A History of the Bible — in the beginning was the word
Its teachings have shaped the west but is scripture the ‘gospel truth’?
“Nothing beats the Bible — not even The Art of the Deal.” Donald Trump may not be renowned for his piety, but he can recognise a winner when he sees it. The most-read, most-published, most-translated book of all time, the Bible is believed by millions around the world to have been directly inspired by God.
Even non-believers find its influence impossible to escape. As the central document of western culture, its impact is one that has reverberated to the ends of the earth.
The history of the Bible, however, is a notoriously complex one to trace. Only in the 13th century did the Latin word biblia come to signify a single book. Prior to that, in Greek as well as Latin, it had always been a plural: “books”. This was hardly surprising.
The Bible is an anthology, a collection of texts written in various periods, by various authors, with various aims. In the 2nd century AD, when Christian intellectuals first began to promote a fixed canon of scripture, they were attempting something new. What texts constituted the true guides to God’s purposes?
Some Christians claimed that only a select number of texts deriving from the first generation of the Church provided an adequate testament; but most, citing books inherited from the Jews, insisted that there was also an “Old Testament”. This latter opinion was the one that, by the end of the 2nd century, prevailed.
Christians joined Jews in seeing themselves as heirs to the great inheritance of Hebrew scripture. This is why the story of the Bible, the foundational document of the modern west, reaches back ultimately to the myths and folk memories of the ancient Near East.
Who better to guide us through the labyrinth, then, than a former professor of the interpretation of holy scripture at Oxford university? John Barton’s expertise in the Bible, and in the Old Testament in particular, has been manifest over the decades in a series of books that combine learning with humanity, and admiration for its moral insights with an alertness to the disarray that can so often characterise its study.
A History of the Bible may be written for a less academic audience than his previous works, but Barton remains the scholar that he ever was. The fact that he is also a Church of England priest does not prevent him from repeatedly acknowledging the limits of what can be known about the Bible. “There is probably not a single episode in the history of Israel as told by the Old Testament,” he warns, “on which modern scholars are in agreement.”
The Gospels, too, he freely admits, “remain an enigma, and those who revere them should be aware of how much we do not know about their composition”. Phrases such as “a series of guesses” and “hypotheses intricate to the point of self-defeat” stud his pages. Rare is the common assumption about the Bible that Barton fails to render problematic.
Between apologists for Christianity and atheists contemptuous of its claims, between those resolved to substantiate the claims of scripture and those no less anxious to tear them down, he steers a middle course. This via media has long been a specialisation of the Church of England, of course, and Barton’s book is an achievement in the finest tradition of Anglicanism: learned, mild-mannered and quietly anxious about the challenges of reconciling scepticism with faith.
Yet its undoubted excellence as a textual history of the Bible does not come without cost. Nuance can sometimes seem muscle-bound with detail; a concern to balance the competing demands of scholarship and accessibility can on occasion leave it caught between two stools.
While A History of the Bible is certainly a readable book, it is rarely a thrilling one. Moderate in its opinions, it is also moderate in its style.
As a great teacher himself, Barton has a natural sympathy for those who, over the centuries, have studied and mediated the Bible as a literary artefact: the scribes and rabbis and church fathers and philosophes.
A history of the Bible, though, cannot just be a history of intellectuals. Its impact is immeasurable precisely because it was felt by soldiers as well as by scholars, and by down-and-outs as well as by dons. It is a book that has, over the millennia, inspired revolts and grandiose schemes of revolution and wars and pogroms and expeditions to distant continents.
Of these convulsions Barton gives us too little notion. It is not “on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts” that the Bible has been written most indelibly. There is no need to have read it, nor even to know anything about it, to be stamped by it. Today, as for the past millennium, to live in the west is to be shaped inescapably by its influence — bigly.
A History of the Bible: The Book and its Faiths, by John Barton, Allen Lane, RRP£25, 640 pages