The History of the Construction of the Bible
Note on the text: I used John Barton’s A History of the Bible: The Story of the World’s Most Influential Book as published by Viking Press in 2019.
It’s important to be able to read any book, especially one as important as the Bible, within the context in which it was crafted. If you want to understand the Bible it’s important to understand as much as you can about the people who wrote it. And to that end this is a really informative read. It is worth also noting that not only am I an avid Catholic, but John Barton is a priest in the Church of England.
IN talking about the Old Testament, John Barton reminds us that it “did not derive from a single period in the history of Israel but from a wide range of dates and places” (22). It’s important to understand as much as you can about the historicity of the Old Testament (and the book you are reading in particular) if you want to understand it as fully as you can. It’s interesting to see the different ways in which understanding the history of the time and place in which the Old Testament was written enriches the text itself. Sometimes it’s surprising, like when he points out that although the writer of Chronicles appears to have no use for King Omri (whose 12 year reign was characterized chiefly by his continual defiance of God’s law), the “Assyrian annals show that Omri was an important and powerful ruler” such that the Assyrians will refer to Israel as the House of Omri for next 200 years (28). This then leads into a fruitful discussion of the culture and thought process of the Jews at that time insofar as we can determine them and how that thought process influenced what got written into the Bible and what did not.
Similarly he discusses the ways in which people’s view of the New Testament evolved over time. For example, John Barton argues that the evidence shows that early Christians thought of the Gospels in a different way than we do now. He suggests that the way in which Irenaeus and Justin Martyr write about the Gospels indicates that they ascribe “ultimate authority not to the Gospels in their finished forms, but to the words and deeds that they record. Both clearly knew these words and deeds from the Gospels, but they do not derive their authority from this” (241). Meaning that they knew about the Gospels but that at that time they did not appear to think of them as different than other supposed accounts of Christ’s life. He also talks about how the fact that the Gospels were written as codices and not scrolls might indicate something because “in the ancient world scrolls were regarded as a much higher status. . . . The codex was not used for important texts, but only as we might use a notebook, to make jottings or write drafts” (244). Early Christians apparently just saw the Gospels as practical books to learn about Christ as opposed to sacred literature in the way that we do, and to see how the New Testament acquired the status that it has today is really fascinating.
The Bible is a large encyclopedia written by thousands of people over thousands of years and learning more about the process by which it became the Bible that we know and love today is really interesting and worth learning about. It can do nothing but enhance our relationship with the book itself.
