APPENDIX: SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

The ancient writings that make up the Bible’s cutting room floor are, for the most part, well known within the halls of the academy, so there are plenty of scholarly essays and books about them. Equally, as with most matters connected to the Bible and religion, there’s no shortage of popular books that overcome the stiffness of typical academic prose but at the expense of accuracy; they end up easy to read but wrong.

And the deficiencies of both kinds of writing are only exaggerated on the Internet.

This puts the reader looking for more information in a bind. On the one hand, the sheer volume of readily available material means that it’s easy to find a book or essay about almost any of the topics I’ve presented here. But that same quantity, coupled with the grossly uneven quality that these works achieve, makes it much easier to find bad information than good. (I try to counteract this trend on my site, The Unabridged Bible, at www.TheUnabridgedBible.com. There, you’ll find a comprehensive list of the documents from the Bible’s cutting room floor, along with links to quality online writing about them, an expanded glossary of the people and places connected to them, and a variety of additional supporting material.)

My hope is that the following suggestions will guide the reader to some sources that strike me as helpful. Surely there are many other valuable works that don’t appear here, though. By excluding them, I don’t mean to imply that they have no value. And I offer my apologies to their authors in advance, for not recognizing their work, and to my readers, for my inadvertent complicity in keeping them in the dark.

Translations

The first thing the reader will want is full translations of the material from chapters 2–7. Here there is both good news and bad.

The good news is that translations are readily available.

The bad news is that they tend to be outdated, because many of them were composed some time ago. And they tend to be overly literal, partly for the same reason, partly because the texts are sometimes obscure, and partly because the scholars who translate the texts are usually not professional translators. So we end up with renderings of Josephus like “Nay, Nicolaus of Damascus, in his ninety-sixth book, hath a particular relation about them; where he speaks thus:…” for what could more simply be, “Even Nicolaus of Damascus, in his 96th book, has this to say…” Or we find translations along the lines of, “he died a death” for what should just be “he died.” And so on.

Still, with a little work the modern reader can find the gist, if not the nuance and poetry, of most of the ancient texts, as follows:

Almost all the Dead Sea Scrolls are available in translation from Florentino García Martínez and Eibert J. C. Tigchelaar’s The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition, published in 2000. It comes in a reasonably priced two-volume paperback edition, and it contains a comprehensive summary of transcriptions and translations of the nonbiblical Dead Sea Scrolls. You’ll find the original Hebrew or Aramaic text alongside a fairly good word-level English translation. So start here to read the Dead Sea Scrolls for yourself.

The Septuagint is available in English in Sir Lancelot C. L. Brenton’s 1851 translation, called The Septuagint, now in the public domain. You can find it online or in the 1986 reprint by Hendrickson Publishers. Oxford University Press has a more contemporary translation by Albert Pietersma and Benjamin G. Wright, published in 2007 under the name A New English Translation of the Septuagint.

The standard eighteenth-century translation of Josephus, by William Whiston, is also in the public domain and readily available online and in various print and e-book compilations. It’s not ideal, but it’s the best there is.

Translations of the Life of Adam of Eve, the Apocalypse of Abraham, and Enoch are available in volumes 1 and 2 of The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, edited by James H. Charlesworth and available from both Yale University Press and from Doubleday. The books are expensive, but affordable used copies can often be found. The Life of Adam and Eve is in the second volume (published in 1985), the Apocalypse of Abraham and Enoch in the first (published in 1983). This is a compilation you’ll want to own anyway, as I describe below, so start looking for your copies now.

My And God Said: How Translations Conceal the Bible’s Original Meaning, published in 2010 by Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, explains why translating ancient texts is so hard, details how modern translations distort the original text of the Bible, and explains what modern readers can do to see past these mistakes. Though focusing more narrowly on the Old Testament, it will give readers a sense of what they get and what they miss when they read translations of the material from the Bible’s cutting room floor.

I’ve referred to three Bible translations in these pages.

The JPS (Jewish Publication Society) translation is the most popular Jewish translation, and it comes in two versions, the first JPS translation from 1917 and a newer one, sometimes called the NJPS translation, published in 1985. The NJPS has two editions, the original translation and a revised gender-inclusive text. The 1917 version is no longer in copyright, so it’s widely available for free online, but it’s outdated. The 1985 version is also widely available in print and e-book editions. As a Jewish translation, it only covers the Old Testament.

The NRSV (New Revised Standard Version) translation is, in my opinion, unsurpassed as an English translation of the Old and New Testaments, for the reasons I describe in And God Said. It is widely available in print and e-book editions and available online.

The KJV (King James Version), though outdated as a translation, remains influential and, in addition, helps us understand what people four hundred years ago thought the Bible meant. Though technically still in copyright (in perpetuity, the copyright being held by the Crown), Her Highness Queen Elizabeth II graciously allows its use almost without restriction.

General

The same two-volume edition we just saw, The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, is an excellent way to continue studying the Bible’s cutting room floor. It is a remarkably comprehensive compilation of ancient writings, offering scholarly analysis in addition to translations of dozens of major and minor works from antiquity. Both volumes also contain three forewords (indicated as being for the general reader, for the Jewish reader, and for the Christian reader) and a general overview of the material.

The way that edition treats the individual works is also typical of what’s available. You’ll find short summaries of what’s in each work, when and where it was written, how we know about it, why it’s important, and where to find more information. Equally, the edition does a good job conveying the degree to which we have confidence in our information, helpfully noting when scholars themselves disagree. It’s not easy reading, but (unlike some scholarly publications), at least it’s almost entirely in English; only the footnotes assume that the reader can keep up with French, German, Russian, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Aramaic, and more. The only major deficiency I’ve found when using the two-volume set is that the fourteen-page list of abbreviations is sorted by type, so if you see an abbreviation, you often have to look through more than one list to find out what it means. Though The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha is comprehensive, even that edition is not complete. Additional material can be found in a more recent 2013 publication of almost the same name: Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. Consisting of two volumes (one of which is still forthcoming as I write this), the subtitle—“More Noncanonical Scriptures”—describes its nature exactly. It’s edited by Richard Bauckham, James Davila, and Alexander Panayotov, and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans.

The Secret Book of James that I mention in passing in chapter 4 is part of the collection of fourth century A.D. codices found at Nag Hammadi in Egypt. Thanks to Elaine Pagels’s excellent book The Gnostic Gospels (available in a 1989 paperback edition from Vintage), these, along with some other manuscripts, are widely known as the Gnostic Gospels. Pagels’s book about them is a great place to start.

Because most of these Gnostic Gospels come from Nag Hammadi, they are also called the Nag Hammadi Scriptures, and a book by that name, edited by Marvin Meyer and published in paperback in 2007 by HarperOne, has translations of them with commentary by the translators. Another option, also from HarperOne, is The Nag Hammadi Library in English, edited by James Robinson and published in 1990.

History

The history from chapter 1 is fairly well known, and histories of the first millennium B.C. are easy to come by, though most of them do not indicate the tentative nature of some of the information—particularly when it comes from only one or two sources, like the Bible or Josephus.

For following up on what you’ve read here, start with H. W. F. Saggs’s Civilization before Greece and Rome, published in 1989 by Yale University Press. It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read, and a beautiful example of how to combine scholarly research and accuracy with engaging prose. As the title suggests, it’s about what happened before Greece and Rome. I’m not aware of any better introduction to the forces that shaped the first part of the first millennium B.C.

J. M. Roberts has a 1976 volume—since reprinted many times—from Oxford University Press with the only slightly pretentious title History of the World. It’s obviously not as detailed as a single book about, say, Alexander the Great or King Herod, but it’s better than an encyclopedia and is a marvelous addition to any bookshelf. Only some parts overlap with the history that concerns us here, but those parts make the book worth it.

For the specific period from about 200 B.C. to A.D. 200, a great place to start is A. R. C. Leaney’s The Jewish & Christian World: 200 B.C. to A.D. 200, published by Cambridge University Press in 1984. It’s the seventh volume of their Cambridge Commentaries on Writings of the Jewish & Christian World 200 B.C. to A.D. 200, and it expands on much of the historical narrative I’ve presented.

Dead Sea Scrolls

I’ve already mentioned that the best way to start reading the Dead Sea Scrolls is García Martínez and Tigchelaar’s The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition. It contains everything except the biblical material. You can get that from the 2002 paperback edition of The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible, by Martin Abegg, Peter Flint, and Eugene Ulrich. While their work doesn’t give you the original Hebrew, it does tell you where the Dead Sea Scrolls differ from the Masoretic text of the Old Testament.

My presentation in chapter 2 of how the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered and brought to light is fairly comprehensive. For another take on the riveting story, you can try the introduction of Florentino García Martínez and Wilfred G. E. Watson’s The Dead Sea Scrolls Translated, published in 1996 by William B. Eerdmans.

Because the Dead Sea Scrolls are the oldest significant manuscripts we have, you’ll want to see some them. Start with Ayala Sussmann and Ruth Peled’s Scrolls from the Dead Sea, which contains some lovely full-color photos. Then plan a trip to Jerusalem to see them in person at the Shrine of the Book.

Septuagint

A good next step in learning about the Septuagint is Karen H. Jobes and Moisés Silva’s Invitation to the Septuagint, published in 2000 by Baker Academic. It gives you a concise history of the Septuagint, some interesting photos of various manuscripts (sadly, in black and white), and a series of increasingly narrow essays about the content and importance of the Septuagint. For some parts of the book it helps to know Hebrew and Greek, because those languages appear in their native scripts, rather than in English transliteration, but readers can equally skip over those parts and still get most of the main thrust.

You’ll also want a translation, as indicated above.

Josephus

Many people’s first instinct when they first become interested in Josephus is to try to read what he actually wrote. Unfortunately, this is a daunting task. His complete works, as translated by William Whiston, run about half a million words, frequently in complex, almost archaic English. And while the notes help a little, the reader still has to know a fair deal about the ancient world to keep up.

Steve Mason has a better place to start. His Josephus and the New Testament (second edition published 2003 by Hendrickson Publishers) is an excellent guide to Josephus in general and, in addition, accomplishes the author’s more specific goal of exploring how Josephus and the New Testament overlap. It is a natural place to follow up on the issues from chapter 4. It is a fine example of what I might call the “new scholarship”: it is well researched and footnoted though still generally readable by lay audiences, and you only need to know one language to read it: English.

Adam and Eve, Abraham, and Enoch

It is easy to find books about the Life of Adam and Eve, the Apocalypse of Abraham, and especially Enoch, and most of them are not very good. Rather than searching around at random, a good place to follow up on these three books is Charlesworth’s comprehensive two-volume series, mentioned above. It will take some work to read through the scholarly presentations there, but it’s worth it.

How the Bible Became a Book

In addition to the documents and writings themselves, one of my major themes here has been how those texts turned into what we now call “the Bible,” along with related themes like why some texts were included, others excluded, and others yet modified. Unfortunately, the simple question, How did the Bible become a book? defies any simple or even widely accepted answer.

William M. Schniedewind has a book published in 2004 by Cambridge University Press. Its title, How the Bible Became a Book, suggests that it might offer an answer. It does not, because, as Schniedewind explains, he primarily addresses the writing of the individual scrolls, not their compilation into one book. Still, it’s a great place to start exploring these issues. In particular, his first chapter, “How the Bible Became a Book,” provides a succinct and clear overview of the issues surrounding the written texts that we now call the Bible.

Schniedewind correctly points out that the nature of writing in antiquity is closely related to the writings that became the Bible and its cutting room floor. My own belief is that writing was widespread among at least some of the Jews (and, therefore, early Christians), for the reasons I explain in detail in my In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language (NYU Press, 2004). Unfortunately, Karel van der Toorn in his excellent Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible, published in 2009 by Harvard University Press, presents evidence that points toward much more limited literacy. But he doesn’t refute any of my evidence. So we’re left with two convincing but contradictory explanations about the very nature of writing that underpins all the ancient manuscripts that were available for inclusion in the Bible. If you figure out which one of us is right, please let me know.

Finally, all of the sources I’ve mentioned here have their own suggested reading lists.

Happy reading.