Classic review: Whose Bible Is It?

[This review from the Monitor's archives originally ran on May 31, 2005.] The news is brimming with religion. People of faith are taking strong stands on both sides of political issues. Jewish settlers are proclaiming a divine right to hold onto land. Evangelicals travel to tsunami-devastated corners of the world offering their faith as the answer for life's tribulations.

At the heart of these manifestations are people's encounters with Holy Scriptures - and their differing interpretations of what the sacred texts mean.

Over the millennia, both Jewish and Christian communities have been shaped and reshaped by translations and reinterpretations of biblical writings.

In Whose Bible Is It?, distinguished religious historian Jaroslav Pelikan of Yale University offers a masterly overview of this complex development of the Bible over the ages. From its beginnings in the spoken word and oral tradition, through the gathering of written books into canons, to the influence of changing interpretive methods, Pelikan weaves a tapestry of the power of the Word to mold religious communities, nations, and culture.

This engaging, concise, and highly readable work demonstrates that the most influential book in Western civilization has always held different meanings for different peoples. Yet it represents fundamentally a "testimony of faith in the action of God."

Research has brought into question the historical basis of some narratives, but the meaning of those stories, Pelikan says, continues to resonate with people of various cultures in deep and convincing ways. (While fewer Americans are now familiar with the Bible - surveys show an astonishing ignorance of basics - millions around the world are reading it in some 450 languages.)

In describing the evolution of various translations, Pelikan clarifies how the scriptures have both unified religious groups and divided them from one another - Jew from Christian, Catholic from Eastern Orthodox, Protestant from Catholic, Protestant from Protestant.

"The history of Jewish-Christian relations, and then the history of the division within Christendom, is at one level the history of biblical interpretation," he says. This remains true today as the deepest split in Christianity is not between denominations but across denominations over perceptions of the Bible.

In Judaism, the written scriptures are called the Tanakh, and include the Torah (the Pentateuch), the prophets, and other writings (Psalms, Proverbs, etc.).

The canon was fixed in the first century CE. Yet Jews living in Egypt had earlier translated the Hebrew scriptures into Greek, making them a part of world literature.

It was this Greek translation (the Septuagint) that became the Old Testament of the Christian Bible, with Christians appropriating the Jewish scriptures as their own. Viewing Christianity as the fulfillment of biblical promise, and emphasizing an allegorical interpretation, they found references to Jesus where Jews saw other meanings.

"Yet at some point, this 'stupendous claim' of prophecy and fulfillment could no longer function with the combination of written Tanakh and oral tradition ... but had to develop its own written authority ... what we now call 'the New Testament,' " Pelikan writes.

In shaping this testament, disputes arose over the written gospels. The first agreement came in the mid-4th century, and the canon was formally settled in 692, incorporating books seen as connected to the apostles.

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