Why Read the Bible?

A Little Book Of Guidance

Tom Wright

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780281073269
• eBook ISBN: 9780281073276
• Topic: Theology & Religion

Tom Wright unpacks the contents of the Bible and explains the meaning of its inspiration, impact and authority. A book for all who are curious about how God's voice can be heard today.
Intended for people looking for answers to life's biggest questions, this little book of guidance will appeal to anyone, whether believer or non-believer, looking for a quick and easy way into the topic.

1

What is the Bible?

So what is the Bible, and what should we be doing with it?

To begin with, the facts.

The Bible consists of two parts, which Christians refer to as the ‘Old Testament’ and the ‘New Testament’. The Old Testament is much longer, nearly a thousand pages in the average printing, against the New Testament’s three hundred. The Old Testament came into existence over a period of more than a millennium; the New, within less than a century.

The word ‘Testament’ is a translation of the word which also means ‘covenant’. It is a central Christian claim that the events concerning Jesus were the means by which, in fulfilment of ancient Israelite prophecy, the creator God, Israel’s God, renewed the covenant and thereby rescued the world. Many of the early Christian writings make the point by explicitly hooking on to the Old Testament, quoting or echoing it in order to offer themselves as the charter of that covenant renewal; hence, ‘New Testament’. Calling the two parts by these related but differentiated names is thus a way of flagging up a claim and a question: the claim that the Jewish Bible remains a vital part of Christian scripture, and the question of how it is to be understood and applied by those who believe that its ‘covenant’ was indeed renewed in Jesus.

The books which Jews call the Bible, and Christians call the Old Testament, were grouped in three sections. The first five books (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy) were always regarded as special, and foundational. They are known as Torah (‘Law’), and are traditionally ascribed to Moses himself. The next collection, known as the ‘Prophets’, include what we often think of as some of the historical books (1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings) as well as the books of the great prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel) and the so-called ‘minor’ prophets (Hosea and the rest). The third division, headed by the Psalms, is known simply as the ‘Writings’, and includes some very ancient material and some parts – such as the book of Daniel – which were only edited and accepted within the last 200 years BC. Even around the time of Jesus some were still debating whether all the ‘Writings’ (Esther and the Song of Solomon were particularly contentious) really belonged. Most thought they did, and so it has remained.

Torah, Prophets and Writings: 39 books in all. It may well be that the ‘Law’ and the ‘Prophets’ became fixed collections considerably earlier than the ‘Writings’. One way or another, the three sections became the official list of the sacred books of the Jewish people. The Greek word for such an official list is ‘canon’, which means ‘rule’ or ‘measuring rod’. That is the word that has been applied to them since the third or fourth century of the Christian era.

Most of these books are written in Hebrew, which is why the Old Testament is often referred to as ‘the Hebrew Bible’. Parts of Daniel and Ezra, plus one verse in Jeremiah and two words in Genesis (a proper name), are in Aramaic, which is to classical Hebrew more or less what contemporary English is to Chaucer. Most scholars would agree that many if not all of the Old Testament books reached their final form through a process of editing. This may have been going on over many centuries, and may have involved considerable fresh writing. However, several books of which this is likely to be true (e.g. the prophet Isaiah) retain a remarkable inner coherence. Our knowledge of the original text of the Old Testament has been enormously enriched by the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. They include copies of most of the Old Testament books, and show that the much later manuscripts upon which mainstream Judaism and Christianity have depended are very close, despite small variations, to the texts that would have been known in Jesus’ day.

Over the 200 years or so before the time of Jesus, all these books were translated into Greek, probably in Egypt, for the benefit of the increasing number of Jews for whom Greek was the primary language. The Greek Bible they produced was, in various different versions, the one used by most early Christians. It is known as the ‘Septuagint’, because of stories about there having been 70 translators.

This is the point at which the books which came to be known as the ‘Apocrypha’ (literally, ‘hidden things’) first appear. A long and complex debate about their status and validity rumbled on in the early church, and re-emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as a result of which some Bibles include the Apocrypha and some do not. Those that do include them normally print the relevant books (sometimes adding some extra ones as well) in between the Old and the New Testaments, though the ‘Jerusalem Bible’ and other official Roman Catholic publications treat the Apocrypha simply as part of the Old Testament. Sadly, more people today are vaguely aware that these books have been controversial than have ever read them for themselves. At the very least, these books (like other works of the period, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls and Josephus) tell us a great deal about how Jews of the time of Jesus thought and lived. Some of the books, such as the Wisdom of Solomon, provide significant partial parallels, and possibly even sources, for some of the ideas in the New Testament, not least in the writings of Paul.

The 27 books of the New Testament were all written within two generations of the time of Jesus – in other words, by the end of the first century at the latest. Most scholars would put most of them earlier than that; the letters of Paul are from the late forties and the fifties, and though disputes continue as to whether he wrote all the letters ...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• About the author
• Series title
• Title page
• Imprint
• Table of contents
• Introduction
• 1. What is the Bible?
• 2. Why is the Bible important?
• 3. How is the Bible to be interpreted?
• 4. A sample Bible study: 1 Corinthians 13
• Further reading