An Introduction to the Bible

J. W. Rogerson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317545248
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

A casual reader enters a bookshop looking for a Bible. However, not all the Bibles on display have the same contents! Some have more books than others, some are study editions, some use gender-free language. How did this come about? This Introduction works back through the processes by which the Bible was written, transmitted, copied and declared to be authoritative by various churches. The following topics are dealt with: What is the Bible?; How Biblical Writers Wrote; The Making of the Old Testament; The Making of the Apocrypha; The Making of the New Testament; The Canon of the Bible; The Study of the Bible; The Use of the Bible in Social, Moral and Political Questions. This updated edition takes account of developments in scholarship since the book was first published in 1999 by Penguin. The original edition has been translated into Spanish and Portuguese.

Chapter 1

WHAT IS THE BIBLE?

“The English word Bible derives ultimately from the Greek word biblia meaning ‘books’.” An opening sentence such as this can be found in more than one introduction to the Bible, and such an opening sentence, having established that “Bible” means “a collection of books” prefaces a treatment that begins in the ancient world and works its way forwards in time. Rarely do such works start where people are today, and recognize that while most people connect the Bible with the Christian Churches (less often with Judaism), they soon become aware, if they begin to take an interest in the Bible, that it exists in English in a bewildering variety of translations, and that even the contents can vary from one translation to another.

Anyone going into an academic bookshop to purchase a copy of the Bible will be faced with a number of choices. These may include the Authorized or King James Version of 1611 (AV), the Revised Standard Version (RSV), the Revised English Bible (REB), the New Jerusalem Bible (NJB), the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), the New International Version (NIV), the English Standard Version (ESV) and the Good News Bible (GNB), the prevalence of the adjective “new” witnessing to the considerable effort expended in recent years on the revision or provision of translations of the Bible.¹ Depending on the type of bookshop and the country in which it is situated the choice may also include the Today’s New International Version, The Living Bible, and The Holman Christian Standard Bible. Internet users will find that many of the above versions can be accessed and downloaded. In what follows however, the discussion will centre on the major “mainstream” versions.

A remarkable thing about the Bible is that some editions of it contain more books than others. The New Jerusalem Bible will most probably be longer than the Authorized Version and certainly longer than the New International Version. Depending on what a bookshop stocks, editions may be available of the Revised English Bible and the New Revised Standard Version both with and without a section entitled “The Apocrypha.” Assuming that the longer versions of reb and nrsv are avail-able, there may be no fewer than four options when the Old Testament sections of these versions are compared. The differences are set out in the following table: The table lists only four options. If the Good News Bible designed for Catholic readers and an English translation of the Hebrew Bible prepared by Jewish scholars, are added there will be six options. The Jewish translation will have the same number of Old Testament books as the Authorized Version, but with these books in a different order from 2 Kings onwards. In order to explain this apparent chaos the difference between the Old Testament and the Apocrypha, and how this has affected English versions of the Bible since the Reformation, will now be discussed.

Authorized Version	New Jerusalem Platform	Revised English Bible	New Revised Standard Version
Genesis	Genesis	Genesis	Genesis
Exodus	Exodus	Exodus	Exodus
Leviticus	Leviticus	Leviticus	Leviticus
Numbers	Numbers	Numbers	Numbers
Deuteronomy	Deuteronomy	Deuteronomy	Deuteronomy
Joshua	Joshua	Joshua	Joshua
Judges	Judges	Judges	Judges
Ruth	Ruth	Ruth	Ruth
1 and 2 Samuel	1 and 2 Samuel	1 and 2 Samuel	1 and 2 Samuel
1 and 2 Kings	1 and 2 Kings	1 and 2 Kings	1 and 2 Kings
1 and 2 Chronicles	1 and 2 Chronicles	1 and 2 Chronicles	1 and 2 Chronicles
Ezra	Ezra	Ezra	Ezra
Nehemiah	Nehemiah	Nehemiah	Nehemiah
Esther	Tobit	Esther	Esther
Job	udith	Job	Job
Psalms	Esther	Psalms	Psalms
Proverbs 1 and 2	Maccabees	Proverbs	Proverbs
Ecclesiastes	Job	Ecclesiastes	Ecclesiastes
Song of Solomon	Psalms	Song of Solomon	Song of Solomon
Isaiah	Proverbs	Isaiah	Isaiah
Jeremiah	Ecclesiastes	Jeremiah	Jeremiah
Lamentations	ong of Solomon	Lamentations	Lamentations
Ezekiel	Wisdom of Solomon	Ezekiel	Ezekiel
Daniel	Ecclesiasticus	Daniel	Daniel
Hosea	Isaiah	Hosea	Hosea
Joel	Jeremiah	Joel	Joel
Amos	Lamentations	Amos	Amos
Obadiah	Baruch	Obadiah	Obadiah
Jonah	Ezekiel	Jonah	Jonah
Micah	Daniel	Micah	Micah
Nahum	Hosea	Nahum	Nahum
Habakkuk	Joel	Habakkuk	Habakkuk
Zephaniah	Amos	Zephaniah	Zephaniah
Haggai	Obadiah	Haggai	Haggai
Zechariah	Jonah	Zechariah	Zechariah
Malachi	Micah	Malachi	Malachi
	Nahum	1 Esdras	Tobit
	Habakk	2 Esdras	Judith
	Zephaniah	Tobit	Additions to Esther
	Haggai	Judith	Wisdom of Solomon
	Zechariah	Additions to Esther	Ecclesiasticus
	Malachi	Wisdom of Solomon	Baruch
		Ecclesiasticus	Letter of Jeremiah
		Baruch	Song of the Three
		Letter of Jeremiah	Daniel and Susanna
		Song of the	Bel and the Dragon
		Daniel and Susanna	1 and 2 Maccabees
		Daniel, Bel and the	1 Esdras
		snake
		Prayer of the Manasseh	Prayer of Manasseh
		1 and 2 Maccabees	Psalm 151
			3 Maccabees
			2 Esdras
			4 Maccabees

The distinction between the Old Testament and the Apocrypha goes back to a dispute in the Early Church as to whether the Hebrew or the Greek canon of the Old Testament was to be accepted as authori- tative.² The Hebrew canon consists of the books found in Protestant Bibles today as the Old Testament. (They are in a different order in the Bible in Hebrew, but that is not an issue here.) The Greek canon, found in the ancient Greek version known as the Septuagint*, is longer than the Hebrew canon. Its additional material consists of books that were either not originally written in Hebrew, or whose original Hebrew has not survived. Preference for the Greek canon prevailed, and the Latin Vulgate*, which became the standard Bible for the Western Church until the Reformation, contained the larger, Greek canon, in the content and order to be found today in the New Jerusalem Bible (see table above).

Because the Reformation included a revival of Hebrew and Greek scholarship in the Churches, and the decision was made to translate the Bible from its original languages into vernaculars such as German and English, the issue of the status of those Old Testament books for which no Hebrew existed, became contentious. In 1520 Andreas Karlstadt argued that only the works that existed in Hebrew were canonical, and he designated the rest as Apocrypha.³ This was put into practice by Luther in his Bible of 1534, in which the Apocryphal books were placed after the Old Testament and prefaced by the comment that these books were not on the same level as Holy Scripture but were useful and good for reading. The first complete Bible in English was produced by Myles Coverdale and printed probably in Cologne in 1535. It was based largely upon William Tyndale’s* translations of the New Testament and parts of the Old Testament, as well as the German work of Luther. Coverdale followed Luther in placing the Apocrypha in a separate section after the Old Testament, although he employed a different order. He did not include the Prayer of Manasseh, which was the final book in Luther’s Apocrypha.⁴

The first English Bible to include the Prayer of Manasseh was Matthew’s Bible of 1537,⁵ a Bible which was largely based upon Tyndale’s* work and produced by John Rogers working under the pseudonym of Thomas Matthew. With the work of Coverdale and Rogers the content and order of books of Protestant Bibles in English were laid down, and were followed by the Great Bible (1539), the Geneva Bible (1560), the Bishops’ Bible (1568) and the Authorized Version (1611). However, in the seventeenth century the Apocrypha came under attack, and the practice began of producing Bibles without the Apocrypha. Thus, an edition of the Geneva Bible without the Apocrypha was published in Amsterdam in 1640, while in 1648 the Westminster* Confession of Faith decreed that the books of the Apocrypha were no more to be used in the Church of God than other human writings.

This view of the Apocrypha prevailed in the Church of Scotland and among Non-conformist Churches in Britain, and in 1826 it became the policy of the British and Foreign Bible Society to print Bibles without the Apocrypha. A similar attitude prevailed in the United States of America, and it is noteworthy that when companies were set up in Britain and America in the 19th century to revise the av and to produce respectively the Revised Version (1896) and the American Standard Version ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• BibleWorld
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface to the Third Edition
• Abbreviations
• Maps
• 1. What is the Bible?
• 2. How Biblical Writers Wrote
• 3. The Making of the Old Testament
• 4. The Making of the Apocrypha
• 5. The Making of the New Testament
• 6. The Canon of the Bible
• 7. The Study of the Bible
• 8. The Use of the Bible
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index