Abstract
This paperback, the fourth in an introductory series aimed at Christian study groups, provides an overview of the history of the Bible in thirteen chapters. Written in a consciously colloquial style, each is provided with two to five ‘Study Questions’ at the end and a similar number of items of recommended reading. Only on the back cover do we discover that the course is accompanied by a video study: the first of the thirteen twenty-minute episodes, available on YouTube and consisting solely of a single talking head, suggests that production costs both for video and book have been kept to a minimum in order to ensure wide affordability.
As the title suggests, this book has a specific target audience. The authors acknowledge that their focus is on the Bible in the West, particularly in English, yet the cultural and doctrinal assumptions in the writing make it clear that the first-person plural refers to North American Protestants. The didactic tone of the title is echoed in the book’s sweeping statements: with regard to the canon, we are told that ‘confidence should not be shaken because someone somewhere raised doubts about a few books’ (p. 66), while eyebrows might be raised by assertions that ‘the church has always embraced its Jewish foundation’ (p. 29) and ‘Moses was the principal author of the Torah, save a few passages’ (p. 33). There is no room for dissent when a study question asks ‘In what way did this study strengthen your trust in the reliability of the transmitted text?’ (p. 39).
From an academic point of view, the authors do a good job in condensing two millennia of history into fewer than two hundred pages. They are also not afraid to challenge unreflective dogmatic positions. With regard to sola scriptura, readers are reminded ‘Not that Scripture ever stands alone without other, lesser authorities’ (p. 118). The King James Version, although characterised as ‘the Bible most Christians read on a regular basis’ (p. 179) is acknowledged neither to be a completely new translation nor free from error (pp. 159–162); preferring it for its Greek textual base ‘could be based only on hysteria and a crass appeal to tradition’ (p. 184).
Occasional hints of a revisionary approach which minimises certain historical figures may reflect the culture in which the book was produced. Alcuin is presented as clinging to ‘a dying language’ (p. 94) even though it is admitted that Latin continued to be used for another five hundred years (p. 113). As for printing, the ‘business-savvy’ Gutenberg ‘often gets all the credit for something that instead lay dormant before he leveraged technology to advance production’ (p. 101). Jerome, ‘perhaps the last great Hebrew scholar before the Renaissance’ (p. 29) was also ‘a great big grump’ (p. 77). Even Tyndale himself does not compare with the ‘lovably feisty’ Julia E. Smith Parker: ‘only in nineteenth-century America does one find such plucky individualism associated with Bible translation’ (p. 174).
A few minor errors and inconsistencies are of little account in the scheme of the volume, although the opprobrium heaped on the ‘awful’, ‘sloppy’ and ‘pitiful’ Old Latin translation is unwarranted (pp. 84–5). The goal of the authors is to present ‘a biography of your modern Bible’ (p. 27). For some of their readership they will have accomplished this, yet others may be spurred by the recommended reading and their own inquisitiveness to find different ways of telling this story.