In my previous post I started to explain which manuscripts we have of the Hebrew Bible and broached the question of whether we know they were "accurate."  That is, if we read the stories of Genesis, or the book of Isaiah, or the Psalms, can we be sure we're reading what the authors originally wrote?  Or could things have been changed? In this post, I explain some of the complications of knowing what the original authors of the Hebrew Bible wrote, based on what we know about Jewish scribal practices over the centuries.  It turns out that what we know is not actually what we often hear, that Jewish scribes going all the way back to the beginning had ways of making sure they never changed a single letter of what they copied. We start with .... The Masoretic Text The text of the Hebrew Bible that is read today, and that is at the basis of all modern translations, is called the Masoretic Text. It is called this because the Jewish scholars [...]

When talking about “how we got the Bible,” there is obviously a lot more involved than understanding how and when the canon came to be collected and more or less fixed.  Knowing which books are in the canon is not the same thing as knowing what words were originally in the books. For that we have to move to the related question of the “textual tradition” of the books, of how they were copied for many centuries before the invention of the printing press. I have talked a good deal about that with respect to the New Testament on the blog, but far less about the Hebrew Bible.  Since I’ve just finished with some posts on the canon, now I can turn to the question of the text: what do we know about how it was copied?  Can we trust that we have what the authors wrote?  What are the complexities involved? This will take two posts.  I will be drawing from my discussion in my textbook, The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction, 2nd [...]

In my previous post I discussed the traditional view of when the Hebrew Bible became a fixed canon in stages, with the final decisions being made at the end of the first century CE at the "Council of Jamnia." Today scholars tend to present a somewhat fuzzier picture of when and why the canon came to be formed, although there do seem to be some fixed points. It is widely held that the five books of the Torah were accepted by nearly all Jews as a set canon by the fifth century BCE, in the early post-exilic period. One piece of evidence comes from the Bible itself, in a post-exilic book, Ezra. The scribe Ezra himself is described as being “skilled in the Torah of Moses that the LORD the God of Israel had given” (Ezra 7:6). This suggests that it was widely known that there was a “Torah of Moses” and that the educated elite were sometimes being trained in understanding and interpreting it. The Torah is and always has been the [...]

 How did we get the Bible, these 66 books in particular? Over the next couple of years I’m planning on reading massively on the Canon Part 2 (the New Testament), in particular on what we know about why certain books came to be included and yet others were left out, as the topic of my next book.  And I’ll be talking a good bit about what I’m thinking about that here on the blog. The topics that I’ll need to be covering  are so wildly varied that I’m guessing that about two-thirds of time it won’t even be obvious to blog readers that a post is even related to questions of canon.  We’ll almost certainly have to be dealing with such widespread issues as Roman imperial efforts to obliterate Christianity; teachings of universalist salvation in the early church; The Arian Controversy (think: the Council of Nicea); Paul’s confrontation with a talking lion he had earlier baptized; letters allegedly written by Jesus himself and…. and oh, there is so much to cover! I’ve decided that here [...]