the less likely it is to have been invented. Again, a reading which explains the others is more likely (if three manuscripts have ‘the’, ‘then’, ‘ten’, the most probable is ‘then’, which could be at the root of both the others). However, textual criticism is an art as well as a science, (8) and there is uestion of learning it in one easy lesson!
NOTES
1. Cavallin 1974, pp. 103-104, cf. Wright 2003, p. 148.
2. Moule 1962, p. 8.
3. E.g. Casey 1998.
4. J. Kloppenborg Verbin 2000.
5. Massively by Robinson 1976 and 1985.
6. Lagrange 1985, p. 55.
7. Read-Heimerdinger, 2002, p. 348.
8. Elliott and Moir 1995, p. 4.
