What is the Bible?

I'm nearing the end of the Teaching Company's lecture series called The Story of the Bible. It's a very interesting course for anyone who wants to understand how this book came to be.

Actually, it's not a book. It's a lot of books with intertwining histories, because different churches and religions use different versions. Different translations and different collections of writings.

First of all, the Bible is a collection of distinct writings, produced at different times and places. The Bible of the Jews, which Christians call the Old Testament, is a collection of writings in Hebrew. It was translated into Greek (the Septuagint) and the Latin Vulgate was translated from the Greek, not from the original Hebrew. (That's how the prophecy that a young woman would bear a son got changed into a prophecy that a virgin would bear a son!)

But it gets more interesting, because there are no extant manuscripts of the original any of the writings in the Bible. What we have are copies of copies of copies. And there is sufficient variation between copies of the same work that it's clear that the scribes made changes, sometimes probably accidental, other times probably on purpose, in the belief that they were making an improvement. Scholars have probably gotten pretty close to the original texts, but there is always uncertainty and controversy. Many of the extant manuscripts are fragments just a few inches on a side, and thousands of these are analyzed to try to decide what the original said.

There are inconsistencies, not only within any given version of the Bible, but between versions of the Bible as well. This is not a static, fixed, and single document. It's an ongoing work as scholars and theologians revise their translations, their decisions about what writings to include and which to exclude, and their decisions about what the text of the original probably was.

None of this makes a lot of difference if you view the Bible as allegory and as a testament to the faith of the writers. But if you choose to insist that every word of the Bible is literally true (as Martin Luther did when he set the Protestant Reformation in motion) then you face the real problem of deciding which words are the actual words. Which is even harder when you realize that not a single verse of the Bible exists in original manuscript form, and the manuscripts that do exist did not even have breaks between words, sentences, or paragraphs, so that the job of interpreting them begins with deciphering what the words were supposed to be, from a single, enormous, block of letters all run together, written by hand, and not always clear. (Chapter and verse markings are a fairly modern invention and are purely conventional, with no basis in any of the manuscripts. They are useful for reference, but bear no relation to the originals.)

Just thought I'd open a can of worms before leaving for my snowshoeing and weight-loss trip to Canada. Enjoy!

 

How they were chosen was beyond the scope of my post. However, in the early days different churches used different writings as their scriptures, which eventually were gathered into collections, all different.

There is no agreed-upon collection to this day. As I mentioned above, each editor or translator has made his own decisions. The Catholic Bible, of course, was compiled under direction of the church hierarchy. The KJV was compiled under the direction of King James. And they include different writings! Some Bibles have been compiled by individuals or private religious organizations. Some were more politically motivated: selected and translated to make a point. Luther, for example, had a strong agenda and picked those books that reinforced it. But it should go without saying that if you have a religion and you are compiling books to use as scripture, you are not going to include books that disagree with your religious views. Those would seem to you to be heresy rather than scripture.

There are many ancient writings on philosophical and religious matters, and if you have access to them, you can compile a "Bible" for whatever religious views you hold.

On the other hand, Paul invented Christianity, so if you want a Christian Bible you want to include everything he wrote. But the problem, and this is the point of my post, is that nobody knows what he really wrote because all we have are copies of copies of copies.

How you choose what to include becomes less important when you realize that none of it is authentic. What we read is a translation of a translation of a translation, made from a copy of a copy of a copy. Which puts some perspective on the practice some people have of quoting an English Bible to prove this or that. It remains a testament to the faith of the original writers and the generations of copyists, but it has no real authority even if the original writings were inspired by god. The Bible is not a book passed down from the ancients to us. It is a collection of diverse writings which changes with every generation, and at all times exists in several variations which differ from each other in both scope and substance.

 

The Missouri Synod Lutherans still take the Bible literally. But Lutheranism, like all religions, has split into many different churches, each with its own vision.

And there are still people deciding what to put in and what to leave out. You cited several in your post above. Those versions may not be accepted by this or that church, but they are as much Bibles as any other, and if they are well done may be accepted as "the" Bible by one church or another in good time.

So you don't need to wonder what would be put in the Bible today: You merely need to take your pick and read the latest offerings. Or make your own decision and compile your own Bible.

I was very amused when a not-very-intelligent fundi once told me that the KJV was the only version that was really the word of god because it was the authorized version. As if being authorized by the King of England had some deep religious significance. I suspect this guy didn't realize who it was who "authorized" it. But it is the translation preferred by some fundis, and it is a very good translation, except where manuscripts discovered later have provided better text, or where English expressions have gone out of common usage or changed their common meanings, rendering the KJV translation unintelligible to modern readers.

 

The difference is that we can read Shakespeare. Few of us can read ancient Greek and Hebrew. So you read a translation or you don't read it at all.

Nothing an ever really be translated. Even a simple letter between closely-related languages. Translating Spanish to English, "su" can mean "his," "hers," or "yours." If the context provides no clear indication, the best you can do is add a footnote explaining the ambiguity. In literature not only the primary meaning, but the mood of a word are important, and there is seldom a word in the target language that conveys both at the same time. Or there are multiple meanings of a word and all are suggested, but none of the translated words carries the same multiple meanings.

There's a movie about several transvestite men who transform a small midwestern town from a place of bigotry to a place of acceptance. At the end, one of them says, "Sometimes it just takes a fairy." I saw the movie in Mexico in English with subtitles in Spanish. They translated "fairy" as "hada," but "hada" does not have the secondary meaning of a gay man, so the humor was entirely lost.

It's ridiculous to imagine that a book as deep and poetic as the Bible would not be crammed full of such layers of meaning, but a translation cannot convey more than the literal one. And then when morons decide, for no reason whatsoever, that this diverse compilation of poetry has to be absolutely literal without any hint of metaphor or allegory or humor, they blind themselves to all they're missing.

What we read in English can never be more than a pale shadow of the original, stripped of most of its meaning, and of necessity sometimes even stripped of its primary meaning and conveying ideas that the original never contained (as when "young woman" becomes "virgin" because in Greek one word can mean both, and the Vulgate was translated from the Septuagint instead of from the Hebrew.)

Don't forget the fact that in most earlier translations into English god is always "he," though there are more modern translation that eliminate that.

Many (probably most) Christians feel it is okay to kill in spite of the commandment. The death penalty. Deadly force in the defense of property. War. And up until very recently most Christians felt it was okay, and even required, to kill other Christians who held to differing points of dogma.

 

And now I must finish my packing. I'll be snowshoeing in some spectacularly beautiful country, with some yoga and gym work thrown in, on a diet of 1,200 calories a day of mostly organic food, all gourmet. I expect to have internet access but no time for more than checking my email. So I might not be on PC again until I get back.

It's gonna be fun, and I'll come back with a little less fat on me.