What is the Bible?
Part 2
Series Intro…
For many this may seem
like a very simple question, even silly. Everybody knows what the Bible is,
right? Yet, it’s really not simple at all. In this series of posts it is my
hope to share the variety of answers that are legitimately possible to that question.
If you are Catholic
the Bible consists of 7 more texts that make up the Old Testament than does the
Protestant Bible (i.e., Tobit, Judith, 1 & 2 Maccabees, Wisdom, Sirach,
Baruch/Letter of Jeremiah). If you are Eastern Orthodox you add another two texts
to the Old Testament (i.e., 1 Esdras and 3 Maccabees). If you are a Protestant,
you might have been told that these additional books were not part of the “original
Bible.” But that would be a faulty belief. First of all, there was not one, officially and universally accepted, “original Bible.” Second, the earliest collection of “biblical” texts we have (in book
form, called a “codex”), contains texts NOT found in the modern Protestant
Bible. Please read carefully the following quotations from British Library
website.
Despite its rather
austere appearance, Codex Sinaiticus is a treasure beyond price. Produced in
the middle of the 4th century, the Codex is one of the two earliest Christian
Bibles. (The other is Codex Vaticanus in Rome.) Within its beautifully
handwritten Greek text are the earliest surviving copy of the complete New
Testament and the earliest and best copies of some of the Jewish scriptures, in
the form that they were adopted by the Christian Church. As one of the earliest
luxury codices to survive in large part, the Codex forms one of the most
important landmarks in the history of the book…The Codex [Sinaiticus] is
critical to our understanding of the history of the Christian Bible and the
development of Christianity. It is one of the two earliest surviving
manuscripts into which the full 'canon' (collection of accepted texts) of the
Christian Bible was copied into one volume. It is thus the antecedent of modern
Christian Bibles. Before this date the individual books of the Bible were
copied into much smaller volumes, often comprising only one or a handful of
texts. The ambition of the Codex to include the entire canon of Christian
scriptures coincides with the adoption of Christianity by Emperor Constantine
the Great and an attempt to define once and for all, or 'codify', the texts
that qualified as sacred scripture.[1]
Possibly the oldest complete Bible, certainly the
oldest complete copy of the New Testament, Codex Sinaiticus was copied in the
middle of the 4th century. It originally contained the Septuagint (a Greek translation of the 48 books of the Christian
Old Testament and Apocrypha), the 27 books of the New Testament, and two more
early Christian writings, the Shepherd of Hermas and the Letter of Barnabas.[2]
The development of
the Christian canon has a long and complicated history.[3]
While the main branches of Christianity agree on the 27 texts of the New Testament,
they disagree on what is included in the Old Testament. As we’ll see in future
posts, the Dead Sea Scrolls and quotations found in the New Testament suggest that
both Second Temple Judaism and the early Christianity had a broader view of what
texts they considered to be scripture than most people of Jewish or Christian faith
do today.
[3] Here is a very simplistic, but useful, overview of the history of the canon
of scripture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFEBwfYZBJY&t=2s
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