From Word to Book: Ten Questions about How We Got the Bible

Introduction

Recently worship in my Mennonite congregation included an event when the pastors called forward twelve-year-old children and their parents, and presented each young person with a Bible. These stories are our stories, the pastors told the group gathered before us. As I observed the parents and their children, images of twelve-year-old Jesus in the temple with the elders (Luke 2 ) flitted through my mind, and then bumped into memories of my nephew’s Bar Mitzvah at his synagogue. As in my congregation, so in many communities of faith, pastors, Sunday school teachers, and study group leaders work hard to connect biblical stories with the lives of the people who participate.

Teaching Bible to college undergraduates for over twenty years, though, I learned how few of the Bible stories my students actually knew—whether they had grown up in congregations like mine or had only been in church once or twice, perhaps with grandparents. So, giving people Bibles is only the first step. Finding ways to encourage reading the Bible is the next step, or a series of steps. The pastors in our congregation didn’t say that the Bible is God’s story, although I am sure they assumed that concept as a foundation for this special event. For some of us present that Sunday, the equation: the Bible is God’s Word had shaped our earliest experiences of listening to Bible stories and learning to read it for ourselves. But for many readers, paying attention to the Bible has given rise to many questions about how that equation really works. Learning from theological declarations and arguments about the Bible as God’s Word is important work, a lifelong task, for people of faith.

As a university instructor, I started out with this basic explanation of the Bible as God’s Word: the Bible contains the one great story of God’s steadfast love for humanity and for all creation. And that saving love was fully revealed to us in the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I hoped that such foundation could also be a springboard for the longer and more complex task of learning the Bible’s story and applying it to our own world. But I discovered delving into God’s love story was not all that was needed. As my students explored biblical accounts, they frequently had questions that surrounded what they were reading.

What follows in this book picks up some of those questions. Each chapter begins with a question, and taken together they trace the journey my students and I have taken over the years, both into the biblical text and into what surrounds it. Readers may want to go straight through all the questions, which are arranged somewhat chronologically. Or you may enter in to one specific question that you have wondered about. As you read, it will soon be obvious that within each question is a series of more related things to ponder. For the Bible as we know it, whatever format we use, also has a story. I hope readers will begin to unpack ways that the Bible’s story intersects with our stories. Perhaps the twelve-year-olds who received those Bibles, or their parents, or some of my students, or any Bible readers, find themselves asking: Wait, what?! Who recorded Moses talking to God? Do we have any artifacts from King Solomon’s temple? Why did Prophet Isaiah think King Cyrus of Persia was a messiah? If Jesus never wrote anything, how do we really know what he said and did? Who copied down and distributed Paul’s letters? And how did all that ancient writing get into English, or Spanish, or Chinese?

Such questions are appropriate and important, yet sometimes they worry readers who wonder whether asking them detracts from taking the Bible seriously as God’s Word. The story that surrounds the Bible is a very human story, spreading across global history and geography, and involving complex political, economic, and cultural interactions. For some scholars, the humanity of these stories diminishes or even destroys claims of divine activity within Scripture. Yet, I think that learning more about the work of storytellers, scribes, translators, and commentators offers us instead a rich account of human efforts inspired and shaped by God’s wisdom and presence. As New Testament scholar Dennis Edwards puts it, The Bible is the supreme example of divine-human collaboration.¹ That declaration is a faith claim. It insists that God has always been willing to use humans in sharing God’s love story.

The first chapter introduces an essential question twenty-first-century readers must consider: What does it mean that we encounter the Bible in our own languages, and how did it get to words we understand, from the ancient tongues in which it was first heard? Throughout this chapter and the entire book, I offer biblical references that readers can look up if desired. All biblical quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) unless otherwise noted. Chapters 2 through 5 deal with some of the most difficult questions in the Bible’s history, because they depend on scholarly theories that may draw on physical evidence but are not always certain. Since the texts of the Bible are not nearly as old as the stories the Bible tells, understanding as much as possible about those theories and the evidence we have requires care and clarity. Chapters 6 through 9 delve into what is known about how biblical texts were copied, edited, selected, and distributed across the world. Finally, we will consider questions about how modern and contemporary readers have described God’s Spirit at work shaping human writing and transmitting of God’s story.

Each chapter also includes excerpts of texts by people who played a role in bringing the Bible to us. Throughout, I write as a Christian, yet I must underline that much of this story also belongs to Jews, with whom Christians share a large portion of the Bible. While I am an outsider to Jewish faith, I am clear that failing to note our shared heritage seriously limits the story. Readers may also wonder what I believe about the Bible, as is your right. Throughout this book I have tried to present as much accurate information as possible, and to recount it so that people of different backgrounds and views can give this information due consideration. My own journey with the Bible goes back to the days of early childhood when my mother helped me memorize Scripture. Over the years I sometimes backed away from the Bible, finding it confining or even insulting to me and my world. But decades of reading, study, and praying Scripture, both formally and informally, have drawn me back to loving the Bible. I am grateful that both the communities to which I belong and my personal commitments are sustained with this confident message: The unfolding of your words gives light (Ps 119:130).

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. Edwards, What Is the Bible?,

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Chapter 1

What Does It Mean to Read the Bible in Translation?

Genesis, the first book in the Bible, includes a story about how human communication was confused, so that people were no longer able to talk with each other (Gen 11 : 1 – 9 ). The story raises interesting theological questions; for example, why does God mix up the languages, in response to human plans which include making a name for ourselves, and not being scattered over the earth? These questions reveal that early biblical storytellers both experienced and wondered about whether linguistic diversity was part of God’s plan. Perhaps they were also considering benefits and drawbacks of reaching across the barriers set up by their differences with the peoples around them.

Of course, Israelite narrators were not the first to think about such matters. Herodotus, a Greek ethno-historian who wrote four centuries before New Testament times, passed along a story from Carthaginians about a silent trade they carried out with other Africans. Each side placed their items for trade, goods or gold, on a river bank and then took turns checking their exchange until each agreed that the trade amount was fair. No matter how historically accurate this report may be, Herodotus described the ancient human desire and need to communicate when they did not share a spoken or written language. Even earlier than Herodotus or the Genesis writers, written texts, whether engraved in stone or inked onto parchment, needed to be translated. Often these documents spelled out political or legal agreements. A treaty or a contract needed to be distributed to all those affected. Rulers expected the territories they had conquered to recognize who was in charge. These ancient written translations reflected the perspective of literate members at the very top of their culture’s hierarchies.

A well-known example of such translation is the Rosetta Stone, discovered in Egypt by French military officers in 1799. This stone monument, likely set up in an Egyptian temple compound, was inscribed by Egyptian priests to celebrate the coronation of King Ptolemy V in 196 BCE. The sacred language of the priests was expressed in hieroglyphic, but the language of Ptolemy, a Hellenistic ruler whose dynasty descended from Alexander the Great, was Greek. In the middle section of the stone, the scribes inserted the text in Demotic Egyptian, the script derived from ancient hieroglyphic, and at the bottom provided a translation into Greek. This monument became the foundation of modern work to decipher ancient hieroglyphics.

Modern scholars who study translation practices and theories point out that translation as a concept can cover a very broad range of situations, as noted in the story of ancient African non-verbal trading. In modern settings, turning a book into a movie, or a scholarly lecture into a popular article, are both kinds of translation. But in professional terms, Translators write, interpreters speak. Thus, in this book, when we speak of translation, we are talking about the work of rendering one written language into another.

Since the Bible’s texts were written down in ancient Hebrew or Aramaic, and in Koine Greek, people who hear or read the Bible in twenty-first-century languages necessarily encounter Scripture in translation. Whatever the translators’ methodology, they have taken on the task of carefully considering the written text in the source language, and seek to shape accurate and clear expressions in a receptor language. We will consider several stories where Bible translation took place, pay attention to how that translation influenced geographic spread of faith communities, and look at some of the knotty problems that translators face.

The story of Bible translation began in Egypt. For Egyptians as well as other Mediterranean peoples, being conquered by the armies of the Greek general Alexander the Great (356–323 BCE) forced them into an encounter with Greek knowledge, culture, and language. Alexander, ruler of Macedonia, had been educated by the Greek philosopher Aristotle. He boasted that he had conquered territory from India to Ethiopia, but Mediterranean peoples felt most strongly the force of their conqueror’s commitment to Greek religion, philosophy, and language. In Egypt, both the Rosetta Stone and the Greek translation of the Hebrew Torah, known as the Septuagint, provide evidence of this widespread hellenization.

Egyptian Jews who translated their Scriptures from Hebrew into Greek, however, cared about more than political accommodation. Ancient victory monuments or treaties of conquest of course also had religious underpinnings, yet the Jews had for the most part suffered on the underside of ancient empires. Jews, who were named after the region known by hellenized rulers as Judea, had for centuries been scattered from Babylon to Asia Minor and Egypt, after their own kingdoms were destroyed. Although their stories included much information about their own kings, these stories also reflected perspectives critical of monarchy. Looking back on the captivity and dispersion they had suffered, Jews interpreted what had happened in terms of their failure to keep their ancient covenant with their God YHWH.¹ By the second century BCE, however, many Jews, especially those living in hellenized Egypt, were no longer able to understand their scriptures in Hebrew. A fascinating text from the second century BCE described how the Torah, that is, the first five books of the Bible, were translated from Hebrew into Greek.

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The Letter of Aristeas, ostensibly from an Alexandrian Jew to his brother, detailed how King Ptolemy of Egypt urged the librarian of Alexandria to acquire all the world’s books, translated into Greek. The high priest in Jerusalem was requested to send seventy-two scholars, six for each of the twelve tribes, to Egypt to translate the Torah. In this section, the letter writer explained the translators’ daily practice as they worked.

At the first hour of the day [the Torah scholars from Jerusalem] attended the court daily, and after saluting [King Ptolemy] retired to their own quarters. Following the custom of all the Jews, they washed their hands in the sea in the course of their prayers to God, and then proceeded to the reading and explication of each point. . . . They explained that [washing hands] is evidence that they have done no evil, for all activity takes place by means of the hands. Thus they nobly and piously refer everything to righteousness and truth. In this way, as we said previously, each day they assembled in their quarters, which were pleasantly situated for quiet and light, and proceeded to fulfill their prescribed task. The outcome was such that in seventy-two days, the business of translation was completed, just as if such a result was achieved by some deliberate design.²

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Scholars agree that the Letter is fictional, but also that the story represented an important cultural moment in the ancient world. First, it described different cultural and religious traditions, and how faithful Jews and learned pagans met each other with mutual respect. By the time the Letter was written, although the text recounted the desire of Hellenistic rulers to have access to the Torah, it is likely that hellenized Jews were the primary audience for the translation. It also underlined that Jews possessed sacred writings that were important to them, and wanted those texts to be widely accessible.³ Of equal importance was this text’s claim of a divine role in the translation. The translation that developed during this period came to be known as the Septuagint (LXX). This Roman-numeral acronym shorthand refers to the seventy-two (in some accounts seventy) translators reported in the Letter. Many Jesus-believers used primarily the LXX, as they told the stories of Jesus and explained how those stories were based on their Bible. The Bible in Greek was also the primary text for gentiles who became part of the Jesus community.

Some centuries after the first Greek translations, Jews living in Babylon began translating and commenting on the Torah in Aramaic, a sister language to Hebrew, in forms called targumim, or interpretations. Although many rabbis continued to read and interpret the texts in Hebrew, the targumim remained useful in some Jewish communities. The targumim are also consulted regularly by modern textual scholars, because they offer both a different window on translation, and some of the interpretational methods emerging in Jewish communities.

Early Christians carried forward the Jewish heritage of translating the Bible. By the third century CE, portions of writings that became known as the New Testament had been translated into Syriac, from the same linguistic family as Hebrew; Coptic, the descendent of Demotic Egyptian, and Old Latin, primarily in North Africa.

As the Christian movement spread, Bible portions also traveled far beyond the Mediterranean world. Merchants had been traveling eastward along the ancient Silk Road, which ended in the west in Antioch, since the second century BCE. In the seventh century CE, Christian monks traveling with the merchants received entrée to the capital of the Chinese Tang Dynasty. A Syriac-speaking Persian monk, Alopen, was authorized by the imperial court to translate the texts brought with him, including parts of the Bible. Several manuscripts discovered in nearby caves, dating from the time of Alopen, offered fascinating glimpses of the translation practices of the Persian monks. For example, the monks adopted Chinese terms such as Cool Wind for the Holy Spirit. But elsewhere they transliterated Syriac words, specifically using Ye-su for Jesus. A monument set up in 781 CE in Shaanxi Province to mark this Christian presence included an overview of the biblical story: Therefore my Lord Ye Su, the One emanating in three subtle bodies, hid his true power, became a human, and came on behalf of the Lord of Heaven to preach the good tidings.⁴ While imperial favor of the Tang rulers was later withdrawn from the Christians, and no lasting Christian community was established in China at that time, this monument had kept a record of one early effort at Bible translation.

In early centuries, Bible translations were recognized primarily for their usefulness. However, the fear that translators were in some way misrepresenting, or even corrupting, the text, was soon expressed.

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Jerome, a fourth-century CE Roman scholar and monk, faced such criticism. Best known