In the beginning

Whose Bible Is It?

A History of the Scriptures through the Ages

Jaroslav Pelikan

Viking, $24, 274 pp.

For most people, shopping for a Bible at the local Barnes & Noble produces symptoms analogous to shopping for a car or a major appliance. As a New Testament scholar, I'm able to offer some assistance to the consumer in distress. Sometimes, if I see someone perusing the Bible section, I can't help myself: "It's like calling NPR's Car Talk," I reassure one shopper. "There's one here that's right for you, but I need more information to make the right diagnosis." Such encounters are much more frequent around Christmastime, but just as last year's holiday rush was winding down, the proofs of Jaroslav Pelikan's new book arrived in the mail.

Pelikan, Sterling Professor of History emeritus at Yale, is well known for both his history of Christian doctrine and his studies of the artistic representation of Jesus through the ages. His engagement with art is evident in the images that open each chapter of Whose Bible Is It? As Pelikan explains in the preface, his impetus for writing the book came from supplying an essay for the program to a Carnegie Hall performance of Handel's Messiah in 1990.

So what can this artistically sensitive scholar say to my Bible-browsing acquaintances? For starters, this book explains where the Scriptures come from, and how they entered the cultural heritage of the West. No mean feat. Some cautions are in order, though. Pelikan lacks sufficient command of contemporary biblical scholarship to provide accurate generalizations about the Hebrew text and its translations or the complex story of the emergence of Jewish and Christian canons. His summaries of various biblical writings are vastly inferior to what can be learned from a good study Bible, such as the New Oxford Annotated, Harper-Collins Study Bible, New Interpreter's Study Bible, or The Catholic Study Bible. At the other end of the spectrum, the book design only identifies the biblical text in question for longer quotes. Pelikan's prose is peppered with shorter quotations and allusions to the Bible that will be familiar to Christian churchgoers. Other readers, though, may miss the quotation marks and not recognize that the Bible is being referred to.

The subtitle of Whose Bible Is It? promises a history. The sequence of twelve chapters moves from something that may be called the oldest part of the Bible, the oral speaking of God to Moses and the prophets, and ends with that performance of Handel's Messiah. Chapters 1 to 4 cover primarily Jewish material: the Tanakh ("torah, prophets, writing") and the Greek translations that would become Scripture in early Christian and Orthodox circles. A quick survey of Jewish interpretation from Talmud and legend concludes chapter 4.

The book then backtracks to cover the emergence of a distinctively Christian Bible in chapters 5 and 6. Pelikan limits his vision of Christian canon history to ancient lists of books included in the canon. He misses the complexity of the first four centuries of Christianity by not investigating the data that are part of contemporary discussions of the canon: the evidence from papyri and early manuscript copies and from citations in Christian authors. Scholars now acknowledge that Christians were not neatly separated from Jews in this period. Many remained convinced that the Hebrew text had priority over the Greek. As for the New Testament, its boundaries were as soft as those of the Christian First Testament (that is, Old Testament). Various writings from the group, referred to as the Apostolic Fathers, turn up in the great fourth- and fifth-century codices. Many other apocryphal Jewish and Christian works were in circulation too, not just the famous Gnostic Gospels. Such evidence shows that Christians did not limit their authoritative texts to those that came to be included as "the Bible." As Pelikan the art historian surely knows, both Jewish and Christian apocrypha helped shape the Christian imaginative repertoire throughout the Medieval period.

Chapters 7 to 9 take up the Latin translations, medieval Christian and Jewish interpreters, the Renaissance and Reformation turn to Hebrew and Greek texts, as well as printing and translation into the vernacular. A few pages mention the Qur'an. Chapters 10, 11, and the opening of 12 bring the story through the emergence of historical-critical scholarship and the Enlightenment up to the contemporary explosion of Bible translations and information. Pelikan picks Karl Barth's great commentary on Romans and Martin Buber's I and Thou as examples of the twentieth-century protest against reducing the Bible to its historical or cultural meaning. Yet this important theological question is not articulated clearly enough for readers unfamiliar with that discussion.

Pelikan does not address some of the basic convictions of religious communities that recur in his book. What makes the Bible applicable to an audience that does not consider it the founding text of its religious tradition? Religious communities who feel themselves bound to hear and obey God's word reflected in the Bible are the audience to which both the biblical authors and most of the later interpreters address themselves. Yet Pelikan suggests that he will indicate what the Bible has to say to an audience of cultured, secular folk. In other words, not only Jews, Catholics, and Protestants, who each hold to the Bible in a different form, but all humanity has a stake in reading and interpreting the Bible. Pelikan argues that the Bible is a story of God and humanity, not a mythological or scientific theory about the origins of everything. Thus, he indirectly rejects those fundamentalists who advocate incorporating biblical views into the public-school science curriculum. Without a more direct explanation of why he takes that position, Pelikan's wide-angle view cannot grapple with the biblical fault lines in twenty-first-century American Christianity over interpreting Genesis and Revelation. He doesn't mention the "Bible war" that divides Protestant America, pitting mainstream denominations who have adopted the New Revised Standard Version against conservative Evangelicals who vehemently adhere to the New International Version. Fundamentalist Christians, too, go virtually ignored: By not directly engaging fundamentalist Christians, Pelikan excludes them. Orthodox Jews may object that treating the prophets merely as commentators on Israel's history misses their significance as commentary on Torah, on the revealed word of God. For an Orthodox Jewish community, "works of the Torah" and prophetic texts belong together in a way they do not for Christian readers. The examples of those whose approaches have been slighted demonstrate the difficulty one finds in isolating a sacred text from the life and practices of believers. One may consider "the Bible" simply as ancient literature or as the founding text for later literature and art. That appears to have been the point from which Pelikan began. Or one may consider it a source for ancient history to be filled out by all the other tools of the trade. But neither of these options comes up for discussion in this book.