In the last five weeks we've discussed how the various books of the Bible came to be written. Now, in the final part of this series, we're ready for some different questions that so far we've barely touched on.

• Who decided that these books are "the Bible"?
• When did they decide this?
• How did they decide it?
• And, most importantly, why?

The Hebrew Bible…

The Torah was accepted as Law very early.

As we saw, scholars say that the books of the Torah did not take final form until around 400 BC.

Most traditionalists say the whole Law dates to Moses, but agree that Ezra did some "editing" or clarification of discrepancies that had arisen, thus would also agree (roughly) with the scholars on the date for the final, "canonical" form of the books.

Whenever it was finalized — or possibly even before it was finalized — the Torah was accepted as canonical. For Judaism, it is the foundation of all scripture.

The other Old Testament books came to be generally accepted as sacred by Jews, and mostly this happened fairly shortly after they were written.

Since Judaism is very much a communal religion, what marked a book as scriptural was the fact that it was used in collective worship or collective study. There was no formal process by which this would happen; it simply happened. Often it was "bottom-up" pressure which led to particular books being used in this way; we saw that the Song of Solomon owes its place in the canon partly to the fact of its enduring popularity at betrothals and wedding feasts.

The Temple priests, it seems, did not concern themselves with affirming which works were scriptural and which were not. There was, of course, debate and discussion on this subject among scholars. In different places, different communities of Jews tended to have slightly different lists of books which they regarded as scriptural.

Around about 300 BC, Hebrew ceased to be a common spoken language, and was supplanted by Aramaic, a closely related language. Also about this time there was a substantial growth in the number of Jewish communities settled, and flourishing, in towns and cities outside Judea. For most of these communities, the vernacular language was Greek. Greek culture, Greek ideas and Greek philosophy began to affect the Jewish world.

Translations of the scriptures were prepared for the Greek-speaking Jewish communities; the standard one was the Septuagint, prepared by a team of scholars in Alexandria around about 250 BC. The Septuagint contains a number of books, or parts of books, for which no Hebrew original exists and which did not, naturally, appear in the Hebrew versions of the Jewish scriptures used in Judea.

A lack of clarity about the exact extent of sacred scripture was not a problem as long as Judaism had other unifying forces to draw it together — particularly the priesthood and the centrality of the Temple. But in 70 AD the Temple was destroyed and the priesthood scattered. This was a turning point in Jewish history.

Where before Jewish life revolved around the Temple, sacrifice, and the priests, it now became more fragmented, centering on local communities and communal prayer. The rabbis and the synagogues grew in importance.

After the fall of the Temple the center of Jewish academic life moved to a rabbinical academy at the town of Yebna (Jamnia in Greek). Scholars came there both to escape the destruction of Jerusalem and to discuss how Judaism was to survive the loss of the Temple. There was a renewed focus on the need for synagogues and communities to be in agreement with one another on belief and practice. A major point of discussion was what parts of Jewish literature were to be considered the word of God. The discussion seems to have proceeded as follows:

• The Torah was accepted as the writings of Moses, and the basis of Jewish life.
• For other books, the test was primarily whether they agreed with Jewish law and history as found in the Torah.
• Each book had to be read and dissected and any anomalies resolved before it could be accepted as having the authority of Scripture.
• For some long-established books, like Joshua, Judges, Kings, Isaiah, and Jeremiah, the discussion would have been brief.
• For other books, like Esther, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon, we believe the discussion was lengthy.

The result of this scholarly discourse was the gradual emergence of a consensus about the canon of scripture. Around 90 AD, after much debate, there emerged a list of 39 books accepted by Jews as scriptural.

A number of the newer books, which had been accepted and used in at least some Jewish communities, didn't make the list. For example, the Books of Maccabees were not accepted, despite the popularity of the holiday of Hanukkah that they commemorate.

As a rule of thumb, it was newer books which were at risk of being rejected in this process. The rabbis of Jamnia, who wanted to identify and assert a strong Jewish identity, feared corruption from Greek beliefs and ideas, and were suspicious of works produced after about 300 AD, and not written in Hebrew. In addition, many Greek-speaking Jews had by then adopted Christianity; and this increased the influence of the Hebrew advocates at Jamnia. So Jamnia rejected a number of works which up to that time had been accepted as scriptural by at least some communities, particularly Greek-speaking communities and the early Christian communities.

Jamnia didn't settle matters once and for all. Texts with slight variations persisted for a time. Even today, Ethiopian Jews include some books in their canon that mainstream Judaism excludes.

Nevertheless, Jamnia marks a turning point. What we now call the "Hebrew Bible" is the list of 39 books which was settled at Jamnia.

The Catholic/ Orthodox Bible…

The first part of the Christian Bible is called the Old Testament. It is largely the Jewish scriptures.

Remember, however, that in the early days of the church the contents of the Jewish scriptures were not definitely settled.

Knowledge of Hebrew was rare among the early Christians — the church was predominantly Greek-speaking — and, rather than using the Hebrew originals, they seem to have adopted the Septuagint. By the time that decisions about the Jewish canon of scripture were being made at Jamnia, Christianity and Judaism had grown far enough apart that Christians generally felt no need to pay attention to what the Jews were deciding.

There was some debate among Christians about the adoption of the Septuagint, but not a lot. Origen was aware that the Greek and Hebrew scriptures differed, and he spent some time studying the differences. Jerome felt that the Hebrew texts should have priority over the Greek texts. But, the concerns of some notwithstanding, the Septuagint came to be accepted as the definitive version of the Jewish scriptures used by Christians. Christians therefore accepted the works which the Jews ruled out at Jamnia.

Putting together the New Testament was, of course, a much more difficult exercise. In the early years the church had no thought of moving beyond the Jewish scriptures and, by the time they did consider it necessary, there was a very large number of potential texts floating around from which to make a selection, each with its supporters and opponents.

While the Jews at Jamnia examined books to see if they were consistent with the main religious text (the Torah), the early Christians conducted a much more fundamental argument about what constituted Christianity, and especially about the nature of Christ. Judaism was an ancient religion with clear traditions against which texts could be measured and assessed. Christianity was brand new, and was torn with disagreement about what it was and what it should be. Thus texts were not proposed as scriptural because they conformed to existing ideas of Christianity; they were proposed as scriptural in order to shape ideas of Christianity.

The first suggested canon of Christian scriptures actually emerged from a Gnostic source — a writer named Marcion, who proposed a canon consisting only of parts of the Gospel of Luke, and some of Paul's letters. (Marcion was fiercely anti-Semitic and wanted to exclude not only most of the books which eventually made it into the New Testament, but also the whole of the Hebrew Scriptures.)

Marcion's canon was not accepted, but he had given people the idea, and thereafter a number of people contributed to a debate about a Christian canon. A major contributor to the debate was Irenaeus of Lyon. He didn't actually propose a list of books, but around about AD 180 he did propose criteria that could be used to assess books. His criteria were:

• Existing scripture — does the book in question link Christianity to its Jewish roots, e.g. by presenting Jesus as the fulfillment of prophecies in the Old Testament? Is the book coherent with other scriptures already accepted by Christians?
• Apostolicity — was the book written by, or for, one of the apostles?
• Tradition — had the book been relied upon and quoted by the Church fathers?

About a hundred and fifty years later, in the early fourth century, these criteria were applied by Eusebius to produce a suggested canon, which is exactly the 27 New Testament books we have today. Because Eusebius was a respected historian, his views on the application of Irenaeus's principles were very influential. Even today, scholars accept that the four gospels which he proposed as canonical on the grounds of their connection with the apostles are, in fact, very much older than most of the rival texts, and therefore closer to the apostolic sources.

In 382 AD a synod at Rome under Pope Damasus adopted Eusebius's list. The same list was affirmed in councils at Hippo in 393 and 419 AD under Augustine and was again ratified at a council in Rome around 473 AD. Since then that list has been accepted throughout the Western church, Catholic and Protestant.

The Orthodox Church took a bit longer to reach the same point; they were never very happy about the inclusion of Revelations, but did eventually accept it. Other Eastern and Oriental churches had their own debates; some of them, such as the Syrian church, now have a slightly smaller New Testament than the Catholic/Orthodox canon, while some, such as the Copts and the Ethiopians, have a slightly larger one.

The Protestant Bible…

At the time of the Reformation, one of the main struggles between reformers and conservatives centered on the question of authority, and specifically the authority of the Bible vis-à-vis that of the church.

Luther was, of course, challenging the role the church had played in proclaiming and interpreting the Bible. He set about reviewing every aspect of Christianity against his reading of the Bible — including, which is what matters for our purpose, the Bible itself.

In other words, he read the Bible and found it internally inconsistent. In particular, he had difficulty in reconciling some of the books of the Bible with what the gospels seemed to say. Specifically, he had trouble with 2 Maccabees, Esther, James, Hebrews, and Revelations.

He was persuaded by his associates that he could not alter the canon of the New Testament — in doing so he would be taking upon himself the very authority that he was challenging in the church.

He was aware, however, that the works which troubled him in the Old Testament were all included in the scriptures which formed part of the Septuagint, but which had been rejected by the scholars of Jamnia, and were excluded from the Hebrew Bible. He was also aware that some early fathers - Origen and Jerome, as we saw above — had favoured the Hebrew texts over the Greek. Finally, although the Greek texts had been treated as definitive for centuries, there was in fact no defined teaching on the subject. The canon of the New Testament had been discussed and decreed at several synods and councils but the canon of the Old Testament, never.

Fortified by these considerations, when Luther produced his German-language bible, he included only the Hebrew texts in the Old Testament. To this day, Christians of the Lutheran and Calvinist traditions generally use bibles, the Old Testament of which contains only the texts which make up the Hebrew scriptures.

The Council of Trent addressed this issue in 1546, and defined the canon of the Old Testament for Catholics. It decreed that not only the Hebrew texts, but also the additional material found in the Septuagint — the Deuterocanon, or second canon — were canonical scripture, affirming the existing position in both the Catholic and Orthodox churches. All Catholic bibles include the Deuterocanonical books.

When the Anglicans came along, they sought — as always — to find a middle ground. Article 6 of the Articles of Religion says of the Deuterocanonical books that "the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners, but yet doth not apply them to establish any doctrine." The Authorised Version of the Bible printed them as a kind of appendix, between the Old Testament and the New Testament, and some modern editions still follow this practice.

Conclusion…

So, after six weeks, what have we learned from all of this?

Scripture may be inspired by God, but is was produced by men and women — by many, many men and women, over many generations.

Scripture was produced by men and women in three senses:

• First, it is to a significant extent an account of the experiences of God's people, and of the events which affected them.
• Secondly, between the experiences and events on the one hand, and the written texts on the other, lie many layers of recollection, reflection, interpretation, writing, editing and collation, all the work of (mostly anonymous) men and women.
• And, thirdly, the recognition of particular texts as scriptural is also the work of the community — a work which took centuries to accomplish.

The result of all this is that divine inspiration is manifested through human experiences, human reflections and human discernment. It is only because scripture emanates from God's people, and is recognised by God's people, that we know that it is scripture.

Scripture, in other words, is the product of incarnation. God's inspiration is not something disembodied, but something that becomes real and effective when incarnate in real human experiences, real human efforts and real human actions.

And it's a communal incarnation. No single human has produced even one word of scripture, never mind an entire book. Even if it were true that Moses had written the entirety of the Torah unaided, it is only scripture because the people of God underwent the experiences which gave rise to the Torah, and because they recognised the text as inspired after it was written.

So it's the community, not the individuals, who ultimately give any text its scriptural qualities. What this means is that scripture is something given to us by God, incarnate in his people.

ARTICLE NAVIGATION: PART I | PART II | PART III | PART IV | PART V | PART VI

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Peregrinus can be contacted at: Peregrinus <peregrinus@catholica.com.au>

©2007 Peregrinus

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