by Timothy Beal
On textual criticism and the question of a common original source in Jewish Scriptures, especially in light of Dead Sea Scrolls discoveries, see Emmanuel Tov “Textual Criticism (OT),” The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 6, 393–412. P. E. Kahle, “Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Pentateuchtextes,” Theologische Studien und Kritiken 88 (1915), 399–439, was the first to argue that there was no “Ur-text” (single original text), but rather multiple versions of Jewish Scriptures (Vulgärtexte) from the earliest times. He did so based on rabbinical quotations and differences among Aramaic, Greek, and Hebrew versions known before the discoveries at Qumran. Tov partially disagrees with Kahle and his followers, arguing that there was an Ur-text, which he defines as the “finalized literary product which incorporated the last recognizable literary editing of the book.” Yet he recognizes that other versions (earlier editions, for example) would not have disappeared at that point, and so there were, even then, multiple versions. Moreover, he sees subsequent generations of scribes making various changes, intentional and unintentional, to that Ur-text, so that the period of the early first century was one of great textual variety.
Another example of the discrepancies common among various ancient Hebrew manuscripts is found in the Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsa-a), discussed earlier. Differences between it and the standard text of Isaiah (the “received” Masoretic Text, based primarily on the Leningrad Codex) seem particularly appropriate to the sectarian community at Qumran. Compare, for example, Isaiah 8:11 in the two versions. The Masoretic Text has “he corrected me [from verb root ysr, ‘correct’] so that I would not follow the path of this people.” 1QIsa-a, however, has “he turned me away [from the verb swr, ‘turn’] from following the path of this people.” The latter lends a more separatist meaning to the text. This verse is also found in another text, 4QFlor 1:15 (a testimonia text), to describe how God separated the Qumran community from the mainstream.
On New Testament textual criticism and working with Greek manuscripts, see Metzger, Manuscripts; and Eldon Jay Epp, “Textual Criticism (NT),” The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 6, 412–35.
Mark 1:2 quotes from Malachi 3:1 and Isaiah 40:3 but treats them as a single quotation from Isaiah. Isaiah 40:3 is quoted alone and attributed to Isaiah in Matthew 3:3 and Luke 3:4. Some later manuscripts of Mark have the quotation attributed to “the prophets” rather than to “the prophet Isaiah.” Most scholars believe these to be scribal corrections.
Concerning Luke’s quotation of Isaiah in the synagogue scene, note too that there is no single edition of the Septuagint. There must have been as many variants among Greek translations as there were among Hebrew manuscripts in the first century.
As precedent for early Christian liberty with scriptural citation and paraphrase, see “A Postscript to the Book: Authenticating the Pseudepigrapha,” in Reading Bibles, Writing Bodies: Identity and The Book, ed. David M. Gunn and Timothy Beal (London: Routledge, 1997), in which Kyle Keefer argues that early Jewish interpreters, as evidenced in the Pseudepigrapha, often paraphrased and even remixed various passages of Jewish Scripture from memory in highly “re-creative” ways that reflected a “low” view of the canon. In his conclusion, he suggests that the same was true for early Christian writers and scribes.
The idea that there never was a single original of most texts now in the New Testament is not new among scholars. As early as 1965, for example, in his presidential address to the Society of Biblical Literature, Kenneth W. Clark asked “if there really was a stable text at the beginning,” or at least whether it “remained stable long enough to hold a priority.” The address was published a year later as “The Theological Relevance of Textual Variation in Current Criticism of the Greek New Testament,” Journal of Biblical Literature 85 (1966), 1–16. Such an argument from evidence is of course a major challenge to the foundations of biblical fundamentalism, which locates biblical inerrancy in the “original autographs” to which all the variants are believed to point.
“All scripture is inspired by God . . .”: 2 Timothy 3:16. Most scholars agree that both 1 and 2 Timothy, along with Titus, were not actually authored by Paul himself but are later, “deutero-Pauline” epistles. Their literary style, vocabulary, and theological orientation are different from the main body of Pauline writings, and Marcion’s canon (c. 140 CE) does not include them. Nearly all those who use this passage to argue that the Bible itself guarantees its own inspiration, however, attribute it to Paul. In referring to its author as Paul, I am following their logic for the sake of argument. In any case, whether written by Paul or not, 2 Timothy dates to an era well before Christian conceptions of the New Testament canon and the Bible had taken form. Another later text, 2 Peter 3:16, refers to Paul’s letters, but does not attribute canonical status, let alone divine inspiration, to them.
Easter letter: Athanasius, Festal Letter 39 (for 367 CE).
Eusebius of Caesarea, Ecclesiastical History, vol. 3, chap. 25. His categories are somewhat ambiguous, leading many to divide what I consider to be the second category (antilegomena, “disputed”) into two categories, “disputed” (antilegomena) and “spurious” (notha), a term he uses after his reference to 1–2 John: “Among the spurious books must be reckoned also the Acts of Paul . . .” With most scholars, I consider this to be a continuation of his list of disputed texts. Before moving onto his last category (heretical), he summarizes: “Now all these would be among the disputed books [antilegomena]; but nevertheless we have felt compelled to make this catalogue of them, distinguishing between those writings which, according to the tradition of the Church, are true and genuine and recognized, from the others which differ from them in that they are not canonical, but disputed, yet nevertheless are known to most churchmen.”
In 397 CE the Council of Carthage listed the books of the full Christian canon, including the Old Testament and Apocrypha, insisting that these alone are to be read in church as sacred scriptures. See Henricus Denzinger, Enchiridion Symbolorum et Definitionum (Wurzburg: Sumptibus Stahelianis, 1854), 11–12. But note that we find subsequent editions of the Vulgate Bible that include scriptures not included in this list, including a gospel harmony and the Letter to the Laodiceans. These suggest that the canon was still not solidly fixed and closed even after the Council of Carthage.
6. The Story of the Good Book
On the Mithraeum at Santa Prisca see Hans Dieter Betz, “The Mithras Inscriptions of Santa Prisca and the New Testament,” Novum Testamentum 10 (1968), 62–80.
For discussions of early second- and third-century manuscript evidence for the rise of the Christian codex, see Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church, chap. 2; and Larry W. Hurtado, The Earliest Christian Artifacts (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 43–93, 209–29. An exhibit of P46, the early (c. 200) codex of Pauline writings, is available at www.lib.umich.edu/reading/Paul/index .html. Saul Lieberman, in Hellenism in Jewish Palestine, argues that the early Christian adoption of the codex was not necessarily in contradistinction to Judaism. In fact, it could well have had its beginnings in notebooks kept by Jesus’s disciples for recording personal notes on his teachings. Furthermore, although there is very little data on Jewish scriptural culture outside Palestine during the time when codices were gradually taking over scrolls, it’s entirely possible that Diaspora Jews as well as Christians were using Greek codices for their Scripture.
The different holders of pages from Codex Sinaiticus have cooperated to produce an online exhibit of the entire surviving manuscript: www.codex-sinaiticus.net.
“sacred Scriptures . . . written on prepared parchment . . .” Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, vol. 4, chap. 36.
Jerome, Preface to the Four Gospels, addressed to Pope Damasus (c. 383 CE). An excellent account of Jerome’s Vulgate and its subsequent history is available in Christopher De Hamel, The Book: A History of the Bible (London: Phaidon, 2001), 12–39.
Desiderius Erasmus, Novum Instrumentum omne (Basel: Johann Froben, 1516). A copy of the Complutensian Polyglot Bible may be fou
nd in the Library of Congress’s Rare Book and Special Collections Division as Biblia polygotta (Alcalá de Henares, Spain: Arnaldi Guillelmi de Brocario, 1514–17). My treatment of both works is based on examination of the copies held in the Scripture Collection of the American Bible Society. I also had access to a copy of Erasmus (1535 edition) in the Special Collections of Kelvin Smith Library at Case Western Reserve University
My review of early English Bibles, beginning with the Geneva Bible, is based on two primary sources: personal examination of the Scripture Collection of the American Bible Society, which is the largest collection of English Bibles in the United States; and T. H. Darlowe and F. H. Moule, Historical Catalogue of the Printed Editions of Holy Scripture in the Library of the British and Foreign Bible Society (London: The Bible House, 1903–11). Another valuable resource is Margaret T. Hills, ed., The English Bible in America: A Bibliography of Editions of the Bible & the New Testament Published in America 1777–1957 (New York: American Bible Society, 1961).
Luther’s reference to James as “an epistle of straw” (eine recht strohende Epistel) is in his 1522 foreword to his translation of the New Testament (“Vorrede auf das Neue Testament”), and his questioning of the inspiration of Revelation is in his foreword to that book (“Vorrede auf die Offenbarung S. Johannis”). He places these books, along with Hebrews and Jude, at the end of the New Testament, out of canonical order. On Luther’s disparaging, sometimes blatantly anti-Jewish treatments of Esther, see Timothy Beal, The Book of Hiding: Gender, Ethnicity, Annihilation, and Esther (London: Routledge, 1997), 6–12.
“. . . encloses thought in thousands of copies”: Ong, Orality and Literacy,
James I’s complaint about seditious notes in the Geneva Bible is from William Barlow, The Summe and Substance of the Conference... at Hampton Court (London, 1604).
For a masterfully written, highly readable history of English Bibles after Gutenberg, culminating with the King James Version, see Alisdair McGrath, In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How It Changed a Nation, a Language, and a Culture (New York: Doubleday, 2001). On the post-King James proliferation of Bibles (despite the royal copyright restrictions), including discussions of value-added illustrated Bibles, Bible commentaries, and thumb-sized Bibles, see esp. De Hamel, The Book.
Examples of early King James Version Bibles containing typographical errors are: The Holy Bible... With Marginal notes, shewing Scripture to be the best Interpreter of Scripture (probably Amsterdam, 1682); and The Holy Bible [aka the Wicked Bible] (London: Barker and Assigns of Bill, 1631).
Michael Sparke, Scintilla; or A Light Broken into Darke Warehouses, in Darlowe and Moule, Historical Catalogue, 189–94.
Examples of Bibles on the market by 1800: The Souldiers Pocket Bible... (London: G. B. and R. W for B. C., 1643); The Christian Soldier’s Penny Bible. Shewing from the Holy Scriptures, the Soldier’s Duty and Encouragement... (London: R. Smith, 1693); Jeremiah Rich, Whole Book of Psalms in Meter According to the Art of Short-writing (London: Jeremiah Rich, 1659); Solomons Proverbs, alphabetically collected out of his Proverbs and Ecclesiastes for help of Memory. With an additional Collection of other Scripture-Proverbs out of the Old and New Testament... By H. D. [Henry Danvers] (London: 1666); Symon Patrick, The Books of Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, And the Song of Solomon, Paraphras’d: With Arguments to each Chapter, And Annotations thereupon (London: J. Walthoe, 1727), a reprint of one of the volumes of Symon’s Bible; William Mace, The New Testament in Greek and English. Containing the Original Text corrected from the Authority of the most Authentic Manuscripts . . .(London: J. Roberts, 1729); William Whiston, Mr. Whiston’s Primitive New Testament (Stamford and London: W. Whiston, 1745); The Family Testament, and Scholar’s Assistant: calculated not only to promote the reading of the Holy Scriptures in families and schools, but also to remove that great uneasiness observable in children upon the appearance of hard words in their lessons, and by a method entirely new... (2nd ed.; London: T. Luckman, 1767); John Brown, The Self-Interpreting Bible (3rd ed.; London: W. Flint, 1806); Matthew Talbot, An Analysis of the Holy Bible, containing the whole of the Old and New Testaments: collected and arranged systematically, in thirty books... (Leeds: Edward Baines, 1800; and London: Thomas Conder, 1800).
On the history of the American Bible Society, see Peter J. Wosh, Spreading the Word: The Bible Business in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). On its British counterpart, see Leslie Howsam, Cheap Bibles: Nineteenth-Century Publishing and the British and Foreign Bible Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
In its Thirty-third Annual Report of the American Bible Society (1849), the Printing and Publishing Department reported, “it was thought that the Society had reached the extremity of its cheapening and multiplying the leaves of the Tree of Knowledge and of Life.” In 1852 the ABS’s Committee on Versions reported nearly twenty-four thousand variations among six copies of the KJV that it compared (courtesy of the American Bible Society archives).
Novel nineteenth-century Bibles include The Holy Bible . . . miniature facsimile edition (Glasgow: University Press for David Bryce and Son, 1896). Pocket-sized red leather Bibles for Civil War soldiers were published by the American Bible Society in New York (New Testament only, 1862) and by William H. Hill in Boston (whole Bible, 1863). Lifeboat Bibles from World War II include: The New Testament for Lifeboats and Rafts (New York: American Bible Society, n.d.); The New Testament for Life Boats and Rafts (Toronto: The British and Foreign Bible Society of Canada and Newfoundland, n.d.); and Scriptures: Protestant, Catholic, Jewish [including fascicles of the Psalms and Gospels], with no publication data given on the outside of the sealed package. Novel versions of the biblical text are Andrew Comstock, De Nw Testament ov or Lwrd and Sevyur JDizus Krist (Filadelfia: A. Komstok, 1848); Julia E. Smith, The Holy Bible: Containing the Old and New Testaments Translated Literally (Hartford: American Publishing, 1876), on which see Hills, The English Bible in America, 290–91; and C. K. Ogden, Stories from the Bible Put into Basic English (London: Kegan Paul, 1933).
The Illuminated Bible... Embellished with sixteen hundred historical engravings by J. A. Adams, more than fourteen hundred of which are from original designs by J. G. Chapman (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1846).
Colleen McDannell, “The Bible in the Victorian Home,” in Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 67–102. The quotation about Bible reading as breastfeeding is from p. 80. McDannell notes the slow decline of the family Bible phenomenon beginning in the 1870s and continuing through World War I, as American popular culture gradually distinguished itself from Victorian ideals. I obviously disagree, however, that this decline meant that publishers subsequently “simplified their content and form” so that the Bible no longer functioned as an iconic sacred object but “returned to being a compilation of sacred scriptures” (p. 101), especially over the longer term of the twentieth century. With the rise of an individualistic evangelical consciousness, the cultural meaning of the Bible and Bibles as sacred objects remained central to patriarchal family values (especially sexuality and gender roles) but was tied more solidly to issues of personal salvation and sanctification, especially as it relates to Christ-like moral behavior.
Peter J. Thuesen, “Some Scripture Is Inspired by God: Late-Nineteenth-Century Protestants and the Demise of a Common Bible,” Church History 65 (1996), 609–10; see also In Discordance with the Scriptures: American Protestant Battles over Translating the Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). My abbreviated version of the story of the Revised Version and the Revised Standard Version is drawn primarily from Thuesen’s account.
“A master stroke of Satan”: the quotation from Hux is in Thuesen, In Discordance, 97.
7. Library of Questions
Jacques Derrida, “Living On,” trans. James Hulbert, in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Seabury, 1979), 73. The French ph
rase is appauvrissement par univocité.
I am translating yehi ‘or (Genesis 1:3) as “there is light” rather than the more familiar “let there be light,” which treats the verb as a jussive. Both are correct, but “there is light” better conveys the sense that God is literally speaking light into existence.
There are irreducible multivalences in other words in the Genesis story as well. ’adam, for example, which appears initially with the definite article (ha’adam), means “the human.” After the woman is created from it, however, it appears both as the proper name Adam (without a definite article), and as the male human (with a definite article). Even one of the names for God, ’elohim, is polyvocal: although it is a plural noun literally meaning “gods,” it is often used as a singular noun, with singular verbs (e.g., “then ’elohim said . . .”). Complicating things, however, is the fact that on two occasions in these stories, God speaks in the first person plural: “And God [I’elohim] said, ‘let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness’” (Genesis 1:26); “Then the LORD God [yhwh ‘elohim] said, ‘See, the man has become like one of us’” (Genesis 3:22). Interestingly, in each of these instances (and also later, in Genesis 11:6), what’s at issue is the degree to which God and humans are alike and different. It’s almost as if God’s own identity is less stable in those moments. On this issue, see esp. the groundbreaking essay by David M. Gunn and Danna Nolan Fewell, “Shifting the Blame: God in the Garden,” in Reading Bibles, Writing Bodies: Identity and The Book, eds. Timothy Beal and David M. Gunn (New York: Routledge, 1996), based on a paper originally delivered by Gunn at a meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in 1990.
