Bible

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The Bible is not a single book but a library bound as one: a collection of scriptures, written across roughly a thousand years and many genres, held sacred in Judaism and Christianity. The English word descends, through Latin, from the Greek ta biblia — “the books,” plural — and the plural is the point. Law, chronicle, poetry, prophecy, proverb, letter, and apocalypse sit side by side between the same covers, and what binds them is not a single author or even a single language but the decision of communities to read them together as authoritative. To open it is to open not a treatise but an archive — Hebrew and Aramaic in its older strata, Koine Greek in its later, edited and re-edited and copied by hand for centuries before any printing press fixed a page.

A library, not a book

The internal variety is the first thing a reader meets. There is the terse mythic narrative of Genesis and the legal codes of the Torah; the bloody chronicle of the conquest and the kings; the erotic lyric of the Song of Songs and the bitter wisdom of Ecclesiastes; the hundred and fifty Psalms of praise and complaint; the visionary thunder of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel; and, in the Christian half, four gospels, a history, a sheaf of letters, and the closing fever-dream of Revelation. These are not chapters of one composition but works of different hands, places, and centuries, gathered after the fact. The unity is imposed by reading, not by authorship — the conviction of the communities that carried them that these texts, gathered, amount to one revelation.

Which books belong

Which books belong is the first thing that divides its readers. The Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, gathers the Torah (the Law), the Nevi’im (the Prophets), and the Ketuvim (the Writings) — the acronym that gives the collection its name — and counts these, in Jewish reckoning, as twenty-four books that are the whole of scripture. Christianity inherited those same texts as its Old Testament and added a New Testament: four gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, a body of letters credited largely to Paul and to other early figures, and the Revelation — written in Greek across the first century or so after the events they describe.

Even within Christianity the lists differ. Catholic and Orthodox Bibles include the deuterocanonical books — Tobit, Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Baruch, the books of Maccabees, and additions to Esther and Daniel — that Protestant Bibles, following the shorter Hebrew canon, either set aside or print separately as Apocrypha. The arithmetic registers the division plainly: a Jewish Tanakh of twenty-four books (the same material a Protestant counts as thirty-nine, divided differently), a Protestant Old Testament of thirty-nine, a Catholic Old Testament of forty-six, the Eastern Orthodox canons larger still — and a New Testament of twenty-seven held in common by all of them. There has never been one table of contents agreed by every reader.

How the canons formed

Scholarship treats the formation of these canons as a long, uneven process rather than a single act. The Jewish scriptures hardened in stages — the Torah earliest, the Prophets by perhaps the second century BCE, the Writings latest of all, with debate over a handful of books (Esther, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs) continuing into the rabbinic period. The old notion of a decisive “Council of Jamnia” that closed the Jewish canon around 90 CE has largely been abandoned by historians; the boundary settled by usage and consensus rather than by any single ruling.

The Christian canon formed against a sharper pressure. Around 140 CE Marcion of Sinope proposed a deliberately Christian scripture — an edited Luke and ten letters of Paul, with the Jewish writings cut away entirely — and the proto-orthodox response to that amputation was, in part, to define a canon of their own that kept the older books. The Muratorian fragment, datable to roughly 200 CE, already lists most of the works that became the New Testament. The twenty-seven-book list familiar today appears first, intact, in the thirty-ninth Festal Letter of Athanasius of Alexandria in 367 CE; the synods of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397), in the orbit of Augustine, ratified substantially the same list for the Latin West. The Catholic boundary was fixed formally only at the Council of Trent on 8 April 1546, in answer to the Reformation — which is to say that the question of exactly which books are scripture remained genuinely open, in places, for fifteen centuries.

What the believing traditions hold is something the historian does not adjudicate: that these books are revealed, that God speaks through them, that they carry an authority no other writing has. Judaism reads the Torah as covenant and command, given at Sinai and handed down; Christianity reads the whole as pointing toward Christ, the older scriptures finding their meaning in the newer. Both have built vast structures of commentary, liturgy, and law upon the text, and disagree about what it means even where they share the words.

The great versions

The Bible has almost never been read by most of its readers in its original tongues. Its history is in large part a history of translation, and four versions in particular shaped the worlds that received them.

The Septuagint (Latin for “seventy,” abbreviated LXX) is the Greek rendering of the Hebrew scriptures made for the Greek-speaking Jews of Alexandria, beginning with the Torah in the early-to-mid third century BCE and extending to the other books across the second. The Letter of Aristeas wraps its origin in legend — seventy-two translators summoned by Ptolemy II Philadelphus, six from each tribe of Israel, producing in isolation a single miraculously concordant text — and historians read the letter itself as a later apologetic fiction. But the Septuagint’s importance is beyond legend: it was the Bible of the Greek-speaking diaspora and then of the early church, the version the writers of the New Testament most often quote, and the carrier of the deuterocanonical books that the later Hebrew canon excluded.

The Vulgate is the Latin Bible of the Western church, the work above all of Jerome, whom Pope Damasus I commissioned in 382 to revise the ragged Old Latin gospels. Jerome went further than revision: for the Old Testament he set aside the Greek and translated afresh from the Hebrew, on the principle he called the Hebraica veritas, the “Hebrew truth,” a controversial choice that aligned the Latin Bible with the rabbinic text rather than the Septuagint. His Vulgate became the Bible of the Latin Middle Ages — the text Europe heard, copied, illuminated, and glossed for a thousand years. The Council of Trent declared it the authentic Latin scripture in 1546, and the Clementine edition of 1592 fixed its standard form until the Nova Vulgata of 1979.

The Luther Bible broke the Latin monopoly. Sequestered at the Wartburg, Martin Luther translated the New Testament into German in eleven weeks and published it as the September Testament of 1522; the complete Bible followed in 1534. He worked not from the Vulgate but from the Greek New Testament that Erasmus had edited in 1516 and from the Hebrew Old Testament, and he gathered the Apocrypha into a section of their own between the testaments, useful and good to read but, as his heading announced, not held equal to scripture — the gesture that fixed the Protestant canon’s shape. His German did as much to standardize the language as to spread the gospel.

The King James Version, or Authorized Version, did the same office for English. Commissioned by James VI and I at the Hampton Court Conference of 1604 and published in 1611, it was the work of some forty-seven scholars in six companies seated at Oxford, Cambridge, and Westminster — but it was far less a fresh translation than a polishing of William Tyndale, whose 1526 English New Testament, the first printed in the language, supplied the bulk of its wording and cost him his life at the stake in 1536. Its cadences shaped English prose more durably than any other book, and through the colonial and missionary centuries it carried the text across the world.

How the text survives

No autograph — no original manuscript in an author’s own hand — survives of any biblical book. The text reaches us instead through copies of copies, and the study of those copies is the discipline of textual criticism. For the Hebrew Bible the authoritative form is the Masoretic Text, the meticulously vocalized and annotated edition fixed by Jewish scribes, the Masoretes, in the early medieval centuries; the oldest complete copies date only to the tenth century CE. The Dead Sea Scrolls, recovered from the caves of Qumran from 1947, pushed the manuscript evidence back a full millennium and showed both how stable the text had remained and how much variety had once circulated alongside it.

The Greek New Testament survives in a flood of witnesses — more than five thousand Greek manuscripts, alongside Latin and other early versions — and with them some hundreds of thousands of textual variants, the great majority trivial matters of spelling and word order. Two great fourth-century codices, the Sinaiticus and the Vaticanus, are the oldest near-complete Bibles in Greek; the Sinaiticus was recovered by Constantin von Tischendorf at Saint Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai, leaf by leaf from 1844 and in full in 1859. The modern critical text grew from the nineteenth-century labor of scholars who weighed these witnesses against the later, more numerous medieval copies; Brooke Foss Westcott and Fenton John Anthony Hort published their landmark Greek New Testament in 1881, and the eclectic Nestle-Aland edition remains the standard working text today. The lesson of the discipline is double: the wording is known with extraordinary security in its substance, and known to have been fluid in its details — a paradox the believing traditions and the academy hold in different hands.

Reading otherwise: the Bible in Western esotericism

Beyond its own communities the Bible became one of the load-bearing texts of Western culture, the source its art, law, and language drew on for centuries. Within that long reception runs a distinct current: the conviction that the text carries more than its surface says, and that the surface is a veil over an inner sense to be unlocked by those who know how to read.

The medieval church systematized this in the doctrine of the four senses of scripture — the literal, the allegorical, the moral, and the anagogical — by which a single verse could speak at once of historical fact, of doctrine, of how to live, and of the soul’s final destiny. The framework descends from the allegorical reading of Origen, who built a threefold sense, and from John Cassian, who added the fourth; it made the entire text a layered cipher and gave the mystics their warrant. Christian reading also leaned hard on typology: the practice of reading persons and events of the Old Testament as figures, fore- shadowings, of Christ and the church — Adam answered by Christ, the flood by baptism, Isaac’s binding by the crucifixion — so that the older scripture became a coded anticipation of the newer.

In Judaism the hidden-sense tradition reached its most elaborate form in Kabbalah, which treats the Hebrew letters of the Torah not as a record of the divine but as its very substance. Its tool is gematria — the assignment of a numerical value to each letter, so that words summing alike are read as secretly joined — together with its companion techniques of notarikon (reading letters as the initials of a hidden phrase) and temurah (permuting letters by fixed substitution). These rest on the cosmology of the ancient Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Formation, which describes the world as constituted from the twenty-two letters and the ten sefirot. The same arithmetical reading appears in the most discussed cipher in scripture, the number 666 of Revelation 13:18 — preserved in some early witnesses as 616 — which most plausibly encodes, in transliterated Hebrew letters, the name of the emperor Nero.

The Renaissance fused these strands. Marsilio Ficino’s revival of Plato and the prisca theologia — the dream of an ancient theology underlying all true traditions — gave humanists a frame in which Hebrew letter-mysticism, Pythagorean number, and Christian doctrine could be read as one. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola brought Kabbalah into a Christian register and read Genesis for its hidden cosmology; Johannes Reuchlin built a Latin Christian science of the divine names; Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa codified the number-lore into a manual that carried it to the wider Latin reading public. From that synthesis the esoteric reading of the Bible passed into the later occult revival, where Genesis, the Song of Songs, and Revelation were treated as ciphers for an inner ascent. The move is always the same: the canonical text, read as surface, opens onto a second text read as depth.

A book among the books

Islam grants the earlier scriptures a qualified honor. It names Jews and Christians the People of the Book and counts the Torah, the Psalms, and the Gospel among the revelations God sent before the Qur’an; yet it holds that their texts were altered in transmission, so that the scriptures now in hand are no longer the pure revelation once given. The Bible thus stands, in the Islamic account, as a true word grown corrupt — venerated and corrected at once.

Venerated, dissected, fought over, translated into more tongues than any other book, and read in more incompatible ways than perhaps any text in history, the Bible has been the most consequential library ever assembled — and the reading of it goes on, generation after generation finding in the same words a meaning the last did not.

Texts, editions, and the scholarship

The primary versions are accessible in landmark editions, several of them in the public domain. The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, edited by R. H. Charles in two volumes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913), remains the standard English gateway to the deuterocanonical and parabiblical literature and is hosted in the Library here (Charles, APOT); Charles’s separate edition of the Book of Enoch (Oxford, 1917) is likewise held (Charles, Enoch). For the letter-mysticism that the esoteric tradition works on the Hebrew text, the foundational Sefer Yetzirah is hosted in W. Wynn Westcott’s 1911 English edition (Westcott, Sepher Yetzirah), and S. L. MacGregor Mathers’s 1887 Kabbalah Unveiled — his partial English version of Knorr von Rosenroth’s Latin Kabbala Denudata — at Mathers, The Kabbalah Unveiled.

For the documentary history of the text, the standard modern surveys are Bruce M. Metzger’s The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987; doi:10.1093/0198269544.001.0001), which traces the slow hardening of the Christian list, and John Barton’s Holy Writings, Sacred Text: The Canon in Early Christianity (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1997) and his later synthesis The Bible: The Basics and A History of the Bible: The Book and Its Faiths (London: Allen Lane, 2019; publisher record). On the Hebrew side, Emanuel Tov’s Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (4th ed., Minneapolis: Fortress, 2022; publisher record) is the authoritative manual; on the Greek, Bart D. Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005; publisher record) gives the textual-critical problem its widest modern hearing. The critical Greek New Testament itself is maintained as the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece (28th edition record), and the fourth-century Codex Sinaiticus is digitized in full (codexsinaiticus.org). For the formation of the Septuagint and its place in early Judaism, the entry points remain the Letter of Aristeas and the scholarship summarized in the standard reference overviews (Septuagint overview).

→ In the library: Charles (ed.) — The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the OT (1913) · Charles — The Book of Enoch (1917) · The Kabbalah Unveiled (Mathers — 1887) · Sepher Yetzirah (Westcott — 1911)

→ Related: Christianity · New Testament · Old Testament · Torah · Tanakh · Gospel · Paul The Apostle · Jerome · Erasmus · Martin Luther · Deuterocanonical Books · Apocrypha · Qur An