A History of the Bible

"It’s not just a European topic, because the Christianization of Latin America puts the Bible at the centre of their culture too. At the moment, Christianity is expanding faster in Africa than anywhere else. Before very long, the majority of Christians in the world will be Africans. The Bible has had a huge influence all over the world and in many different cultures. A History of the Bible is another example of global history. It is also a summation of a lifetime’s work and knowledge: John Barton has been studying and writing about the Bible for decades. It’s an authoritative, knowledgeable and readable survey of the early Biblical manuscripts, how they came together, how they changed in later versions, and what its influence was. It’s a fascinating work. You don’t have to be religious to read this book. The Bible is one of the most influential books in the whole of human history and he explores it in a broad way. It’s a wonderful book. The Old Testament—I suppose what we would now call ‘the prequel’—is closely tied to Judaism. Nevertheless, attempts to rework the Bible without the Old Testament—such as happened in Nazi Germany, because the Nazis condemned it as a Jewish book—have never worked. It’s always had a central part in the Christian faith."

"Yes. It came out earlier this year and it is a general introduction for the non-specialist reader (though that does not mean that it has nothing for members of the academic guild). He calls it a ‘history of the Bible’. He’s well aware that the Bible evolves over thousands of years and that’s important for a modern reader to understand, if they’re going to cope with reading it. He knows his subject intimately; and he covers a whole range of different topics with immense skill. He never puts a foot wrong. He’s saying that the Bible is actually rather an untidy collection. We tend to use phrases like ‘the Bible says’, but in fact, you’ve got several different voices in the Bible and the trick is to be like a conductor managing a choir and getting all those different voices to sing from the same sheet. Well, there’s a lot of them. It’s built around fairly obvious sections. He starts with the Old Testament and the many different kinds of literature you get in the Old Testament, then moves on to the New Testament and how it all started and the different kinds of literature you have there. Then the ‘Bible and its Texts’ is his third section, how you move from ‘books’ to ‘scripture’. At some point, words on a piece of paper have turned into ‘scripture’, and they acquire a kind of authority. He looks at the 27 books of the New Testament, but he also discusses other books, those which are sometimes called apocryphal gospels. Now, if you look at those, the church showed great wisdom in not selecting them, either because they’re not very interesting or because, where they are interesting, they are interesting for the wrong reasons. The Protoevangelium of James, for example. Well, the wrong reasons are where they’re exciting and excitable. For example, the story of the ox and the ass at Jesus’s crib comes from the apocryphal gospel. That’s not terribly important, not terribly interesting, but people latch onto it. Then he has a useful thing on the different kinds of biblical manuscripts. Often we don’t really know exactly what the Bible does say because the manuscripts differ. Of the 50,000 manuscripts of the New Testament, every single one is different from the all the others. None of them is written by the original author. That’s right. Which is a great sadness, but it’s true. I think he does. One of the ways he does it is to say that faith is the common theme, that is to say when people open the text now you find a life pulsing below the surface of the text. We give that life the deceptively easy name of God. No, I don’t think he does; he would bow graciously in the direction of biblical scholars who are totally without religious faith. He says they have every right to read the gospel and to say this is what the gospel is saying and he’s right about that."