A History of the Bible Quotes

“become the New Testament than from the Old, even though they generally do not use citation formulas such as ‘it is written’ with New Testament material.13 Rather than seeing Jesus, known through the Gospels, as a reference point even more important than the Old Testament Scriptures, Christians after Irenaeus started to see the Gospels, the Letters and the Old Testament as all equally authoritative, parts of a unified Holy Bible. ‘Bible’ is in origin a plural – ta biblia in Greek, ‘the books’ – but a sense developed, certainly by the end of the third century, that the books were in reality a single one with many parts. This marked a departure from the earliest Christian perception.”
― John Barton, A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book

“The thirty-first of October 1517, when Martin Luther is said to have posted his ninety-five theses against indulgences on the door of the Castle Church in the small town of Wittenberg in Saxony,”
― John Barton, A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book

“The Gospels, treated so solemnly in later Christian life and liturgy, are the distillation of traditions about Jesus, and as such were also naturally highly regarded and copied for subsequent generations, but they were not seen by the first Christians as verbally exact: there was no tradition, as there was in Judaism, of precise copying of the text – with the consequence that New Testament manuscripts vary greatly, and none is authoritative.”
― John Barton, A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book

“The books of what is now the Old Testament thus probably came into existence between the ninth and the second centuries BCE. This does not necessarily mean that the records of earlier ages are pure fiction, but it makes it hard to press their details as solid historical evidence. Many readers of the Bible would recognize that the stories of the early history of the world – Noah’s Ark, the Tower of Babel – are mythical or legendary, but it may be more challenging to think that the stories of Abraham or Jacob or Moses are also essentially legends, even though people bearing those names may well have existed. No one is in a position to say they are definitely untrue, but there is no reasonable evidence that would substantiate them. This is also the case with the early kings, Saul, David and Solomon, even though the stories about them do make sense within a period (the eleventh and tenth centuries BCE) about which we know something, from the archaeological record. With the later, eighth- and seventh-century kings (for example, Hezekiah and Jehoiachin) there is definite corroboration from Assyrian and Babylonian records, and we are less in the dark. But even some of the stories of life after the exile, in the Persian period, may be fictional: most biblical scholars think that the book of Esther, for example, is a kind of novella rather than a piece of historical writing. A later date does not of itself mean that a given book is more likely to be accurate: much depends on its genre, as we shall see in the next chapter. The biblical books of the Old Testament thus probably span a period of about eight centuries, though they may incorporate older written material – ancient poems, for example – and may in some cases rest on older, orally transmitted folk-memories. But the bulk of written records in ancient Israel seem to come from a core period of the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, with heavy concentrations in some particular ages: most think, for example, that the period of the exile was particularly rich in generating written texts, as was perhaps the early Persian age, even though we know so little about the political events of the time. The flowering of Israelite literature thus came a couple of centuries earlier than the classical age in Greece. The Old Testament, taken by and large, is thus older than much Greek literature, but not enormously so. Compared with the literature of ancient Mesopotamia or Egypt, however, Israelite texts are a late arrival.”
― John Barton, A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book

“the medieval period (Chapter 15) the tendency to read the text in the light of one’s prior beliefs becomes even more evident, but so does the emphasis on the Bible (interpreted correctly) as the source of all religious truth. The reading of the Bible at the Reformation (Chapter 16) inherited medieval methods and approaches, but it also paved the way for the critical questions that would come to characterize Enlightenment and modern biblical study. Martin Luther in particular pioneered a willingness to challenge parts of the Bible on the basis of theological principles.”
― John Barton, A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book

“These beliefs are partly drawn from Scripture, partly not, and the interplay between the surface meaning of the biblical text and the meanings that have been read into it is part of the fascination of biblical study. In”
― John Barton, A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book

“Printed Hebrew Bibles all derive from a single eleventh-century manuscript, whereas all printed New Testaments are based on the comparison of various different manuscripts. The”
― John Barton, A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book

“The books which were actively excluded (Chapter 11) were in nearly all cases considerably later and less reliable than those that were accepted.”
― John Barton, A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book

“There were in fact hardly any decisions about what should or should not be canonical. All, or almost all, the books of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible (Chapter 9) were accepted as Scripture by widespread consensus, in some cases probably not long after they were composed; only at the fringes was there any dispute. In the early Church (Chapter 10) as in Judaism, acceptance and citation of books long preceded any formal rulings about the limits of the canon. When there were such rulings, they usually simply endorsed what was already the case, while leaving a few books in a category of continuing uncertainty.”
― John Barton, A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book

“There is a widespread belief that the contents of the Bible were decided at a number of Church councils, no earlier than the fourth century CE, and that they excluded a substantial body of works that the Church authorities regarded as heretical. The third part of the book contests that belief.”
― John Barton, A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book

“The Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles (Chapter 8) derive from the second half of the first century.”
― John Barton, A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book

“The earliest surviving texts of this new religion are not Gospels but letters, those of Paul deriving from the 50s CE, twenty years or so after Jesus’ crucifixion.”
― John Barton, A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book

“Finally I examine poetic texts (Chapter 5), especially the Psalms and their obscure origins and uses. The Psalms have been attributed to a number of different periods in the history of Israel, from the time of King David (eleventh or tenth century BCE) down to the age of the Maccabees (second century BCE). One important theory suggests that they were used liturgically in the worship of Solomon’s Temple, but many may also have arisen as personal prayers.”
― John Barton, A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book

“especially the Psalms and their obscure origins and uses. The Psalms have been attributed to a number of different periods in the history of Israel, from the time of King David (eleventh or tenth century BCE) down to the age of the Maccabees (second century BCE).”
― John Barton, A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book

“This is even more obviously true of the books of the prophets (Chapter 4), which arose from various specific political crises in Israel’s history, and in any case often seem to speak in riddles.”
― John Barton, A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book

“but even such apparently universal texts as the Ten Commandments were written for and presuppose a society utterly different from our own, and cannot be applied today without extensive interpretation.”
― John Barton, A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book

“Reading these books raises what will be a recurring theme: given that they tell a story rather than give instruction on what to believe or to do, the path from the biblical text to religious belief and practice in Judaism or Christianity today is far from straightforward.”
― John Barton, A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book

“All, or almost all, of the books were complete by the age of Alexander the Great (356–323 BCE).”
― John Barton, A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book

“. It has been popularly assumed that the Bible, bearing the stamp of Divine authority, must be complete, perfect, and unimpeachable in all its parts, and a thousand difficulties and incoherent doctrines have sprung out of this theory.23”
― John Barton, A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book

“sets the scene for my treatment of the Bible in this book. I wish to show how it came into being, developed and was used and interpreted down the years, in both Christianity and Judaism. In the process I shall call in question the tendency of religious believers to treat it as so special that it cannot be read as any other book might be – ‘attributing unto Scripture more than it can have’, as Hooker put it. Yet at the same time I shall not seek to diminish the sense, shared by believers and many non-believers alike, that the Bible is a collection of great books. That it is not perfect (and what could be meant by a perfect book anyway?) does not mean it is of poor quality: on the contrary, these are some of the most profound texts humanity has produced. I have no intention to ‘cause even those things which indeed it hath most abundantly, to be less reverently esteemed’.”
― John Barton, A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book

“Fundamentalist models of scriptural authority – and even official attitudes towards it in non-fundamentalist churches – elide this historical dimension by treating the Bible as in some sense a single book.”
― John Barton, A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book

“Thus, to return to the Letter of James, if the theory of justification by faith alone really is central to Christian faith, then James must be read as supporting it, despite appearances. It must be saying, not literally that faith is dead without good works, but that the reality of faith can only be seen in the good works that people of faith perform: without good works their faith is not real but only apparent. (This may be a correct interpretation of James: my point here is simply that a commitment to the congruence of the Bible with Christian teaching more or less obliges one to adopt it.)”
― John Barton, A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book

“Protestants have developed theories according to which everything that matters to the religion is somehow present in the Bible, and some have even argued that nothing may be done or believed that the Bible does not explicitly sanction. This, I believe, is an abuse of these texts, which are deeply important for the Christian faith but cannot possibly bear the weight that is sometimes loaded upon them.”
― John Barton, A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book

“To have as its holy text a mixture of works of many genres – predominantly narratives, aphorisms, poems and letters – introduces great complexity into Christianity.”
― John Barton, A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book

“In Christianity, for example, there are absolutely central doctrines, such as that of the Trinity, that are almost entirely absent from the New Testament; conversely, there are central ideas in the New Testament, such as St Paul’s theory of ‘salvation by grace through faith’, that at least until the Reformation were never part of official orthodoxy at all, and even now are not in the creeds. Similarly”
― John Barton, A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book

“The description of the Bible (warts and all) which follows will necessarily make disconcerting reading for those who idealize it, but I will also show that it is not and cannot be the whole foundation of either Judaism or Christianity.”
― John Barton, A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book

“There are versions of Christianity that claim to be simply ‘biblical’ (no versions of Judaism do so), but the reality is that the structures and content of Christian belief, even among Christians who believe their faith to be wholly grounded in the Bible, are organized and articulated differently from the contents of the Bible.”
― John Barton, A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book

“The history of the Bible is thus the story of the interplay between the religion and the book – neither mapping exactly onto the other.”
― John Barton, A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book

“Alongside these descriptive tasks, the book also makes an argument: that the Bible does not ‘map’ directly onto religious faith and practice, whether Jewish or Christian. I will propose that though the Bible – seen as a collection of religious texts – is irreplaceable for many reasons, Christianity is not in essence a scriptural religion, focused on a book seen as a single, holy work. Judaism, similarly, though it greatly reveres the Hebrew Bible, is also not so Bible-centred as is widely thought. Islam perhaps is the ideal type of book religion, and by comparison with it, Judaism and Christianity stand at a considerable distance from their central holy text.”
― John Barton, A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book

“The history will necessarily include a great deal of pre-history, as I explain how biblical books were composed, since few if any are the result of simple composition by one author: most are highly composite, and some even depend on others, so that there is a process of reception of older books going on in younger ones.”
― John Barton, A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book