Introduction to the Study of the Bible

The purpose of this session is to introduce some of the issues, and some of the techniques used, in the study of the Bible. It is not intended to be comprehensive, nor is it expected that lay Christians would necessarily have occasion to use this information, at least not on any regular basis. At the same time, it is useful to have a view of what goes on “under the bonnet”, in order to appreciate why passages from the Bible may be understood in quite different ways.

1. The Bible is both the book of holy Scripture of the Church and a collection of diverse documents, each with its particular setting in the history of Israel or the Church. The Bible has not always been a single volume of literature, as we have come to know it; each book has its own origins at some stage in the history of Israel or the early Church. As Christian Scripture, the Bible is read during worship and interpreted in the light of God’s ultimate revelation in and through Jesus Christ. This is problematic in that a substantial proportion of the books of Christian Scripture are also the Scripture of Judaism, interpreted by Jews in the light of God’s revelation to Moses and covenant relationship with the nation of Israel through the Old Testament period and beyond. How the Church relates to Israel is therefore an issue of both complexity and sensitivity whenever we as Christians interpret the Bible.

There is an inherent tension between reading the Bible as Scripture and reading the texts as literature or as historical documents. Both have their place, but it is important to recognise the distinction. Reading the Bible as Scripture is premised upon Christian (or Jewish) faith, and seeks to discover Christian truth from passages of the sacred text. Reading the Bible as literature, on the other hand, seeks to understand each document in a way essentially similar to the way in which we would read any other document of the same or similar type. This involves distinguishing prose from poetry, letters from narrative writings, etc. When we read biblical documents as history, we seek to discover something of the people and events behind the text, to understand not only the specific events recorded but also the way of life, and religious beliefs and practices, of the authors of the texts and of the communities in which these documents were first read.

2. The Bible as we know it is divided into two quite distinct sections, known as the Old and New Testaments. The distinction is quite clear in that the New Testament consists of overtly Christian writings reflecting on Jesus as the messiah whose life, death, and resurrection are located in recent history. The Old Testament documents, on the other hand, predate Jesus of Nazareth, and reflect various stages in the history of Israel. Some of these documents express a hope that God would intervene in the future to deliver Israel from adversity, and expect that God would use a human agent, sometimes but not always known as the messiah, sometimes but not always a descendant of David, to effect this. These passages are understood by Christians to refer to Jesus, but this is of course not how Jewish readers would understand those texts.

Within the Old Testament, the books can be divided into (more or less) clear groups. The first is known as Torah or the Law, and includes the first five books in any collection, viz. Genesis – Deuteronomy, commonly known as the Pentateuch. These books have traditionally been ascribed to Moses, and were the acknowledged Scripture of all Jewish groups at the time of Jesus. The other groups of books are less clearly demarcated, and the order in which they appear varies in different collections; it is worth remembering that book-binding is a relatively recent development, and that ancient books were written on scrolls of limited length; however they were stored, the order could very easily be varied, and different libraries would have included a different range of possible documents.

The second collection of books in the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament) is the Prophets; as well as those bearing the names of particular prophets, this includes those books which we might at first sight regard as works of history, viz. Joshua – Kings. The Prophets were accepted as Scripture by some Jewish groups, including Jesus and the Pharisees, but not others, such as the Sadducees. This accounts for some of the theological disputes we find reflected in the Gospels, e.g. over resurrection, which is attested in the Prophets but not in the Law.

The third collection is known as the Hagiographa, or sacred writings, and includes such books of poetry as the Psalms, and “Wisdom” literature, such as Job and Proverbs. It is worth noting that some books such as Daniel and Chronicles, which form part of the prophetic corpus in the Christian Old Testament, form part of the Hagiographa rather than the Prophets in the Hebrew Bible.

The books of the New Testament can be fairly simply classified according to their literary type, or genre. The Gospels are quite clearly distinct, as being accounts of the life and ministry of Jesus; John is very different to the others, known as synoptic gospels. Matthew and John, as those bearing the names of apostles, have tended to be the most widely read in worship, and the most influential in the formation of Christian doctrine, at least until quite recently.

Acts is an account of the origins of the Church, beginning in Jerusalem and spreading, largely through the ministry of Paul, through the north-eastern Mediterranean lands as far as Rome, the centre of the Empire. Acts is written as a sequel to Luke, even though the two are separated in bound copies of the Bible.

Much of the New Testament consists of letters, most of which are attributed to Paul, and others to James, Peter, John, and Jude. The letter to the Hebrews is anonymous. There are questions as to who precisely wrote some of these letters. Most of those attributed to Paul identify co-authors, and there are indications that a secretary prepared the text in Paul’s name. There is also a question of pseudepigraphy, the attribution to a known and prominent figure of writings which seek to continue and develop (usually) his legacy. This may apply to several of the letters, just as it is questionable whether Moses actually wrote the Pentateuch.

Finally, there is the book of Revelation or the Apocalypse, a quite distinct document containing accounts of heavenly visions seen by one identified only as John.

There were numerous other writings, in many respects quite similar to these, which have not come to form a part of the “Canon” of Christian Scripture. There are other gospels, attributed mainly to various of the apostles, other books of Acts, other letters, and other apocalyptic books. Many of these have been lost, and are known only from references to them in other writings. But some at least were revered as Scripture in some churches during the early centuries, and some remain Scripture to some of the Oriental churches.

Judaism during the period between the Babylonian exile and the early Christian centuries produced a vast number of writings in Hebrew, in Aramaic, and in Greek. Many of the texts known to us are analogous to those found in (what we call) the Old Testament. There are reinterpretations and commentaries on the Law, developed accounts of the history of Israel, collections of hymns or psalms, prophetic and apocalyptic texts, many of which are attributed to figures named in the Old Testament. The Dead Sea Scrolls are perhaps the most famous collection of these, but there are many others.

The processes whereby some books came to be more widely, and ultimately universally, accepted as Scripture while others fell into disuse, cannot be fully reconstructed. What is important is that there were gradual processes, over several centuries, in both Judaism and Christianity, and it is those books which proved to be of enduring value, and whose authenticity was accepted, which remained in the Canon. So far as we can establish, the principal criterion for acceptance of Christian writings as Scripture was the attribution of apostolic authorship and authority.

These processes account in part for the section in some Bibles known as the Apocrypha. These books were generally accepted by Jews and Christians in the Greek-speaking world of the early centuries. For those Christians these books were simply part of what we call the Old Testament, and they remain so in the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches. However, the Canon of the Hebrew Bible was not fixed until rather later, and was more narrowly defined. When Jerome translated the Hebrew Bible into Latin early in the fifth century, he included only those books accepted as Scripture by his Jewish neighbours. At the time of the Reformation, it was supposed that the Hebrew Bible was more ancient and original, and therefore the authentic Old Testament. Protestants accordingly accepted only these books, and Anglicans have adopted a mediating position between the two, with the Apocrypha occupying an ambiguous position. Passages from these books are read in worship, and considered edifying, but they do not from the basis for Christian doctrine in the Anglican tradition.

3. We of course normally read the Bible in English, and there are several different translations or versions available to us. The books of the Bible were of course not originally written in English, even though there are some who maintain that the King James Version, published in 1611, is the original and authentic text of Scripture. The books of what we call the Old Testament were originally written in Hebrew or Aramaic, and those of the New Testament in Greek, with perhaps some drawing on Aramaic sources. In our reading of the Bible, we are therefore dependent on the translation work of others. Those of us familiar with more than one language will appreciate that translation is a complex process. The semantic range of a word in one language does not necessarily coincide precisely with that of the nearest equivalent in another language. The structures of sentences, tenses, and other aspects of grammar, also vary between the languages, and it is therefore extremely difficult to convey the precise sense from one language to another. If we pause to consider, we can think of English words which have more than one, quite different, meaning, or which have come to acquire quite different meanings in different places where English is spoken or in the argot of particular groups within societies. Sentences can sometimes be understood in quite different ways, and there are contexts in which deliberate ambiguity has become something of an art form. Translators have to make choices in interpreting passages and deciding how best to express the sense in another language, guessing as well as they can the meanings intended by the original authors. Bible translators work with ancient languages which are no longer spoken, and can be known only from surviving texts. Our knowledge of these languages is therefore very incomplete, unlike modern languages such as French or German whose grammar and vocabulary can not only be learned from grammars and dictionaries but also reconstructed from studying contemporary usage. Given our limited knowledge of ancient Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew, it is inevitable that different translators of the same text could understand words and sentences quite differently, and we simply have no way of knowing that one is right and the other wrong. This seldom if ever affects passages of vital importance for matters of faith, but it does affect our understanding of pronouncements on moral issues. These uncertainties are indicated in footnotes in some published versions of the Bible.

4. Until the printing press was invented, all Bibles, or sections thereof, were copied by hand. It was inevitable errors would be made during the course of copying, whether the scribe was writing from dictation or reading from the text. These errors in turn could be copied. When the errors did not make sense, attempts to correct them would be made, often without benefit of consulting the original document. These corrections could often be guesswork, or what the copyist thought the text ought to say. The result is that there are numerous passages where different copies, or “textual traditions” vary in many places, sometimes by a single letter, in other places with different words and phrases expressing the same or a different meaning, and sometimes with entire sections missing or arranged in a different sequence. Obvious examples are the different versions of the book of Esther, the ending of Mark’s Gospel, and the absence of the story of the woman caught in adultery from most manuscripts of the Gospel of John. These are called variant readings, and are often indicated in modern printed Bibles by footnotes with the alternative readings. As the original texts of all the books of the Bible have long been lost, and even if they were still in existence could not be identified with any certainty, we are usually unable to ascertain which was the original wording of these texts.

The point of all this is that we need to think very carefully about what we mean when refer to the Bible as the “word of God”. Strictly speaking, in Christian theology it is not Scripture but Jesus Christ who is the Word of God (John 1:1). Scripture bears testimony to God’s Word, but any idea that God dictated the Bible as to a secretary is simply not tenable. The Bible is the work of some variety of human authors at different times and in different places, some of whom we can identify by name, but the identity of others we can only surmise. But we understand all to have sought to give expression to what they believed God to be saying, or to give an account of what they believed God to be doing. As the Bible is the work of human authors, so it is also the continuing role of human interpreters to discover its meaning for the Church today.

5. One important indicator to the meaning conveyed by a text is its literary form. A letter is quite different from a book of rules, a prophecy uttered in the name of God is not the same as a collection of proverbs, a parable is not a record of an historical event. Insofar as we are able to identify the type or form of document, we are in a position to interpret it appropriately. But we cannot always be certain. The creation stories in Genesis are an important example. There are Christian interpreters who believe these to be works both of history and of science. Others believe that these are myths, which is not to say that they are not true, but that the truth they convey is not to be discovered if they are read literally. Myth is the use of stories to convey theological truths, in ways which perhaps were more apparent and more easily understood in the societies and cultures in which the stories were first told than they are in a modern, rationalist, and supposedly scientific world.

6. A very important indicator of the meaning of a text is the historical context in which it was written. If we know when a document was written, and something of the society and culture in which it was written, and of events in the world of the time, we have several important clues to understanding statements which might otherwise be obscure or allusive. Many aspects of meaning are mediated through culture, events are perceived differently from different historical and geographical viewpoints, and unclear statements can be illuminated by means of further information obtained from outside the text. This can include archaeological artefacts, other records of events in the world of the time, and even alternative accounts of the same events.

A further issue of which we need to be aware is that history writing is not as simple a process as we might assume. “Facts” are few and far between, and cannot be recounted without being interpreted. Memories are short, and in societies where very few people are literate, stories and other traditions are transmitted orally. While the stories may be preserved in this way for centuries, they inevitably become embellished as gaps in the narrative are filled by reconstruction and conjecture, details are made more vivid as the story grows with the telling, and the order of events becomes confused. Comparing stories told about Jesus in the synoptic Gospels illustrates this very well. Similarly, we can compare accounts of the history of Israel in the books of Samuel and Kings with those in Chronicles. In many respects these details do not matter; for us as Christian readers we are concerned with what the texts say about God and what God is doing in the world, but we need to be aware that we are dependent on human accounts of human perceptions of what is happening, and of the ways in which God is active in what is happening. And we need to participate in these processes, in the text of the Bible and in our life as a Church, of discerning what God is saying to us and how God is at work in us and in those with whom we interact.