The Bible As Received

This is the first of two week 2 discussion questions from my Spring 2022 course Understanding the Bible as a Progressive Christian through Pathways Theological Education and discusses the book How the Bible Came to Be by John Barton.

THE BIBLE AS RECEIVED: List the factors that made the process of finalizing the biblical books in writing a complex one for both the Old and New Testaments. Outline the reasons that some books are in the Apocrypha rather than in the Old Testament canon itself.

One factor that was new to me is the urge to have a set of books written or attributed to Moses. (I think this is a good spot to put the sentence I highlighted about author versus writer/scribe versus editor versus compiler that "The biblical world was not familiar with many of our finer distinctions." (p 34) ) The translation into Greek of the Law (5 books of Moses) and Prophets [which was used to be inclusive of what in Judaism today is referenced as the Prophets (Nevi'im) and the Writings (Ketuvim), but that is actually a later innovation], led to them starting to be presented as a single volume or collection. 

For the New Testament, it seems that over the first 100-200 years after Jesus, Christians came to first esteem, then collect together the 4 gospels as we know them, but it took about another 100 years for the current order to be agreed on - chronologically. Paul's letters (and the pseudo-Pauline letters) were likely collected due to a real or imagined belief that he wanted them shared among churches. (Barton mentions that Colossians 4:16 recommends sharing letters between churches, but also that Colossians may not be a genuine Pauline letter.) They are ordered (albeit imperfectly) by length. The other letters were also placed in length order, with the exception that letters by the same author were placed together. This leaves Acts and Revelations to be handled separately. I find it interesting that there were no collections that placed Acts immediately after Luke, despite it being the second half of the story. 

Some of the factors that Barton lists for why different books came to be seen as scripture include: 

*Citations* Mention of or quoting from the book by other well regarded (scriptural) books is a sign that the book may itself be scriptural.

*Authorship* For Jews, scriptural books are written by (or attributed to) prophets; for Christians, it is apostles and their close connections. It's important to note, though that good or valuable information may have been attributed to qualifying authors as much as actual authors may have qualified books as worth making into scripture.

*Date* Christians valued books believed to be written close to the time of Jesus and because Jews believe prophecy ceased after Ezra and that scripture must be written by prophets, only books believed to have been written before 500 BCE would qualify. (This seems to be why Sirach ended up in the Apocrypha.) Jews also seem to have believed that scripture started with Moses, as books attributed to earlier prophets do exist (and some were mentioned in the New Testament.)

*Relevance and Universality* Books that became scripture in Judaism were seen as universally applicable and relevant by the rabbis. In Christianity,  the test was were they relevant to early Christians and Paul, at least, argued for the relevance of the Hebrew scriptures as instructional and predictive of the current (to him) time. Barton seems to argue that the epistles, in particular, became scriptural because they could be "seen as belonging to all times and all places" (p. 64), but I saw nothing in his text to convince me that they were not universalized because they were considered scripture.

Aside from the above mentioned date issue, a major reason books became part of the apocrypha is that at the time of the translation of the bible from Greek to Latin, the Jews in Israel had decided that the books were not canonical, which brought them into doubt. They also were not as commonly quoted in the New Testament or by early Christian leaders. During the Reformation, in an attempt at making the Old Testament canon match the Hebrew canon, the apocryphal books were removed (or set aside in the case of the Lutherans and Anglicans) but the remaining books were not reordered to match the Jewish canonical order.