This article is a preview from the Autumn 2019 edition of New Humanist
A History of the Bible: The Book and its Faiths (Allen Lane) by John Barton
Even a reader familiar with the fraught and bloodstained history of the Bible will come away from John Barton’s sizeable new study having learned a great deal. Halfway through, for example, he tells us that the word “Bible” is in origin a plural word (ta biblia in Greek means “the books”) but that by the end of the third century CE the books were being treated as a unified whole. Packed into this are many of the ingredients – linguistics, history, the challenges of translation – that make A History of the Bible so readable.
The ubiquitous and enduring influence of the Bible needs no elaboration. As Barton points out, Oxford University Press alone – one publisher in one country – sells 250,000 copies of the King James Version every year. But the very fact that we continue to visualise it as one book belies the complexity and multiplicity of its very nature. The Bible, Barton explains over 489 illuminating pages, is never one thing.
We are taken, first, on a pleasingly logical tour through the chronology and geography of the Old Testament, beginning in Israel and Palestine in the eighth century BCE. The author’s asides about the “priestly style” of the early books are occasionally a delight; Barton devotes half a page to a passage in which the same point about clouds is made nine times, before he says, “We may feel that we had got the point somewhat before the end of this passage.”
He is keen to underline the differences between the Old and New Testaments, sections of the Bible that were at one point so conflicting that Marcion, a second-century teacher, proposed with short-term success that references to the Old be expunged from the New. “The Old Testament is the literature of a nation, written over some centuries, and having a certain official character,” Barton writes. The New Testament’s literature was written in far less time, against a backdrop of persecution, and by a small group “distributed all over the eastern Mediterranean world”.
The New Testament began as ad-hoc literature – the Gospels, for example, were never cited with the formula “as it is written” – and Barton argues that the Church only perceived them as having comparable authority to the Old Testament from the second century CE onwards. The first sustained official rulings on the complete contents of the New Testament came two centuries after this. As elsewhere, Barton is honest about the limits of peering back through history: “When we have established the oldest reading available to us, we should not delude ourselves that we have therefore got back to the words Jesus uttered.”
Taking the reader through the Lutheran Reformation of the 16th century, Barton explains that its seeds had already been sown: there had been excoriating criticism of Church authorities centuries before. He also describes the innovative thinking of Spinoza, who in the 17th century took the bold steps of treating the Bible “like any other book” and appreciating that those who lived in biblical times might have thought differently to us. In a history full of splitting hairs and infuriatingly pointless in-fighting, Spinoza is, for my money, the book’s hero.
Barton is an obviously learned and eloquent writer, and I disagree with him only on a few points: once when he says that atheist critics haven’t pounced on the notion of the official accounts of Jesus’ life as being contradictory (we certainly have); and again when he says of the story of creation given by the author of Genesis 1-2: “There is bound to be some level at which what he wrote is true.” (Why is there?) Elsewhere, Barton, an Anglican, is refreshingly objective in his biblical interpretation; here, it is as though he has become light-headed. Barton does not follow the technique he describes: to read the text at face value, “and then recognise that it is not true”.
But virtually every page of the book is infused with an intelligence that refuses to perceive one translation as perfect or another critic as unbiased. It is a study that does justice to its colossal subject.
