by Timothy Beal
Behold Your God
The life of faith can often feel like wandering in the wilderness, as it was for the Hebrew people after the exodus. Where are we? Where are we going? Where is God in all this? Are we going to be abandoned out here? In response to the anxieties of the Hebrews, weary of insecure, day-to-day uncertainty, Aaron fashioned a golden calf. “Behold your god,” he declared, offering them something solid in place of Moses’s God, whose presence with them was not often easy to discern or even trust. The idea of the Bible as a divine guidebook, a map for getting through the terra incognita of life, is our golden calf. It’s a substitute for the wilderness wandering that the life of faith necessarily entails. And the Bible business is selling it for all it’s worth. “Behold your god”; that is, God’s Word made flesh, bound between two covers, incarnation by publication. No more guessing. No more wondering. No more wandering.
We sometimes hear people accuse fundamentalist Christians of “bibliolatry,” worshiping the Bible as an idol in place of God. Be that as it may, it’s not what I’m talking about. An idol is an iconic image that stands in for something else—usually something that’s harder to pin down, to be clear about, to control. God, for example. When I say we’ve made an idol of the Bible, I don’t mean that we’ve idolized the Bible itself, as a stand-in for God; I mean that our iconic idea of the Bible as God’s Word incarnate is an idol that stands in for the Bible itself, which is no such concrete, black-and-white thing.
Like Aaron, Bible publishers are responding to a felt need. In an effort to give the people what they want, they produce Bibles that better approximate the iconic idea. Which is part of the reason biblical literacy is declining even while Bible sales are rising: people are reading all the value-adding extras more than they’re reading the biblical literature itself. After all, those extras seem more biblical.
I see no ill intentions among Bible-publishing companies, any more than I do in Aaron. I’ve found no fat cats in smoke-filled rooms conspiring to exploit the cultural icon of the Bible for all it’s worth. Some within the industry are more than a little uneasy about going too far in proliferating the Bible in too many different forms and formats. But most clearly think it’s a win-win situation. Selling more Bibles means putting the Bible in more hands means spreading the Word. They don’t see themselves in the endgame of the evangelical dilemma of preservation versus popularization. They don’t believe that the medium is the message. True to their neo-evangelical heritage, they believe that the message, the Word, transcends whatever new media is used to spread it.
Some may say I’m naive. Maybe, on some more or less conscious level, many Bible publishers have come to agree with McLuhan. Maybe they got his message, took it to heart, but then tucked it discreetly away in the back of their Bibles (or maybe in Numbers, where few would look). Maybe they are far from denial about the twilight of print culture, or about the inextricability of medium and message, and in fact are intentionally selling off the Bible’s sacred capital before there isn’t any left. Maybe, but I doubt it. In any case, the fruit of their labors is proving McLuhan right.
5
What Would Jesus Read?
FACED WITH THE SCENARIO I’ve presented in the last two chapters, one’s first response might be to call for a back-to-basics campaign. Things have gotten out of hand, clearly. We need to get back to the original, fully concentrated Bible. Back to “that old-time religion” some of us used to sing about in Bible camp. “It was good for the Hebrew children . . . It was good for Christ’s disciples . . . It’s good enough for me.” After all, behind these many newfangled Bibles with all their varied translations, supplements, and forms, there must be a pure source, an origin from which they all descended, the Adam of all Bibles.
It’s a reasonable assumption. But it’s nonetheless wrong. There is no single, unadulterated Bible, no pristine original, at the base of this crazy biblical family tree. In fact, the very idea of the Bible as a fixed canon of scriptures bound into a single book, not to mention believed by many to be the literal, divinely authored Word of God, would have been completely unfamiliar, indeed inconceivable, not only to Jesus and his disciples but also to the first few centuries of Christians.
To begin to realize just how foreign such an idea would have been, let’s try to reconstruct the scriptural culture of the early Christians, asking not only how they interpreted their Scriptures, but also how and where they were actually read, how they were copied, published, and cared for, and what they looked and felt like.
Jesus Sings
We begin with a story that many early Christians knew and shared about Jesus’s own relationship to Scripture:
And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and entered the synagogue, in keeping with his custom on the day of Sabbath, and stood up to read. The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him and, after unrolling the scroll, he found the place where it was written,
The spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because of the fact that he has anointed me
to preach good news to the poor;
he has sent me out to herald relief to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to send out those who are broken in relief,
to herald the acceptable year of the Lord.
And after rolling up the scroll and returning it to the attendant, he sat down. All eyes in the synagogue were intent on him. Then he began to speak to them: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:16–21; my translation).
This is how the Gospel of Luke marks the beginning of Jesus’s public ministry, with his reading and interpretation from the prophet Isaiah in his hometown synagogue. In fact, this is the first time in this Gospel that we see Jesus interacting with other people as an adult.
The people gathered are initially impressed by his reading from Isaiah and his proclamation that the time of liberation described therein is at hand, “fulfilled in your hearing.” They ask each other, “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” Apparently they’ve heard about great things he’s done in the surrounding area: teaching in other synagogues, and perhaps performing healings. But Jesus’s next words preempt any hopes they might have had for similarly mighty works back home, and soon the good feeling of the homecoming turns sour.
“You will probably tell me the proverb, ‘Physician, attend to yourself. What we have heard happened in Capernaum make happen here too, in your own homeland.’” Without giving them even a moment to respond, he recites another parable as his answer to the first: “Truly I say to you, no prophet is acceptable in his own homeland.” Then he tells two stories from Scripture about other prophets, Elijah and Elisha, who performed their miracles not at home in Israel but elsewhere. These words infuriate the crowd, now turned mob. They take him outside and try to throw him headlong off a cliff. He escapes their clutches and slips away unharmed.
This is a very familiar story to most Christians. Apart from the birth and infancy narratives, regularly remembered in Christmas pageants, it’s probably the most well-known story in the Gospel of Luke. For many of us, it’s so familiar that we tell it and hear it as though we were actually there. It’s like a family story about a notable ancestor. We’ve heard it so many times that we begin to insert ourselves as eyewitnesses. We’re not so different from those medieval patrons of paintings depicting Jesus reading from an illuminated Bible book to a crowd of themselves gathered under the arch of a huge cathedral. Unwittingly, we take the content of what Jesus says and how the people react out of its ancient context and put it into our own world, as though Jesus is standing at a church pulpit on Sunday morning reading from a big, black, leather-bound King James Version Bible.
But have you ever stopped to think about what Jesus was actually reading? I don’t mean just what words, but what the thing was that he held in his hands and read from. What did it look like? Feel like? And how did he read it? Handle it? How did he sound when he read it? What was the scriptural culture in whic
h he moved and breathed and had his being?
“The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him . . .” The Greek word for “scroll” is biblion. That’s what Jesus would have had handed to him. Later, during the transition from scrolls to books, biblion came to be used for both media. Later still, as books became the dominant medium for literature, it came to mean “book,” and most of Christendom forgot that the Scriptures now bound in books began as scrolls.
Most English translations have perpetuated the anachronistic image of Jesus opening and reading from a book. The King James Version of 1611 had “the book of the prophet Esaias” delivered to Jesus. So did the American Standard Version, the New American Standard Version, and the Revised Standard Version, among many others. So it’s not surprising that so many illustrations of this story throughout much of Christian history, including the popular icon of Christ the Teacher, picture Jesus holding a Bible book.
In fact, it’s highly unlikely that Jesus ever saw, let alone read, a book in his life. He almost certainly never saw a version of Isaiah, or any other Jewish Scripture, in book form. What Jesus would have been handed was a scroll. In early first-century Jewish Palestine, as throughout the Greco-Roman world, the scroll was the exclusive medium for literature.
Most scrolls were made from papyrus, a tall reed that grew in marshy regions along the Nile and in the plantations of paper makers. In his Natural History, the first-century naturalist Pliny the Elder described how papyrus scrolls were made during his time. Paper makers cut thin strips of the plant’s pith, laid them out in two crosswise layers, and pressed them flat. The pith’s natural juices served as glue to fuse the layers together. Once the material dried, they sanded both sides with pumice, polished them with shell, and cut them into sheets. The recto side, on which the grain ran horizontally, was best for writing. These sheets, which commonly measured about ten inches high by about seven inches wide, were then glued together along their edges and rolled with the recto on the inside. The typical roll included about twenty sheets and was about eleven feet long. These rolls were cut to shorter lengths or glued together into longer ones in order to accommodate different text lengths.
This sixth- or seventh-century icon of Christ Pantocrator (“ruler of all”) from Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai, Egypt, where tradition holds that God appeared to Moses from the burning bush, is an early example of what became a common image of Jesus Christ holding a Bible book. The historical Jesus, however, never saw, let alone held, any such thing.
By permission of Saint Catherine’s Monastery, Sinai, Egypt
Although papyrus was the most common material for scrolls, Jesus would probably have been reading one made from parchment, which would eventually become the normative form for scrolls of Jewish Scripture. To make parchment scrolls, animal skins (usually calves, sheep, or goats) were soaked in lime solution, washed, and dried on stretchers. Then the outside was shaved and the inside was rubbed smooth with a stone or bone. Although the hair side (verso) was more absorbent of ink, the flesh side (recto) was smoother and thus the preferred side for writing. After being whitened with chalk, the skins were cut into sheets, sewn together, and rolled into scrolls with the recto on the inside. Each sheet was made from one whole side of an animal’s hide, cut lengthwise along the spine and middle. So, for example, a scroll made from eight parchment sheets would have required four whole animals.
Most scrolls in the ancient world were between twenty and thirty feet long. Much longer and they were hard to handle. In fact, texts were written to accommodate this general standard of length, once again illustrating the inseparability of medium and message.
Columns 32 and 33 of the Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsa-a), discovered in the first cave at Qumran in 1948. The scroll measures about ten inches high and twenty-four feet long and was made from seventeen sheets of sheepskin. Dating to the first century BCE, the scroll might still have been in use during the time of Jesus.
Photograph © John C. Trever, Ph.D.; digital image by James E. Trever
In our story, Jesus was handed the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. What would that have looked and felt like? Probably a lot like the scroll of Isaiah that was discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran, known as 1QIsa-a (Cave 1, Qumran, Isaiah, copy “a”). This “Great Isaiah Scroll” dates to the first century BCE and could well have still been in use by the community at Qumran, not far from Jerusalem, during Jesus’s time. It’s a parchment scroll, made from seventeen sheets of sheepskin that were sewn together with linen thread. That’s eight and a half sheep! It’s a little over ten inches high and about twenty-four feet long. The text of Isaiah is divided into fifty-four columns, each about four inches wide, separated by narrow margins. The work appears to have been done by a single scribe using a thin piece of reed with a chisel-shaped point dipped in an ink solution made from lamp oil soot. In some spots you can see vertical lines that were drawn to keep the margins straight and consistent, and horizontal lines that served as writing guides. Although the Hebrew text is set very closely together, with little space between words, it has been laid out in paragraphs, so a reader can find a particular passage more easily.
Where would Jesus have read? In a Jewish synagogue among fellow Jews. Jesus and all his disciples were born and raised Jewish in Jewish Palestine. They remained so throughout their lives. Jesus’s teaching is not comprehensible except as interpretation of Jewish tradition, especially Jewish Scripture.
We know very little for sure about the architecture of synagogues or what happened in them during the early first century CE. Most information about them comes from the second century, well after the destruction of the Temple (70 CE), a time when their organization and liturgy were being standardized. In fact, this story in Luke, probably written in the 80S CE, is the earliest known description of a Shabbat synagogue service. Nonetheless, most agree that the synagogue was the center of Jewish life in Palestine and throughout the Roman Empire.
Although there was probably variety from community to community, there was likely a typical order of events. At the center of the service was the reading and interpretation of Scripture, especially (if not exclusively) the Torah. Communal study of Scripture gave shape to the religious community.
What might his hometown synagogue have looked like? There’s no way to know in any detail. Many synagogues during Jesus’s time were probably simple gathering places set aside in people’s houses for communal Scripture reading, study, and prayer on Shabbat. Perhaps some had benches for people to sit on. Perhaps there was a particular spot from which a leader would read and instruct. There must have been a means of storing the scrolls, probably a portable round wooden chest, or capsa. As was typical for nonreligious scroll collections in the Greco-Roman world, the scrolls probably had identification tabs on their ends. Such a crude library would have included some or all of the Torah scrolls as well as some of the Prophets and other writings, such as the Psalms. It might have included more than one copy of a text. It probably would not have included all the texts now in the canon of Jewish Scriptures, and it might well have included some texts that were not part of that canon. Some, at least, would have been written in biblical Hebrew. Others might have been in Aramaic, the lingua franca of Jewish people in Palestine and Mesopotamia during that time—the language spoken by Jesus and everyone he knew. There were, moreover, different versions of Jewish Scriptures circulating in both languages. In addition to various Hebrew versions from which our modern-day Bibles descend, others came from what is now known as the Samaritan Pentateuch, a version of the Torah identified later with the Jewish sect of Samaritans (a few hundred of them live in Israel to this day). Aramaic versions (Targums) retold Scripture in expanded forms, often revising and elaborating on their source material extensively.
Outside Palestine, in the Jewish Diaspora, where Greek was the Jewish vernacular, Jews used the Septuagint, or “Seventy,” a name for the collective Scriptures that refers to the legend that seventy-two Jewish scholars, working indep
endently, produced the identical Greek translation of the Torah for Ptolemy II in the mid-third century BCE. That legend is betrayed by the fact that there were different versions of these scrolls in circulation. More likely there were multiple Greek translations from different Hebrew versions over the course of centuries (translations of the Torah among the earliest).
The Nazareth synagogue library might also have included what scholars today call testimonia, which were short anthologies of snippets taken from other scriptures. In some cases, these anthologies were organized around a particular theme. A good example is 4Q Testimonia, also found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Dating to the first century BCE, this single page of parchment includes three Hebrew biblical quotations (two of them from something close to the proto-Samaritan version Torah, mentioned earlier, but none of them exactly like any known version) and a fourth quotation from a text known as the Psalms of Joshua, also discovered at Qumran. Taken together, the excerpts center on messianic expectations and an imminent time of disaster. Needless to say, there was no closed canon among Jewish communities, nor were there established standard versions of any particular Jewish scriptural texts.
How would Jesus have read an Isaiah scroll such as the one described here? The story says he stood to read. This is not an impromptu move, made as the spirit leads, but a formal, ritual act, as is the attendant’s presentation of the scroll. Of course, like many ritual acts, this one is also practical: it’s much easier for a reader to project and be heard clearly by a congregation when she or he is standing.
