How to Read the Bible II

A Guide for the Perplexed

In the last installment, we laid out the basic story of how we got the Bible. The Hebrew Bible or Old Testament was composed by a variety of scribal circles and, later, individuals, over the course of about 1000 years from the tenth century BCE all the way up, possibly, through the end of the first century CE (for some of the very late texts). In the first and second centuries CE, the texts that now make up the New Testament were composed by a variety of different members of the Jesus Movement. But the canonization of these texts among both Jews and Christians took many centuries after this to complete, and the process was guided around two essential principles in both communities. The first was what could and should be read in the public assemblies of the Jewish and Christian liturgies; the second was how the assembled texts could be anthologized in such a way as to reinforce a particular set of concerns for each community’s elites.

It may be more helpful, then, to focus more on what those concerns were rather than on the specific histories by which individual books did or did not make the cut into the Jewish and Christian Bibles. That second history is worthy of study on its own, and lots of good books have been written on it; but in a format like this one, what we are most interested in is not the minutiae of canonicity but the overall worldview that Jews and Christians were trying to express in producing their respective Bibles, and which those Bibles, in turn, serve to reinforce.