The World of the Bible

Understanding the world's greatest bestseller

John Drane

• Publisher: Lion Books
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9780745957982
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

The authors of the 66 books of the Bible reflect the social, cultural and religious contexts in which they lived. Understanding these contexts can greatly enrich and deepen our appreciation of the Bible's meaning and message. In this splendid book, John Drane provides an unparalleled survey of the many different worlds which helped to forge the pages of the Bible. He ranges over thousands of years from the earliest hunter-gatherers to the Roman world in Jesus' day. Areas covered include courtly and military structures, home life, social and economic relationships and ritual and cultural practices. This book will enable the reader to approach the Bible with fresh insight, understanding and appreciation.

1

The Bible and its Context

There can be no doubt about the Bible’s status as one of the great classics of world literature. Its most recent parts were written something like 2,000 years ago, yet it is still a bestseller in the bookstores, while a search for the word “Bible” on the worldwide web highlights well over 100 million sites, and its entire text can be found online in more than fifty different versions. It has been translated into more languages than any other book, and has had a profound influence on the whole history of world civilization. Men and women have died for the privilege of being able to read it, and even today millions of people throughout the world avidly read it as a source of personal guidance for daily living.

The Bible has also been the inspiration behind many of the most radical social reforms of recent centuries. Inspired by what he read in its pages, the British politician William Wilberforce (1759–1833) embarked on a campaign that would eventually lead to the outlawing of slavery. Slightly later, another politician, Anthony Ashley Cooper, the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury (1801–85), committed himself to stopping the exploitation of women and children by their employers – again, inspired by what he read in the pages of the Bible. In the middle of the twentieth century, the African-American church leader Dr Martin Luther King Jr (1929–68) initiated a process that led to fundamental changes in relationships between the races in the USA, on the basis of what he knew of the Bible and its message. At the end of the twentieth century, much of the pressure that brought about the collapse of the system of apartheid that segregated the races in South Africa came from church groups that were fired by the vision of a better way of living which they read about in the Bible.

Moreover, Christians are not the only ones to have found inspiration in its pages. In his search for spiritual wisdom, Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) became an avid Bible student, and the teachings of Jesus on turning the other cheek and loving enemies1 provided the operational model for his political campaigns. Though he lived an abstemious life, with few material goods, among his treasured possessions at the time of his assassination was a book entitled The Life and Teachings of Jesus Christ, along with a copy of John’s Gospel, while a picture of Jesus adorned the wall of his home, carrying the inscription “He is our peace” (a quotation from Ephesians 2:14, which explicitly links Jesus with the breaking down of barriers between different races).

Yet although the Bible continues to be valued as a source of moral guidance and social inspiration, it also raises many questions, not least in relation to the truth of its message. The notion of “truth” is of course a slippery one in itself, and can be used to describe many different things, from historical or scientific veracity that can be studied in relation to other sources of knowledge, to the sort of truth about human life and its meaning that can only be tested by personal experience. This book is not designed to delve into such questions, but rather to examine the world of the Bible in a way that will enable serious searchers after truth to gain a better grasp of the social and cultural circumstances that called forth its various books, and to reflect for themselves on its relevance for life in the rather different social context that is the twenty-first century.

Even that modest aim is not as straightforward as it can be made to seem, because actually there is no such thing as “the world of the Bible” – for the simple reason that the Bible itself is not just a single book. A casual glance inside any Bible shows that it is divided into two main sections, usually called the Old and New Testaments – or, in terminology that better reflects its historical origins, the Hebrew Bible and the Second (or Christian) Testament. That is only the beginning of the story, however, for each of these major divisions also contains numerous shorter and self-contained books, thirty-nine of them in the first Testament and twenty-seven in the second. What we have here is an entire library of books that were written over a very considerable period of time. The Hebrew Bible consists of the literary archives of the ancient Israelites, starting with the beginning of time itself and then tracing the nation’s early history through Abraham and his family, before eventually ending in the time of the Greek empire of Alexander the Great (356–323 BC) and his successors. The New Testament reflects a rather shorter historical period, and all of its writings were written in the course of the first century AD. Even here, there is considerable diversity among its various books, some of which reflect life in Palestine, at the eastern fringe of the Roman empire, while others refer to the rather different lifestyles and worldviews that characterized the urban citizens of countries such as Greece and Italy.

This diversity is even reflected in the languages in which the various parts of the Bible were originally written. As the name suggests, the books of the Hebrew Bible, the scriptures of the Jewish faith, were mostly written in Hebrew, though a handful of pages were in Aramaic, a language which achieved worldwide recognition during the period of the Persian empire (559–331 BC). The New Testament documents were written entirely in Greek, which, following the conquests of Alexander the Great, had become the international language of the whole of the Mediterranean world.

In the light of all these facts, the world of the Bible turns out to be many worlds. Its earliest historical narratives are set in the Stone Age, while its latest documents reflect the life of the early Roman empire. In the process of telling this story, Bible readers are introduced to the cultures of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, as well as Greece and Rome. Even they are not homogeneous entities, for each of them underwent significant changes in the course of their own history. Then, interwoven through it all is the story of Abraham’s family, the various people groups who traced their origins back to him, and their religious understandings of the world and its people. While it is perfectly possible to grasp the spiritual heart of the Bible’s message without detailed knowledge of its historical background, placing its various books in the social contexts within which they were originally composed not only brings to life the characters who populate its pages, but also has the potential to illuminate many aspects of its message.

The value of such historical investigations can be illustrated by two stories, one from the nineteenth century and the other from the twentieth. They concern the search for original manuscripts of the Bible, and are worth including here as examples of how casual discoveries and professional investigations have both played their part in broadening our understanding of the Bible and its world. They also highlight how political intrigue and dealings in the criminal underworld can influence, and sometimes skew, how our knowledge of the Bible’s world is obtained.

Discovering old Bibles

It can be disconcerting for modern readers to learn that there is no such thing as a first edition of the Bible, and that no-one knows what happened to the actual documents in which its books were first written down. Probably they did not last beyond the generation in which they were produced. Even in the time of Jesus (the first century AD), the Hebrew Bible was known only through copies of copies, stretching back in a continuous line into the dim and distant past. In this respect, the Bible is no worse off than any other literature from the ancient world. We have no originals of the classics of ancient Greece and Rome either. The works of Julius Caesar, for example, were written in the first century BC but there are fewer than a dozen surviving manuscripts, and the oldest date from as late as AD 800–900 – almost a thousand years after Caesar lived. The histories of the Roman historian Tacitus are the same. His books were written towards the end of the first century AD, but most of them have disappeared for good and our entire knowledge of what survives depends on only two manuscripts that date from the ninth and the eleventh centuries AD respectively. Things are exactly the same in the case of classical Greek writers. The earliest complete manuscript of the work of Thucydides (460–400 BC) dates from about AD 900, and there are fewer than ten manuscripts in all. In the ancient world no-one would have been surprised by this, but once people started to think more deeply about the Bible and its history it was both natural and inevitable to want to know where, exactly, these ancient books had come from, and more especially how we might be sure that the Bible in our hands is what its original authors intended it to be.

Searching for the New Testament

You would hardly expect words like “detective story” or “treasure hunt” to be used in connection with the Bible, yet once we begin to explore the way in which some of the ancient documents have come to light, that kind of language seems entirely appropriate. For me, the search began one cold winter afternoon in the University of Glasgow, Scotland – not the most obvious place to look, perhaps, but the library there contains a remarkable accumulation of books and papers gathered together by one of the world’s most adventurous collectors of ancient manuscripts. Constantin von Tischendorf (1815–74) was a professor at the University of Leipzig in Germany, and when he died the trustees of Trinity Theological College in Glasgow got the chance to purchase his library. It cost them the grand sum of £460, an amount which they raised first from their own donations, and then by an appeal to the Free Church Assembly in May 1877. The Assembly commended the collection to its people in glowing terms:

For this most interesting acquisition the Glasgow college and the Free Church are especially indebted to the zeal and energy of Professor Lindsay. He has also collected a large part of the amount required: and it is hoped that wealthy friends in the west will not leave him in anxiety as to the balance. There is no respect in which a wise munificence may be better exercised than in enabling our college libraries to acquire rare and valuable books beyond the reach of private individuals, and scarcely to be found in any of our public libraries.

No-one seems to know how Professor Lindsay came across the papers. But he obviously had no shortage of wealthy friends, for they raised the cash required to buy them in a remarkably short time, and the Tischendorf collection found a permanent home in his college. From the fine words of the General Assembly you might have expected that these books would have been given pride of place. In fact they were left locked away in a library cupboard, unlisted and all but forgotten, for the next hundred years. Then in 1974, when Trinity College had fallen into such a state of disrepair that it was almost collapsing, they were rediscovered and presented to the University of Glasgow.

They document a fascinating story that starts in 1839 with the young Tischendorf, who at the time was twenty-four years old. Five years earlier he had gone to the University of Leipzig, where he developed a keen fascination for the New Testament. He decided to try to reconstruct its text in the exact words that its authors had originally written. He started work with such materials as he could find in Leipzig, but soon realized that to make much progress he would have to travel a lot further afield. Many of the great libraries of Europe had lain undisturbed for centuries, and Tischendorf had a hunch that if he could get into some of them he would be able to unearth Bible manuscripts and other materials that had been ignored or forgotten for generations. As it turned out, his initial dreams were to be fulfilled beyond his greatest expectations. But like many great scholars and explorers, Tischendorf was not particularly well off, and so his first job was to persuade other, richer people that he was worth supporting. He started with his own government, and they gave him a grant of 100 thalers to cover his travel expenses. Considering that a mere 5 thalers would have bought a whole week’s groceries for a family, this sounds like a very generous grant indeed. But Tischendorf was not impressed, and wrote in his diary:

What was such a sum as this with which to undertake a long journey? Full of faith, however, in the proverb that “God helps those who help themselves”, and that what is right must prosper, I resolved, in 1840, to set out for Paris ... though I had not sufficient means to pay even for my traveling suit; and when I reached Paris I had only 50 thalers left. The other fifty had been spent on my journey.

In Paris, Tischendorf soon found himself caught up in an argument that would ultimately win him fame and, more importantly, fortune. It all started with a document that he found in the National Library of Paris, which at first glance appeared to be a copy of the writings of St Ephraem, a fourth-century leader of the Syrian church. On closer examination, however, it turned out to have more than one layer of writing on it. Good writing material was very valuable in the ancient world, especially if it was made of leather as this was. Instead of buying new materials all the time, enterprising scribes made a habit of taking documents that were no longer needed, scrubbing them clean, and then using them over again. This is what had happened here, and the experts in Paris were trying to decipher the writing that had been there originally before it was scrubbed off. They had tried everything they could think of – strong lights, chemicals, and other novel inventions – but with no success, and eventually declared it would be impossible to read what was underneath.

But they had reckoned without Tischendorf’s determination. Since he was interested in such documents, he thought he had nothing to lose by taking a look at this one, and after many hours of hard work – and, presumably, with the benefit of good eyesight – he had not only deciphered the original writing, but was also able to determine the document’s history. It had, he said, originally been written in the fifth century, and then renovated in the seventh century and again in the ninth – finally to be scrubbed clean and inscribed with different material altogether in the twelfth century.

The scholars in Paris were bowled over by this extraordinary discovery. Tischendorf became a hero overnight, and with this success behind him he found it was now a simple matter to raise very substantial funds for his other projects. Well-to-do patrons of the arts were so impressed by his achievement that they were falling over themselves to have their names associated with his. But what interested Tischendorf most was that the writing he had uncovered on this manuscript was an ancient copy of parts of the Bible. He began to wonder if other documents like this existed elsewhere. He wrote in his journal:

The literary treasures which I have sought to explore have been drawn in most cases from the convents of the east where, for ages, the pens of industrious monks have copied the sacred writings, and collected manuscripts of all kinds. It therefore occurred to me whether it was not probable that in some recess of Greek or Coptic, Syrian or Armenian monasteries, there might be some precious manuscripts sheltering for ages in dust and darkness.

With this possibility in mind, he set off on an epic journey to scour the monasteries of the eastern Mediterranean. Little did he realize what an astounding voyage of discovery it would turn out to be. He began by going round all the great European centres of learning – Venice, Modena, Milan, Verona, Turin, Rome – searching their libraries for ancient manuscripts. In the process, he made a number of significant discoveries. In Florence he came across a copy of the Bible translated into Latin by the fourth-century Italian scholar Jerome, allegedly while ensconced in a cave in Bethlehem. But it had travelled hundreds of miles before it found a home in northern Italy. Its journey had begun at Jarrow, in the north of England – a place which in the seventh and eighth centuries was one of the great cultural and religious centres of Western Europe.

It was here that the Venerable Bede (AD 673–735) wrote his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, and made a start on translating the Bible into Anglo-Saxon. He translated from Latin, and may conceivably have known the very manuscript which Tischendorf discovered: it was certainly during Bede’s lifetime that the abbot of his monastery decided to make a pilgrimage to Rome, taking this document with him as a suitable gift for the Pope. Neither the abbot nor his gift ever arrived, for he died on the journey, and the manuscript found a home in the Italian monastery of Monte Amiata in the northern Alps. There it remained for a thousand years, until the monastery itself closed down in 1782, at which point the manuscript was taken to Florence, and that was where Tischendorf found it eighty years later, and told the world about it.

But it was on the second leg of his epic journey that he made his greatest find. In April 1844 he moved on to the Bible lands proper: Egypt, Libya, Arabia, and Palestine. Here, at the remote site of one of the central events of ancient Israelite history, Constantin von Tischendorf was to make history himself. Beneath the rocky crags of Mt Sinai, he came upon the stern walls of St Catherine’s monastery, built in the days of the Roman emperor Justinian (AD 482–565), and which is still a major pilgrimage site in the twenty-first century:

It was at the foot of Mount Sinai, in the convent of St Catherine, that I discovered the pearl of all my researches. In visiting the library of the monastery, in the month of May 1844, I perceived in the middle of the great hall a large and wide basket full of old parchments; and the librarian, who was a man of information, told me that two ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The Bible and its Context
• 2 The Beginning of History
• 3 By the Banks of the Nile
• 4 Life in the Promised Land
• 5 The Age of Empires
• 6 Romans and Jews in Palestine
• 7 Daily Life in the Time of Jesus
• 8 Life with the Romans
• 9 Faiths, Philosophies, and Spiritualities
• Epilogue
• Endnotes
• Bibliography