When I was nine, my parents decided the moment had come for me to have my first proper encounter with the Bible, and duly bought a lavishly illustrated, child-friendly version of the Christian gospels. The Old Testament, with its gruesome tales of Sodom and Gomorrah and the destruction of the Canaanites, was carefully left in the bookshop.
Having read John Barton’s magisterial history of the unexpurgated biblical text, I now see that Mum and Dad were inadvertent followers of Marcion, the second-century heretic who rejected the intemperate God of the Israelites and left the Hebrew Bible out of his pared-down canon altogether. Who knew? Fortunately our parish priest never found out.
For most of us these days, the New Testament has joined the Old in becoming something of a closed book. Beyond academia and our sparsely populated church pews, scripture has lost its purchase on the collective imagination although, as Barton points out, its maxims and observations remain part of our everyday language. It was the prophet Isaiah, for example, who told us “there is no peace for the wicked” and St Paul who extolled the virtues of “a labour of love”.
An Anglican priest and Oxford professor, Barton brings the Good Book splendidly back to life. Stripping away centuries of theological interpretation, he recovers the biblical text as a “repository of writings” – narratives, aphorisms, poems and letters – that both Christianity and Judaism have used, twisted and embellished for their own purposes. It is an exhilarating achievement, freeing a vast, heterogeneous body of work from the dead hand of religious authorities who had turned it into “a paper dictator”.
The account of the Hebrew Bible, or in Christian terms, the Old Testament, is a tour de force. Barton dates the texts it contains as almost certainly written from the eighth century BCE onwards – well after the times of Moses, Solomon and David and far from being a contemporaneous source of information on the exile of the Israelites in Egypt and their triumphant return to the promised land. The books are, rather, a later distillation of folk memory and foundation myth, constituting an uplifting national literature “for a small nation ... the size of Wales”.
While the high drama lies in the immemorial and unverifiable past, the books of Wisdom and Law form a kind of practical guide to community life in ancient Israel. The “man of Proverbs”, for example, seems to get by according to a series of pragmatic aphorisms that indicate the advisability of keeping one’s head down. Proverbs 25: 6-7, for example, warns cagily: “Do not put yourself in the king’s presence/or stand in the place of the great;/for it is better to be told, ‘Come up here’/than to be put lower in the presence of a noble.”
Job, on the other hand, whose chastening encounter with God is also traditionally placed among the Wisdom books, gets perhaps the most ferocious dressing-down in the history of literature when he puts his head above the parapet. Challenging God over the injustices that seem to be visited upon him despite his blameless life, Job receives a withering put-down. God doesn’t even try to answer his rash question, “Why me?”, instead delivering an assertion of his own majesty: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth?/Tell me if you have understanding/Who determined its measurements – surely you know!”
The sufferings of Job take their place in the plotline that links the Hebrew bible and the Christian New Testament: the fraught relationship between humanity and the one God who first appeared to Moses and later, according to Christian belief, gave his only son, Jesus, who was crucified to atone for our sins and then rose from the dead.
The theological gear change necessitated by the new faith in Christ’s divinity, death and resurrection, and the subsequent history of Christian doctrine, is superbly narrated by Barton. From the first, the gospel writers and Christian thinkers sought to give the Hebrew Bible a suitably forward-looking spin, digging out apparent ‘testimonia’ to the coming of Christ in the older text. The Book of Isaiah in particular, with its references to “a son given to us ... a prince of peace” (Isaiah 9:2-7), was pressed into service. It was even repositioned towards the end of the Old Testament in the Christian bible, where its verses could form a bridge to the gospels, in which its “prophecies” would be fulfilled.
The “prince of peace” passage still features every Christmas Eve at the much-loved Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at King’s College, Cambridge, though Barton says it is likely to have referred to the birth of a royal child at the time it was written. Similarly, Barton finds little support in the gospels for later Trinitarian thinking on the equal status of Christ with God the Father. In Judaism, meanwhile, the Midrash tradition performed its own sleights of hand to explain away textual anomalies in the ancient books.
Along with the evident conviction that this marvellous “melee of materials” deserved fresh treatment beyond the absurdities of Da Vinci Code-style fantasies (conspiracy theories about the Bible’s compilation are well and truly laid to rest), it is this desire to free the Bible from overzealous interpreters that sums up Barton’s intellectual project. Asserting a perfect fit between scripture and the faiths of either Judaism or Christianity means doing violence to a set of texts that are open, mutually contradictory, historically situated, utterly diverse in genre and all the more suggestive for that.
Fundamentalists will not be queuing up to up to buy A History of the Bible: the Book and its Faiths. But for believers of a more open disposition, and non-believing lovers of great literature, reading it will be a revelation and a delight.
· A History of the Bible: The Book and Its Faiths by John Barton is published by Allen Lane (£25). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
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