Learning the History of the Bible - The Biblical Canon

[MineralMan]

Available in dozens of popular translations everywhere, the Bible is the most widely sold book ever printed. But, where, exactly did it come from and how was it assembled into the collection of separate books we recognize today. The answer to that involves a lot of history and takes place in many separate locations.

The Christian Bible was not always what it is today, and was assembled from multiple partial manuscripts written in more than one language and at widely separated times. Some books that were once part of it are no longer included and others that were suspect in the past are now part of the Biblical Canon.

For a compact presentation of the development, Wikipedia has a well-documented article that pares down the Bible's varied history in a way that makes its assembly over many centuries reasonably clear. In reading it, you'll see the political and denominational differences over those centuries that have influenced, changed, and altered what you now read in English.

Find that article at the link below. It's very interesting, and may change how you think about this scriptural collection:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_the_Christian_biblical_canon

The development of the New Testament Canon is even more complicated. See the link below for a dizzying explanation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_the_New_Testament_canon

[Igel]

1. Development of the OT canon wasn't all that straightforward.

"Song" was a latecomer, and the debate over when things were considered canonical and by whom (that last was missed before Qumran because 2nd Temple Judaism was considered more monolithic until then).

I know Messianic Jews that push for a Hebrew NT and the priority of the Syriac but run into a buzz saw with that. Mostly it's anti-Greek animus driving them. But part of the NT canon just wasn't in the Peshitta until late, and attempts to say the Peshitta is original have to deal with the Old Syriac compilation/recension of the gospels. It's sort of fun to tie them up in knots: One frequent text they like to point at is a place in Paul's writings where he has a 3-fold distinction between "evil, righteous, good" and if you look at the Syriac aphabet you can easily reduce that to a two-fold distinction by looking at a simple error in "translating" from the Syriac into Greek. However the three-fold distinction was recorded a century later in rabbinic texts and attributed to much older teaching--"evil" is Torah-breakers, "righteous" are those who observe the Torah and stop there, "good" are those who continue in the intent of the Torah and go above and beyond what simple tsedakah requires. Traditional Bible criticism says to keep hard readings if they're plausible because errors tend to be in the direction of resolving difficulties and making them easier to parse.

Keeping in mind the religious background of the time helps. There wasn't one Judaism or one Xianity, each sect had its own compendium of scripture based upon their own doctrines. To a large extent people try to project unity back in time for modern political and religious purposes but you really can't do that--the reasonable excuse for a lot of bible critical views is just that there was little evidence for where the fault lines lay. Now, of course, some try to read additional fault lines into the past for the same reasons--to support modern religious and political views. That kind of squashing or devising complexity in order to advocate for a given position makes for a bit of insanity. Trying to wrap your head around the complexity is difficult because the jigsaw's missing so many pieces so they seem to fit together in different ways. Hard science it's not.

[MineralMan]

2. Thanks for that additional information.

An enormous amount of time is involved in all of this. Really, we can't imagine the complexity. I got a kick of of them calling the Houston flood "bigger than anything that has happened in the past 1000 years."

1000 years ago, North America was inhabited only by indigenous people, who didn't keep written records, so how would they know? From even 500 years ago, we have no written weather records in this country.

We lose track of such long periods of time, and of how exponential the curve of the development of civilization actually is.