A History Christianity
Edited By: Robert A. Guisepi
The Bible
Author: Ryan Cameroon
Many religions have a literature that serves as a foundation for belief and practice among their followers. For Judaism and Christianity such a literature is found in the Bible--a term derived from the Greek meaning "book." The Bible is a collection of many books by an unknown number of authors.
In Judaism and Christianity the makeup of the Bible is not the same. The Christian Bible is divided into two major sections: the Old Testament and the New Testament. For Judaism the Bible consists of the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings--what Christians call the Old Testament. Some Christians, notably the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, include certain books that are not accepted as authoritative by Judaism or Protestant Christianity. These books, called by Jews and Protestants the Apocrypha, are commonly included in Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox versions of the Bible but omitted from (or segregated within) Protestant Bibles.
THE BIBLE OF JUDAISM
Written originally in Hebrew and Aramaic, the compilation of sacred writings that came to be the Jewish Bible emerged from the religious experiences of the ancient nation of Israel. The Jewish Bible contains 24 books divided into the three sections. The Christian Old Testament (excluding the Apocrypha) contains the same books, numbered and ordered differently, resulting in a compilation of 39 books.
The Law
The first five books of the Jewish Bible are referred to as the Law, or the Torah, or as the books of Moses. They are also sometimes called the Pentateuch, from a Greek term meaning "five scrolls." (The books were originally written on long scrolls instead of in a bound book form, which is commonly used today.) The names of the books are: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. The story told in these books concerns how Israel was founded and how its people are called on to serve as a positive example to other nations. Taken together, these books are called the Torah, meaning "to teach," because so much of their content is devoted to explaining in detail what God's laws are and how they are to be interpreted.
The Prophets
The term prophet is derived from a Greek word meaning "to speak on behalf of." The prophets were ancient Israelites who spoke to the nation on behalf of God. In other words, they were preachers. Their purpose was not, as is often mistakenly assumed, to foretell the future. The prophets were men who interpreted Israel's behavior in the light of God's laws and frequently found reason to condemn that behavior. The prophets also declared that Israel would be punished for breaking the laws. A series of national disasters that befell Israel seemed to prove the merit of the prophetic warnings: Israel was conquered or subjugated in turn by Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome over a period of seven centuries.
The prophetic books are divided into two groups: the Former Prophets and the Latter Prophets. The Former Prophets include the books Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings. In the Christian Old Testament these are considered historical narratives rather than prophetic works. The Latter Prophets are Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, plus a group of shorter books called the Twelve. In the Christian Old Testament, the Twelve are called the Minor Prophets--specifically Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi.
The Writings
The third section of the Bible of Judaism consists of a miscellaneous assortment of books that includes history, songs and hymns, poetry, stories, and wisdom literature. Unlike the books in the Law and Prophets sections, the Writings do not constitute a unity, but their very variety has made them useful in both Judaism and Christianity as aids in worship and for teaching purposes.
The best-known and probably the most often used book among the Writings is Psalms (from the Greek word for "song"). It is a collection of hymns and songs dating from various periods in the history of Israel. The collection was assembled so that it could be conveniently used at worship services. The book is often called "Psalms of David," referring to the king of Israel in about 1000 BC. It is now generally accepted by Biblical scholars that, while David may have written some of them, the authorship of most of them is unknown. The other books included in the Writings are: Proverbs, Job, Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah (considered as two books in the Christian Old Testament), and Chronicles (also considered as two books).
The books of Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes are books of wisdom, a literary form that flourished throughout the ancient Near East. There were two main types of wisdom literature: practical and speculative. Practical wisdom, of which Proverbs is an example, consisted of wise sayings, maxims, parables, and aphorisms. This kind of wisdom was used as a teaching device to instill in young students sensible attitudes for the conduct of life. Speculative wisdom, as found in Job and Ecclesiastes, explored issues such as the problem of good and evil, justice versus injustice, the sufferings of innocent people, and why the wicked are so often successful and prosperous.
The books of Ruth and Esther are basically short stories that have a bearing on Israel during various periods of its history. Daniel is a composite of stories (chapters 1-6) and visions (chapters 7-12).
The Song of Songs (also called Song of Solomon) and Lamentations are collections of poems. The Song of Songs is a collection of love poems, often ascribed to Solomon, king of Israel after his father David. Lamentations is a collection of five poems, mourning the fall of Jerusalem in 587 BC. At that time Jerusalem and the surrounding countryside were overrun by the armies of the Babylonian Empire.
Ezra-Nehemiah and Chronicles are historical books. Both books are interpretations of the history of Israel. Chronologically the book of Chronicles precedes the material in Ezra-Nehemiah, but in the Hebrew Bible their order is reversed. This was probably done because Ezra-Nehemiah contains information found in no other book of the Bible, information that follows logically upon the material in the book of Kings. Chronicles, on the other hand, basically reiterates the material already told in other books. In the Christian Old Testament the two books are divided into First and Second Chronicles and Ezra and Nehemiah, and the four books are printed in that order.
In modern Hebrew Bibles the five books Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, and Esther are grouped together in that order for use on an annual sequence of festivals. Originally called "festival scrolls," they have little in common except for their roles in worship services.
THE NEW TESTAMENT
For Christians, the Bible has two components--the Old Testament and the New Testament. To clarify the reason for having two testaments, it is helpful to think of the word testament in terms of one of its synonyms--"covenant." (The two parts of the Christian Bible are often called the Old Covenant and the New Covenant.) A covenant is an agreement or a contract. The chief teaching of the Old Testament (or Hebrew Bible) is that God has made a covenant with the nation of Israel, beginning with a covenant He made with Abraham, the founder of Israel. Under the terms of the covenant God chose the people of Israel to be His special people, promised to make their nation great, gave them the Law (the Ten Commandments and many other statutes detailed in the books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy), and demanded obedience from the people. The purpose of the covenant was to make Israel a "beacon light" by which all other nations would be enabled to become God's people. The promises God made to Israel were contingent upon Israel's complete loyalty to him.
It is on the issue of whether God's promises were ever fulfilled that the religions of Judaism and Christianity became absolutely divided. Judaism maintains that Israel, the Jewish people, are still God's nation, obedient under His Law, and waiting for the fulfillment of His promises. Christians believe that the promises of the Old Covenant have been completely fulfilled in the life and ministry of Jesus and that the terms of the Old Covenant were sufficiently transformed by the life of Jesus so that a New Covenant was instituted. They therefore believe that the Old Testament (or Covenant) is incomplete without the New Testament. Christians accept the Old Testament completely, but they interpret it in terms of what is said in the New Testament.
Origin and Contents
The Old Testament was written by many authors over a period of many centuries. The New Testament was written by far fewer men over a much shorter span of years--perhaps between AD 50 and 150.
After the earthly ministry of Jesus was over, his followers banded together in an organization that came to be called the "church," a word derived from the Greek kuriakon, meaning "the Lord's house." The church formulated as its mission the spreading of the message about Jesus to the civilized world. As the years passed, some members of the church began to write down the message. They wrote for several reasons: to make sure information was correctly preserved, to instruct believers, to exhort believers to keep the faith in difficult circumstances, and to make a record for coming generations.
The writers whose work makes up the New Testament composed four different kinds of books: the Gospels, a history of the early church entitled Acts of the Apostles, epistles (letters), and a prophetic-dramatic work entitled Revelation. All of the books were originally written in Greek.
The Gospels
The word gospel is derived from the Anglo-Saxon word godspell, meaning "good news." There are four Gospels in the New Testament--Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John--each presumably composed by one of Jesus' closest followers. The Gospels appear at first to be brief biographies of Jesus. While they do contain a wealth of information on the life of Jesus, they are really testimonies of belief about him. Beside recording what he said and did, they interpret the history of his ministry. The Gospels are biographical forms of proclamation of good news.
Although appearing second in the order of New Testament books, Mark was the first Gospel written. It is also the shortest. Biblical scholars believe that Matthew and Luke used Mark, as well as other sources, to write their Gospels. These three, taken together, are called synoptic Gospels. Synoptic is a term of Greek origin meaning "viewed together." The three Gospels can be printed in parallel columns and their contents can be compared to see which passages appear in all of them and which material is peculiar to each of them.
The Gospel of John differs in several respects from the Synoptics. It contains much information not found in the other Gospels, and it has a different chronology for the ministry of Jesus. The author of John probably drew on traditions about Jesus that were unknown to the writers of the other Gospels.
The Acts of the Apostles
The apostles of the early church were messengers sent to announce the Gospel. The book that tells of the founding of the church and the early work of the apostles is Acts. It was written by the same man who wrote Luke's Gospel, probably as the second of a two-volume work. The period of time covered in Acts is about 35 years. The book can be divided into two main sections: chapters 1 to 12, the "acts of Peter," and chapters 13 to 28, the "acts of Paul." Peter was one of Jesus' original disciples and later became the first of the apostles. Paul was the missionary to the non-Jewish world of the Roman Empire. It is believed that both of these men were executed in Rome about AD 64 by Roman authorities. Their deaths brought to a close the earliest period of the church's mission.
The Epistles
Of the 27 books in the New Testament, 21 are epistles; and of these 21 many were written by St. Paul. The names of his epistles, or letters attributed to him, are Romans, I and II Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, I and II Thessalonians, I and II Timothy, Titus, and Philemon. This is the order of their arrangement in the New Testament. While the letters to Timothy, Titus, and Philemon were addressed to individuals, the others were sent to churches in various cities. All of these letters were later copied and circulated among the churches in the Roman Empire. It was the intent of the writer of the letters that they be read aloud in the churches, because the messages contain extensive interpretations of the Gospel, solutions to local problems in the churches, and sound advice about how the Christians were to live. Sometime before the end of the 1st century, most of Paul's letters were collected and circulated for general use in all the churches.
The Letter to the Hebrews, at one time ascribed to Paul, is now generally accepted to be by some unknown Christian of the 1st century. More like a sermon than a letter, it is one of the best and most carefully constructed compositions in the New Testament. Addressed originally to Christians out of Jewish backgrounds, the book makes extensive use of Old Testament material to demonstrate that the ministry of Jesus was the fulfillment of the Old Covenant.
The other seven epistles are James, I and II Peter, I, II, and III John, and Jude. They are collectively referred to as the Catholic Epistles, meaning that they were not addressed to specific persons or churches but were meant for general circulation among all the churches. The authorship of most of the letters is in dispute, though it would seem likely that I John was written by the author of the Fourth Gospel. They were probably all composed late in the 1st century or early in the 2nd century, for there are indications in them that the churches were subject to persecution by the Roman authorities, which occurred at that time. The purpose of the letters was to give guidance for everyday living, refute false doctrine, and encourage perseverance in the face of opposition and persecution.
Revelation
The Book of Revelation, also called the Apocalypse of St. John the Divine, is the most colorful and imaginative work in the New Testament, as well as the most difficult to interpret. An apocalypse is a type of religious literature that has to do with the end of the world and the events that will take place before the end comes. The author of the book was probably a man named John, leader at the church of Ephesus in Asia Minor, who was banished to the island of Patmos, just off the coast. While on Patmos, John wrote Revelation for circulation among the churches in Asia Minor. Revelation got its name from the first verse in the book.
The book is in two main sections: chapters 1-3 contain an introduction and letters to seven churches; chapters 4-22 contain the visions of the writer concerning the end of history and the triumph of the Kingdom of God. The book may have been written during the time of the Emperor Domitian (ruled AD 81-96), who inaugurated the first systematic persecution of the churches by the Roman Empire. The theme of the book is the lordship of God over history, a message intended to encourage Christians to endure even the most savage persecutions, because the Kingdom of God is near.
OTHER BOOKS
The Old Testament is not the whole literature of Israel, nor is the New Testament the whole literature of early Christianity. Many other books with religious themes circulated among those of ancient Judaism and in the early church. Some of these books are called pseudepigrapha, a Greek term meaning "spurious writings." Among Judaism's pseudepigrapha are: The Letter of Aristeas, III and IV Maccabees, the Ascension of Isaiah, the Testament of Job, the Life of Adam and Eve, the Psalms of Solomon, and the Assumption of Moses. The Christian pseudepigrapha include various gospels, books of acts, epistles, and revelations.
There is another group of books, not included in the Hebrew Bible, that have been accepted into the Old Testaments of the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. These books circulated in ancient Judaism, and many of them were very popular and widely read. For some reason they were never accepted by Judaism as authoritative, probably because they were not included in Hebrew versions of the text. This collection came to be called by the Jews the Apocrypha, a Greek term meaning "hidden things." In reference to the writings it has the connotation of books not meant for common use.
Although not included in the Hebrew versions of the Bible, the Apocrypha was included in a translation of the Hebrew texts into Greek made at Alexandria, Egypt, beginning in the 3rd century BC. This translation, popularly called the Septuagint because of the legend that it had been made by about 70 scholars, became the Bible of the early Christians before there were any New Testament writings. In about AD 400, when St. Jerome made a Latin translation of the Hebrew Bible, he included the Apocryphal books (somewhat against his better judgment) because they had been in the Septuagint used by earlier Christians. These books thus found acceptance in both the Latin (Roman) and Greek churches. In the Bibles used in these churches, these books are found distributed throughout the Old Testament and are not considered Apocryphal as they are in Judaism, but as authoritative. Some modern editions of the Bible include these books as a separate section.
The books in this collection are: I and II Esdras, Tobit, Judith, Additions to the Book of Esther, Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus (or the Wisdom of Jesus, son of Sirach), Baruch, Letter of Jeremiah, Song of the Three (or the Prayer of Azariah and Song of the Three Young Men), Daniel and Susanna, Bel and the Dragon, Prayer of Manasseh, and I and II Maccabees. Of these 15 books, three are not recognized as authoritative by the Roman Catholic church: I and II Esdras and the Prayer of Manasseh. This listing is based on compilations of the books under the title Apocrypha.
The books' chief value is to aid in understanding Judaism in the two or three centuries before Christianity. The books contain wisdom literature, poetry, history, stories, and apocalypses (or revelations).
20TH-CENTURY DISCOVERIES
Two major discoveries of ancient texts in the 20th century have added considerably to the understanding of the development of both Hebrew and Christian Bibles. These are the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi collection. The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in the Palestinian desert beginning in 1947. They contain copies or remnants of almost all the Old Testament writings as well as hitherto unknown books and fragments (see Dead Sea Scrolls).
The other find was made by two farmers near the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi in 1945. It contains a miscellaneous assortment of texts from various schools of Gnosticism (from the Greek gnosis, meaning "knowledge"). Some of the books were written by Christians, others were not; they represent a wide range of philosophical speculation in the ancient period, most of it far removed from the teachings of the New Testament. The documents are nevertheless valuable in gaining an understanding of the thoughts and feelings that existed when early Christianity developed. The collection was translated by Christians into Coptic, the language of Egypt at the time, and buried at Nag Hammadi in about AD 400, when the teachings of Gnostic Christians came to be viewed by other Christians as mistaken and heretical.
THE AUTHORITY OF THE BIBLE
Of the vast literature that circulated in ancient Israel and in the early church, only a small number of works came to be included in the Bible. Those that were eventually included make up what is called the canon (from a Greek term for standard) of the Old and New Testaments. This meant that there was a consensus in both Judaism and Christianity concerning the authoritative books of their religions.
Getting into the canon was not an automatic process. The books that were included were accepted after extensive usage over long periods of time and after much debate. The formation of the canon and the origin of the great number of different texts were two separate matters.
Old Testament canon. The formation of the Old Testament canon took place in stages. It is almost certain that the books constituting the Law, or five books of Moses, were recognized by the Jews as authoritative by the late 6th or early 5th century BC. Since the Law became the foundation of Judaism, any other books that were to be considered canonical had to be in conformity with its teachings.
From early in the 5th century BC the prestige of the prophets as national figures aroused interest in preserving their teachings in written form. The acceptance of the various books of the prophets was probably complete by the late 4th century BC.
Most of the books in the Writings are of much later origin than either the Law or Prophets, at least in their present form. Most seem to have been in circulation by the early 2nd century BC, for the author of the prologue to Ecclesiasticus, an Apocryphal book, wrote of "the law, the prophets, and the writers" in about 132 BC. Although the collection of Law and Prophets was a closed collection by the end of the 3rd century BC, there was no attempt to make a final selection of the Writings until the end of the 1st century AD. Sometime about AD 100 it is probable that rabbis living in Palestine at Jamniah, a major center of scholarship for Judaism, settled the canonicity of the Old Testament.
New Testament canon. The 27 books of the New Testament are the only canonical books out of many writings considered sacred by the Christians of the 1st and 2nd centuries AD. The process of sifting to form the final canon took another 200 years.
There were two chief reasons for the formation of a definitive New Testament canon. As the church moved from the 1st to the 2nd century, it was obvious that the oral tradition concerning Jesus and the work of the apostles was ending because the original witnesses were dying. And a number of sects and heresies (schools of doctrine) had emerged, each laying claim to the correct interpretation of the Gospel. Both of these factors made it imperative for the church to collect those writings that most accurately presented its message. The principles by which books were accepted as canonical were three: they had to have the authority of apostolic teaching in them; they had to present true doctrine; and they had to have been widely circulated.
The first part of the New Testament to gain general acceptance was a collection of the letters of Paul, in circulation before the end of the 1st century. The four Gospels were widely regarded as canonical by the end of the 2nd century. The rest were slowly received, but by AD 325 the historian Eusebius of Caesarea made a compilation that listed most of the present canon and left a few books on the list as disputed. In 367 Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria, Egypt, made a canonical list of all the presently accepted New Testament books. Church councils in subsequent decades established his list as final. Still, controversy over the Book of Revelation and some of the Catholic Epistles lasted for at least two centuries.
THE BIBLE TODAY
None of the original Bible manuscripts exists. They were lost centuries ago, and the texts that are now in the Bible represent copies of copies that were handed down in a variety of translations over many generations. The most famous version of the Old Testament is a Greek translation, the Septuagint, made at Alexandria by about 70 Jewish scholars beginning in the 3rd century BC. Another famous ancient translation, including both testaments, is the Latin Vulgate (common, or vernacular) made by St. Jerome in about AD 400. Throughout the Middle Ages the Bible was translated and copied by hand, a process prone to error. It was only with the invention of printing in the late 15th century that fixed, invariable texts of the Bible could be published.
The present versification of the Old Testament is based upon the work of a 15th-century rabbi. It was edited by Jacob ben Hayyim ibn Adonijah and published in Venice in 1524. The New Testament division into verses was done by a Paris printer, Stephanus, in 1551. His printed version of the Latin Bible in 1555 was the first edition to contain both testaments in the present chapter and verse forms.
In the 20th century the Bible has often been updated--mainly to eliminate archaic translations and reflect contemporary usage. The American Standard Version of 1901 was followed by a rephrasing of the New Testament in 1946 and the Old Testament in 1952. Among the more than two dozen different English translations of the whole Bible published since then was the New Revised Standard Version (1990).
The sexist language of older translations was also altered in the Revised English Bible (1989), the work of British scholars. While specific gender references to God were unchanged, the word he was no longer capitalized. Sometimes "man" was changed to "person".