INTRODUCTION

The book we know as the Bible is not so much a single book as a library. It is a collection of books, written by different authors, at different times, and dealing with a wide range of concerns. We recognize this fact when we refer to the Bible as “the Scriptures,” a term that implies we are not dealing with one book but with many. Even our English word “Bible” was originally not a singular noun but a plural one, for it comes from the Greek term ta biblia, which means simply “the books.” Only very late in its history did the corresponding Latin word biblia come to be treated as a singular noun.

Imagine that you were to walk into your local public library and pick up a book entirely at random off the shelves. As you opened the book, there would be a number of questions that would immediately spring to mind. First of all, you might ask yourself, “What sort of book is this? Is it a ‘how-to’ book, such as a car repair manual, or a work on home decorating? Is it a work of fiction, such as a novel? Is it a history book, telling what purports to be a true story of a person or place? Or is it a textbook, setting out the fundamental ideas of some field of study?”

If you were not able to answer these questions, you would hardly know what to do with the book you were holding. What use would it be to you? How could you begin to understand it? As you continued turning the pages, other questions might occur to you. You might ask, for instance, “Who wrote this book? When was it written? For what purpose was it written? How is it set out? Does it, for example, tell a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end?” These questions, too, would help you to understand the book better and to use it more intelligently.

Each volume in the New Collegeville Bible Commentary series will deal with one or more of the books that form the biblical library. In studying that book, it will ask precisely these questions. What sort of book is this? When was it written? By whom was it written and for what purpose? How does it organize its material and present its message? It is important to try to answer such questions if we are to read biblical books intelligently.

This volume, however, is intended as an introduction to the series as a whole. For this reason it is not devoted to any one of the biblical books; it is intended to be a guide to the library as a whole. What we will be looking at in the following pages is the history of this collection of writings and the ways in which it has been used. The questions we will be interested in are: Who founded this library? What books are found in it, and why were they selected? How has the collection developed over time? The following pages will also discuss how the library has been used over the long period of its history. What authority has been given to this particular collection of books and why? What instructions have been given for their interpretation during the long period that they have been regarded as Sacred Scripture?

In a word, this short work is intended to provide an initial orientation to the Bible for the general reader. It aims to help you read both the Bible itself and its commentaries with a sense of the contexts out of which they have come. It will therefore discuss all the matters traditionally dealt with in an introduction to the Bible. To use some technical terms, which we will come across later, it will deal with issues of the biblical text, the biblical canon, biblical authority, and biblical criticism. But rather than discussing these matters in the abstract, it will do so in a broadly historical context. It will examine the origin of the biblical writings and the ongoing story of their interpretation by reference to wider changes in the Christian community and in the society to which it belongs.

The focus of this short book will be on the Christian churches and—in more recent times—the Catholic Church. But it is important to realize that the Christians are not the only people for whom the Bible is Sacred Scripture. The first part of the Bible, which Christians call the Old Testament, is also Jewish Scripture, read and studied in the synagogue in the same way as the Christian Bible is read and studied in the churches. The Jewish Bible, otherwise known as the Hebrew Bible, is often referred to simply as Tanak, a word made up of the initial letters of the Hebrew names of its three principal parts: the Torah (Law), the Neviim (the Prophets), and the Ketuvim (the Writings).

Insofar as it deals with the origins of the Old Testament books, the present volume will also be dealing with the origins of Tanak. To the extent that both Jews and Christians make reference to these writings, they share a common set of Scriptures. But when it comes to the interpretation of these writings, the two traditions part company. Jews and Christians read and understand these common Scriptures very differently. The present work will deal only with the history of Christian biblical interpretation; it will not try to deal with the Jewish. It would take another book to do justice to that topic, one written by an author with a more profound knowledge of Judaism. All I want to do here is to offer a warning. The attitudes towards the Bible described here are not the only attitudes that can be taken by people of faith. There is a parallel and very rich history of interpretation with which this introduction cannot deal.

In fact, there is a second history that this short work does not cover. This is the history of the use of the Bible outside the world of religious thought. It is the history of the Bible as a cultural artifact: its use by painters, musicians, poets, and playwrights and the role it has played in the development of our thinking on a range of issues, from politics to psychology. This would be a fascinating field of study, for—whatever one thinks of the Bible’s message—it would be hard to overestimate its cultural significance.

One could study, for instance, the changing ways in which painters and sculptors have depicted biblical scenes or the ways in which poets have used biblical themes to add resonance to their works. One could trace the influence of biblical patterns of thought on thinkers as apparently irreligious as Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). Sadly, however, I cannot deal with this topic either. In fact, no one person could hope to do it justice. A proper treatment of the Bible’s cultural significance would require a whole team of authors with expertise in these different fields of study.

Finally, there is a third history of the Bible that the present study will not be able to discuss. This is the history of how the Bible has actually been used within the Christian community but at the grassroots level (as it were), outside the relatively rarified world occupied by bishops and theologians. A history of this sort would look at the use of the Bible by popular preachers, by teachers in classrooms, and by leaders of church discussion groups.

It would also examine the ways in which individuals have used the Bible, irrespective of what their teachers may have taught them. For instance, there exists a long-standing custom of solving personal dilemmas by opening the Bible at random and seeking an answer in whatever verse comes to hand. While widely condemned by church authorities and theologians, the practice continues to be used in our own time. In previous ages, biblical verses have also been used in charms and amulets, to ward off the power of evil in ways that many would regard as magical.

A history of such unofficial practices would be an extraordinarily interesting one, but it also falls outside the scope of the present work. What we are interested in here is what has been said about the Bible by its officially sanctioned interpreters and by those who have sought to influence them. It is a history of what we might call the institutional interpretation of the Bible within the Christian churches.

The present work falls naturally into two parts. The first will concentrate on the origins of the Bible. It will offer a glimpse of the ways in which the people of Israel and then, in later centuries, the early Christians gathered this collection together and gave it the status of Sacred Scripture. This is the foundational section of the present study. After all, until there was an official collection of biblical writings, there was nothing for later Christians to interpret.

The second and larger part of our work will deal with the history of biblical interpretation. The survey found here will be divided into four periods. The first period is the longest, embracing both the age of those who are known as the church fathers and the Middle Ages. If we were to assign dates to this period, it would take us from about the year 200 to about the year 1500. Our second major period, that of the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation, takes us from approximately the year 1500 to about 1650. This is a much shorter period, but it is one in which Western Christianity experienced revolutionary changes.

Our third period is the one I have described as the modern era. This may be said to begin with the scientific revolution of the mid-seventeenth century and continue through to our own time. However, we cannot stop there. Recent decades have witnessed a series of revolutions in scholarly attitudes to the Bible. These developments may conveniently be dealt with in a fourth and final section, under the heading of postmodern approaches to biblical interpretation.

While this represents a very broad overview of a very complex history, it may offer the general reader a helpful framework within which to begin to understand the Bible. In particular, it should enable you to appreciate the variety of ways in which the Christian Scriptures can be interpreted. It will also highlight the fact that these methods of biblical interpretation are not timeless. They did not fall from heaven as a user’s guide to a divinely inspired collection of books. They represent attempts by devout but limited human beings to make sense of a set of writings they believed to be God’s word for their time. However much the Bible may be thought to embody an eternal truth, its interpreters remain fallible human beings, bound by the limitations of their time and place.