HarperCollins Study Bible
Page 5
Names and Order of Books of the Bible in Several Traditions
Jewish Bibles
Jewish Bibles include the books of the Hebrew scriptures (Tanak). Most modern editions present the twenty-four books (counting the Twelve Prophets as one book) in the following order:
TORAH
Genesis
Exodus
Leviticus
Numbers
Deuteronomy
PROPHETS
Joshua
Judges
Samuel (1 & 2)
Kings (1 & 2)
Isaiah
Jeremiah
Ezekiel
The Twelve:
Hosea
Obadiah
Nahum
Haggai
Joel
Jonah
Habakkuk
Zechariah
Amos
Micah
Zephaniah
Malachi
WRITINGS
Psalms
Proverbs
Job
Song of Solomon
Ruth
Lamentations
Ecclesiastes
Esther
Daniel
Ezra-Nehemiah
Chronicles (1 & 2)
Protestant Bibles
Protestant Bibles include the books of the Hebrew scriptures (also known as the OT) and the books of the NT. The OT is arranged in thirty-nine books (counting 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Chronicles, each of the Twelve Prophets, and Ezra and Nehemiah as separate books). Some Protestant Bibles include the Apocrypha—those books of the Catholic OT not found in Jewish Bibles—but as a distinct section.
OLD TESTAMENT
Genesis
Exodus
Leviticus
Numbers
Deuteronomy
Joshua
Judges
Ruth
1 Samuel
2 Samuel
1 Kings
2 Kings
1 Chronicles
2 Chronicles
Ezra
Nehemiah
Esther
Job
Psalms
Proverbs
Ecclesiastes
Song of Solomon
Isaiah
Jeremiah
Lamentations
Ezekiel
Daniel
Hosea
Joel
Amos
Obadiah
Jonah
Micah
Nahum
Habakkuk
Zephaniah
Haggai
Zechariah
Malachi
NEW TESTAMENT
Matthew
Mark
Luke
John
Acts
Romans
1 Corinthians
2 Corinthians
Galatians
Ephesians
Philippians
Colossians
1 Thessalonians
2 Thessalonians
1 Timothy
2 Timothy
Titus
Philemon
Hebrews
James
1 Peter
2 Peter
1 John
2 John
3 John
Jude
Revelation
Orthodox Bibles
Bibles of the Orthodox churches consist of the OT and the NT. The OT contains, in addition to all the books of the Jewish Bible (as translated into Greek in the Septuagint), Tobit, Judith, 1, 2, and 3 Maccabees (with 4 Maccabees as an appendix), the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Baruch, the Letter of Jeremiah, 1 Esdras, the Prayer of Manasseh, and Psalm 151. The book of Esther includes the six additions to Esther, and the book of Daniel includes the Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Jews, Susanna, and Bel and the Dragon. Slavonic Bibles of the Russian Orthodox church also include 3 Esdras. The order of books varies somewhat in different editions.
OLD TESTAMENT
Genesis
Exodus
Leviticus
Numbers
Deuteronomy
Joshua
Judges
Ruth
1 Kingdoms (1 Samuel)
2 Kingdoms (2 Samuel)
3 Kingdoms (1 Kings)
4 Kingdoms (2 Kings)
1 Chronicles
2 Chronicles
1 Esdras
2 Esdras (Ezra,Nehemiah)
Esther (with the Additions)
Judith
Tobit
1 Maccabees
2 Maccabees
3 Maccabees
Psalms (with Psalm 151)
Prayer of Manasseh
Job
Proverbs
Ecclesiastes
Song of Solomon
Wisdom of Solomon
Sirach
Hosea
Amos
Micah
Joel
Obadiah
Jonah
Nahum
Habakkuk
Zephaniah
Haggai
Zechariah
Malachi
Isaiah
Jeremiah
Baruch
Lamentations
Letter of Jeremiah
Ezekiel
Daniel (including the Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Jews, Susanna, Bel and the Dragon)
(4 Maccabees in appendix)
NEW TESTAMENT
Matthew
Mark
Luke
John
Acts
Romans
1 Corinthians
2 Corinthians
Galatians
Ephesians
Philippians
Colossians
1 Thessalonians
2 Thessalonians
1 Timothy
2 Timothy
Titus
Philemon
Hebrews
James
1 Peter
2 Peter
1 John
2 John
3 John
Jude
Revelation
Catholic Bibles
Catholic Bibles include forty-six books in the OT (as listed by the Council of Trent in 1546) and the books of the NT. The OT includes the following books not found in Jewish Bibles: Tobit, Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabees, the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, and Baruch with the Letter of Jeremiah. The book of Esther includes the six additions to Esther, and the book of Daniel includes the Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Jews, Susanna, and Bel and the Dragon.
OLD TESTAMENT
Genesis
Exodus
Leviticus
Numbers
Deuteronomy
Joshua
Judges
Ruth
1 Samuel
2 Samuel
1 Kings
2 Kings
1 Chronicles
2 Chronicles
Ezra
Nehemiah
Tobit
Judith
Esther (with the Additions)
1 Maccabees
2 Maccabees
Job
Psalms
Proverbs
Ecclesiastes
Song of Solomon
Wisdom of Solomon
Sirach
Isaiah
Jeremiah
Lamentations
Baruch
Letter of Jeremiah
Ezekiel
Daniel
Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Jews
Susanna
Bel and the Dragon
Hosea
Joel
Amos
Obadiah
Jonah
Micah
Nahum
Habakkuk
Zephaniah
Haggai
Zechariah
Malachi
NEW TESTAMENT
Matthew
Mark
John
Acts
Romans
1 Corinthians
2 Corinthians
Galatians
Ephesians
Philippians
Colossians
1 Thessalonians
2 Thessalonians
1 Timothy
2 Timothy
Titus
Philemon
Hebrews
James
1 Peter
2 Peter
1 John
2 John
3 John
Jude
Revelation
Strategies for Reading Scripture
JOHN BARTON
AMONG THE MANY WAYS people have approached the Bible down through the ages, two are likely to be encountered by readers of this book. They may be called the canonical and critical approaches.
Canonical Reading
A CANONICAL APPROACH TO READING SCRIPTURE is essentially the way most Christians usually understand the task if they are not involved in technical biblical study, but in recent years it has also been promoted by an influential movement within biblical scholarship. It begins from the conviction that the Bible is the Word of God to the church and that the meanings to be found in it flow from this. The scriptures, it is believed, are not simply a collection of ancient books that happen to have come together to form a corpus, but a carefully selected range of works in which the church has encountered a communication from God. This is very obviously true of the writings of the NT, which are the primary witness to the events of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth and the beginnings of the Christian church, which revered him as its founder; these include the very early testimony of the apostles, above all perhaps of the apostle Paul. It is also true of the OT, in which the God whom Jesus worshiped is encountered through out the history of ancient Israel, witnessed to by prophets, priests, and sages, and described by historians and psalmists. In these works the word of life is to be found, and reading them is thus not at all the same kind of experience as reading any other books, not even other religious texts. It calls for a particular mental attitude and for a number of presuppositions about what will be found in the text. We may mention five of these.
First, we should read the Bible in the expectation that what we find there will be true. For some Christians, especially on the more conservative and evangelical wings of the churches, the truth that is looked for is literal and historical truth, so that whatever the biblical text affirms is taken to be factually accurate. For many who do not subscribe to this position it remains the case that the Bible is to be read as true rather than as false. The truth it contains may sometimes be poetic or symbolic truth rather than factual truth, but it is not an option to suggest that any thing in the Bible is an expression of error. Even if, for example, the author of Gen 1–2 did not accurately express the length of time it took God to create the universe, it is unacceptable to say that he was therefore simply mistaken about the events he describes: at some level what he wrote is true. Many Christians will say that although the idea of creation in six days is not factually accurate, the intention of showing that God is the creator remains, and this is indeed a profound truth. It would be wrong for Christians to read Gen 1–2 looking for fundamental error in what it is trying to tell us.
Second, scripture is to be read as relevant. Even where Paul is discussing an issue that arose in the early church but does not arise in the same form today (e.g., whether to eat meat that has been sacrificed to false gods, as in 1 Cor 8, 10), this does not mean that the text in question has nothing to say to us. It is our task as readers of scripture to discern what God is saying to us through the inclusion of such passages in the Bible. Because the Bible is canonical, i.e., authoritative, it does not have passages that were once relevant but are so no longer: all that is written is there for our instruction (1 Cor 10.11). So it is not an option, when faced with a puzzling or difficult text, to say that it simply has nothing to say to us today. The fact that it was included in the scriptures means that it is eternally relevant to Christian believers.
Third, everything in the Bible is important and profound. There is no triviality in scripture, nothing that should be read as superficial or insignificant—in a way this is close to the previous point about its relevance. The Bible is a book of divine wisdom, and it does not contain any unimportant texts. This can be difficult for readers who are likely to feel that some parts of scripture are more important than others. For example, most Protestants, at least, make much more of Romans than they do of 2 John or Jude, especially since it was Romans, with its doctrine of justification by faith, that lay at the root of much of the Reformation. But strictly speaking there is no hierarchy within scripture: everything is inspired by God and therefore everything is important, even if in practice we may at times concentrate more on some books than on others. We are not at liberty, for example, to regard the historical narrations in the OT as mere historical records devoid of spiritual significance: they are all deep texts with profound meanings.
Fourth, scripture is self-consistent. Christian readers must not play one part of the Bible off against another. If there appear to be contradictions between two texts, more careful reading is required to show that they really cohere. A classic case of this would be the apparent discord between Paul and James over the question of works. On the face of it Paul denies that human beings are made righteous by good works, whereas James affirms that good works are essential—indeed, that faith apart from good works is empty and false. Some Christians have argued that this difference is irreconcilable, and Martin Luther famously proposed to exclude James from the Bible as worthless. But for Christians following a canonical approach this is not an option. They are obliged to find ways of showing that Paul and James are not really at odds, but teach messages that, though different in emphasis, are ultimately compatible. In a way, the self-consistency of scripture is already implied by saying that it is true, since two messages that are incompatible cannot both be true. Because scripture speaks with a single voice, we can always elucidate obscure passages from more transparent ones.
The first four preconditions of Bible reading according to a canonical perspective are shared by all Christians. The fifth is more obvious in a Catholic context, though it has parallels in the Protestant world. The Bible is to be read so as to conform to the teachings of the church. Catholics will normally say, for example, that where the NT appears to speak of Jesus’ brothers and sisters, the words “brother” and “sister” must refer to more distant relatives, because Jesus cannot have had literal brothers and sisters if, as the church teaches, his mother remained forever a virgin. At most they could be half siblings from a previous marriage of Joseph. Protestants usually do not follow this line of reasoning since they typically do not believe in the perpetual virginity of Mary, but on other matters they may well stress that the Bible is to be read and received within the teaching of the church. Like early Christian writers, they generally say that the Bible’s meaning depends on consonance with the church’s “rule of faith.” If our reading of the biblical text conflicts with basic Christian belief, we can be sure we have misread the text. When we read some of the prophets, we may feel that we are hearing about a God of vindictiveness rather than of love, but that must be a mistake since the God we worship is indeed a loving God; we must read the prophets in the light of that belief, even if they portray God’s love as “tough love.”
Critical Reading
THE TRADITION CALLED BIBLICAL CRITICISM developed in significant ways in contrast to the kind of religiously committed approach to the Bible just described, though it has often been practiced by people who are equally committed Christians. It has the following features.
First, it approaches the biblical text from a literary rather than a religious perspective. Another way of putting this is to say that it treats the Bible as a text first, and only secondarily as a holy or inspired collection of writings
. It seeks to inquire into the meaning of this text in the same way that one might inquire into the meaning of any other text. (A technical way of putting this is that it does not believe in a “special hermeneutic” for reading the Bible). This has two important additional aspects.
On the one hand, it is concerned to discover what kind of text each biblical book is. Reading prophecy is not the same kind of activity as reading poetry; reading historical narrative not the same kind of thing as reading law. The Gospels and the Letters of Paul belong to different literary types. One cannot legitimately treat all these different works as though they were cut from the same cloth. If we want to know how we ought to live, we will not learn this from a psalm or an OT narrative in the same way we might learn it from one of Paul’s ethical instructions or advice given in Proverbs. The various kinds of literature in the Bible cannot simply be added together to make a single work. The Bible is, as often said, a library of books rather than one book, books of many different types with different claims to inform readers.
On the other hand, criticism is also concerned with the question of when each book was writ ten. This is not because it regards books as limited to the period they come from. Clearly, this is not the case for major literary works—no one thinks that Shakespeare was important only to the Elizabethan age and has nothing to say to us! But taking account of context is important for discovering what the text means. Words and phrases can change their meaning over time, and we need to know the historical context of expressions before we can know what they truly mean. Further, the whole meaning of an extended line of thought may make sense only once we can establish its original historical context. To return to Paul’s discussion of meat sacrificed to false gods: we cannot understand this at all without some idea of the historical circumstances in which Paul lived and worked. Often (as perhaps in this case) we can work out a good deal of this from the text itself, but sometimes we need more information. We cannot begin to apply the text to our own situation until we know enough about its original one to know whether there really are parallels, and the general principle that “scripture is always relevant” is not enough to guarantee this.
Second, critical reading brackets the question of the truth of a text until it has established what the text means. Rather than believing that we can know the meaning of the text by approaching it with the correct predispositions and presuppositions, biblical critics think that the meaning emerges from reading the text cold, without a prior commitment to its truth or a ready-made framework (such as the church’s faith) within which it is read. Critics think of this as showing the text more respect than a committed reading, because it does not limit what the text might mean on the basis of an already existing theory about what this meaning is bound to be. Bracketing the question of truth does not mean being indifferent to the text’s truth claims; a sound method requires seeing the question of meaning as coming first and the question of truth second. This stance has consequences that a canonical approach regards as undesirable. For example, it makes it impossible to be sure in advance that two biblical books are not inconsistent. A critical reading of Paul and James might result in the conclusion that they really are incompatible, which would have considerable consequences for claims about the inspiration and authority of scripture.