02/28/2024 – How did we get the Bible?

Did you ever wonder how we got the Bible? Did it just drop out of the sky? Like, where did it come from? Many Christians literally have no idea. Check this out. This is TenOnReligion.

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So where did the Bible come from? Well, right off the bat, there’s two things we need to differentiate here. One, where did these documents come from? As in, who wrote and edited them, when and where? Two, who collected them and decided which documents were to be included in the collection? Why these documents and not others? There’s a lot of things to say in unpacking these two issues and I’m going to focus a lot more on the second issue in this video. This video is sort of a part two to the last episode “What Language Does God Speak” so if you haven’t seen it, make sure you take a look at that one too. Let’s get started.

First, who wrote these documents, when, and where? I already did an episode back in 2021 providing a summary of the historical background to the Hebrew Bible, or what Christians call the Old Testament and I’m not going to rehash that here now so if that’s what you’re looking for, go take a look at that. As for the New Testament documents, the first ones written were seven epistles which most biblical scholars believe were written by Paul the apostle starting in the late 40’s or early 50’s CE. The other letters with his name on them were probably forgeries, which was more common back then than you would think, and were likely written after Paul died. The four gospel accounts were written starting with the gospel according to Mark around 70, during or just after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, and the others after that. We actually don’t know who wrote the gospels as the titles were added over a hundred years later. Most of the other documents were written in the late first century or early second century. These documents were all written in Greek, and very few, if any of them, were written in Palestine. There are also a number of other documents that were considered scripture by different groups in different locations both before and after the Christian era began. Now, let’s get to our second question which is the main focus of this episode.

It is one thing to ask how the biblical books came into being individually and another to ask how and why they were chosen and included in the current collection and how and why others were excluded. This final collection of books in the Hebrew Bible and the later New Testament is what scholars call the biblical canon. The term “canon” is from Greek and means “straight rod” or “measuring stick,” and when used in relation to a collection of books it is implied that those not on the list are somehow inferior. In relation to scriptural books, it implies they are less spiritual or inspired. The term “canon” was used in a variety of ways long before the collection process started for Judaism or Christianity. The first use of the term being applied to biblical books came in the fourth century CE in the writing of the bishop Athanasius. If it’s not already obvious, the idea of a canon is a concept applied much later than the actual writing of the documents. Before the creation of the canon there was no way to tell which documents would eventually achieve authoritative status as part of a canon because it was long process of negotiation by groups far removed from the writing and editing process of any given document. Talking about the idea of a biblical canon is, then, inescapably retrospective. Not all of what was considered “scripture” at one time or another has been included in the “canon.”

Let’s start with a rough timeline. The Hebrew Bible documents were composed over the course of many centuries with a long editing process, with much of that occurring during the Persian period in Jewish history and some of it during the Hellenistic period. It was translated into Greek in the 200’s and that series of documents is called the Septuagint, which was the main subject of our last episode. As early as the second century CE, a translation of the Septuagint appeared in Latin, and the fragmentary remains from this Latin translation are now referred to collectively as the Old Latin version. The Old Latin version is important because at times the Old Latin preserves the oldest Septuagint reading where later revisions to the Septuagint have buried the earliest text. So, over the course of about five hundred years we have the Hebrew Bible documents, the Septuagint in Greek which was used by many Jews and almost all Christians, and the Old Latin versions of some documents in some places. Eventually, all of these would be revised. The Hebrew Bible was not fixed before the second century CE and, perhaps more surprisingly, many readers and users of scriptural texts before then were not bothered by it. In the end, however, the canon of the Palestinian homeland in Judea emerged as the Hebrew Bible for almost all Jews to this day. This happened in the century after the destruction of the Temple as the biblical text along with prayer rituals filled the vacuum when sacrificial offerings at the Temple could no longer be performed. Then around the same time, or not long after, Greek language revisers were part of a process lasting several centuries through which some Jewish scribes were working to modify the oldest Greek translations so that they would conform to the tradition behind the Hebrew Bible. Thus, some later revisions of the Septuagint brought it into closer agreement with the Hebrew Bible.

Even though the term “Septuagint” originally referred only to the first translation of the Pentateuch in the third century BCE, its meaning was extended as early as Justin Martyr (d. c. 165) to include all of the books translated from the Hebrew Bible and some that were later called “apocrypha.” The inclusion of apocryphal books led some early Christian writers to assume they too had been translations from original Hebrew scriptures. The “Bible” in the earliest centuries of Christianity is characterized by a loose collection of texts, circulating independently or, at best, grouped together in small sets of books. The earliest Christian thinkers, no later than the second century, demonstrate a certain discomfort with the differences between the Septuagint and the Hebrew scriptures that were at this time being confirmed in some Jewish circles. How could their Christian theology be based on texts not used by Jews if they were the “New Israel?” How to address this discrepancy? Some began to assume the superiority of the Hebrew Bible, but none of them knew what has become clear to scholars only in recent times, specifically, that the Hebrew Bible of the second century stood at the end of a long process of evolution and that the Hebrew texts used by the Septuagint translators hundreds of years earlier were in many cases alternative editions of the Hebrew scriptures. The formation of Christianity depended almost entirely on the Greek Septuagint as the Old Testament and not the Hebrew Bible.

Physically speaking, all of these documents were in scroll form. What was called a codex was the forerunner to the modern book format. The technical innovation of the codex, or book, in the second century facilitated the emergence of the Christian Bible. The earliest codices would have been of parts like the Gospels or Paul’s letters. Only from the fourth century do we have evidence of both the Old and New Testament in the same codex. Here’s how quickly the transition happened. In the second century, only about 4 percent of the total number of surviving manuscripts are in the codex form. That number increases to about 80 percent by the fourth century, and the bookrolls, or scrolls, are completely overtaken in the eighth century. Just like record albums to eight-tracks, to cassettes, to CDs, to .mp3’s to streaming and then…back to record albums? Just kidding.

Anywho, scripture, properly speaking is an authoritative writing in a religious community. Canon, as we mentioned, is a catalog, basically a list of scriptural writings. A scripture could have authority but not necessarily be part of a canon. Somewhat ironically, there was no unanimously recognized Old Testament in the early church, and the diversity of canons and scriptural collections persists right down to the Reformation in the 1500’s. If the Old Testament was universally recognized, there would have been no need to continue issuing canon lists – and there were over a dozen such canon lists in the first four centuries alone. Athanasius argued that there were three sets of books: canonical books, ecclesiastical books that could still be read for edification, and apocryphal writings that were to be avoided, although he did not specify which documents these were. The formation of the canon in the early church was a slow process and a book’s omission from the canon was not a denial of scriptural authority. Early Christian leaders made their own canons, or lists of scriptures, and their lists did not all agree. The formation of the New Testament canon in these same centuries also impacted Christian thinking on the Old Testament canon. Since the apocryphal books were mostly ignored by New Testament writers and excluded from the Jewish canon, the church would have had little incentive to add these books to their canons. Luther and the Reformers would be the only Christians in history to have definitively abandoned the broader canon and the issue in both the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches have been largely settled since then. Side note: there are many other Eastern Churches such as the Orthodox churches, Coptic Church, and the Church of the East which also have different canons, but you can only do so much in one video.

This brings us to Jerome, who was one of only a handful of Latin Christians who could read the Hebrew Bible. He now stood in a position to question the church’s Bible, the Greek Septuagint, without any more than a few objectors. In 391, Jerome began a new project to produce a Latin Bible based not on the Septuagint but on the Hebrew Bible. His Latin version, later known as the Vulgate Bible, was quite different from the Greek Septuagint. Because he had so radically confronted the church’s Bible, many readers were disturbed by Jerome’s new rendition. His translation created a new Bible for the church. For four hundred years, most Christians had heard and read from the Septuagint and its related daughter translations. But the West chose eventually, though not immediately, to elevate the status of Jerome’s Vulgate based on the Hebrew Bible, not because they shared his views of the “Hebrew truth” but because they wanted stability they could not find outside the church. Jerome’s Vulgate Bible then became the de facto standard for a thousand years until challenged by the forerunners to the Protestant Reformation.

So, for modern English-language Bibles today, the Old Testament is not based on the Greek Septuagint which was used for five hundred years, including Jesus and all of the New Testament authors. Most translations today, along with some minor corrections from other sources, are based on the Hebrew Bible version known as the Masoretic Text which is a group of manuscripts that have shared features edited between the 600’s up to around 1100 CE. The Masoretic scribes, however, transmitted only one scriptural tradition out of a number of possibilities that existed before the second century CE. The New Testament text in any modern Bible is much more complicated to explain because there are so many ancient documents and fragments which have varied readings. There is no such thing as an “original text” because the materials they used to write on in ancient times simply just did not last very long. By the way, just to clarify, a translation of the Bible is different from a paraphrase. All translated versions today are decisions made by historical and textual scholars to recreate the documents with, theoretically, as high a degree of probability as possible. Ancient scriptures were hand copied and edited for hundreds and hundreds of years before the invention of the printing press in the 1400’s. This means that sometimes…we just don’t know what the words were. Maybe that’s not what you wanted to hear, but that’s the historical reality of the situation. And on that note…we’re done.

So, what do you think about this explanation about how we got the Bible? Leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Until next time, stay curious. If you enjoyed this, support the channel in the link below, please like and share this video and subscribe to this channel. This is TenOnReligion.