The Bible: The Biography

The composition of the Hebrew Bible developed out of Jahwist and Elohist tribal cults and Deuteronomist law-giving through to exile in Babylon. Post-exile elevation of the Torah as sacred scripture, 'the law of Moses'. After the addition of Daniel during the reign of the Maccabees, the study of the Torah became a more prophetic exercise.

The Pharisees were laypeople observing preistly purity laws in their home as in the temple, and believed in the possibility of general resurrection. The Saduccees did not accept that possibility.

Within the Jewish diaspora, the Septuagint was the main vehicle by which the Greek-speaking Jews accessed the scriptures. That translatio was as inspired as the scriptures themselves. This impulse wasn't restricted to word-for-word translation.

Philo of Alexandria translated the Hebrew bible into Platonist philosophical terms. Trepain was the twisting and turning necesary to understand the text in its true light.

Paul introduced a new pesher in which he found the meaning of the Hebrew bible had changed in the light of Christ. Adam and Abraham were seen as forerunners of Christ and Christians. Abraham's pistis (trust or faith) was an example for all Christians.

The destruction of the temple in AD 70 was seen by Christians as a 'revelation' or 'unveiling' of a reality that had been there all along but had not been seen clearly before. ... But the apokalypsis of the ruined shrine seemed so compelling to the Christians that they felt inspired to proclaim the messiahship of Jesus, whose mission, they believed, had been bound up with the temple.

After the destruction of the temple in AD 70, " ... the Pharisees pioneered a spirituality in which Torah study replaced the temple as the chief means of encountering the divine presence. ... unlike modern biblical scholars, they were not interested in recovering th original significance of a given scriptural passage. Like Daniel, they were looking for fresh meaning. In their view there was no single authoritative reading of scripture. ... The meaning of a text was not self-evident. the exegete had to go in search of it, because every time a Jew confronted the Word of God in scripture, it signified something different. Scripture was inexhaustible. ...

Indeed, a text that could not be radically reinterpreted to meet the needs of the day was dead; the written words of scripture had to be revitalized by constant exegesis. Only then could they reveal the divine presence latent within God's Torah.

The Essenes or the Qumran community explored pesher, the deciphering of 'hidden things' in the scripture.

So thorough was the Christians' pesher exegesis that there is scarcely a verse in the New Testament that did not refer to the older scriptures. The four evangelists seemed to use the Septuagint as another source for the biography of Jesus. As a result it is difficult to disentangle fact from exegesis.

For Augustine, "Whatever the author had originally intended, a biblical passage that was not conducive to love must be interpreted figuratively, because charity was the beginning and end of the Bible....

Like the other Christian exegetes, Augustine believed that Jesus was central to the Bible: 'Our whole purposes when we hear the Psalms, the Prophets, and the Law,' he explained in a sermon, 'is to see Christ there, to understand Christ there.' ... all exegesis must be guided by the principle of charity."

Sacred study was central to the rule of St Benedict. "Lectio was a peaceful, leaisurely perusal of the text in which the monk learned to find a quiet place in his mind that enabled him to hear the Word. The biblical story was not studied as a historical event but experienced as a contemporary reality. Monks were encouraged to enter the action imaginatively - visualising themselves beside Moses on Sinai, in the audience when Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount, or at the foot of the cross. They were supposed to consider the scene according to each of the four senses in turn, moving from literal to spiritual in a process that marked an ascent to mystical union with God."

Martin Luther argued that "No practice or tradition of the church could claim divine sanction unless it had the support of the Bible. .... 'A simple layman armed with scripture is to be believed above a pope or a council without it.'"