The Rise and Fall of the Bible

by Timothy Beal

  Before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which include many Hebrew biblical manuscripts dating between 250 BCE and 68 CE, most scholars believed that there was not much variation among different copies of the Jewish Scriptures by the time of Jesus and Paul—that the text was pretty much fixed by then. The earliest known copies of Jewish Scriptures in Hebrew dated to the tenth and eleventh centuries CE, and among them the differences were mostly small and insignificant. Taking them as witnesses to the earlier texts from which they were copied, it seemed logical to conclude that these many homogeneous texts must have derived from a common original via a highly accurate scribal tradition. But evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls seems to contradict this conclusion. Among the hundreds of biblical manuscripts discovered there, many of which are more than a thousand years older than anything scholars had ever seen before, we find not uniformity but diversity, including many significant differences. The logical assumption now is that Jewish Scriptures became more uniform and free of variants over time, as scribes gradually established a more or less standard edition.

  There is reason to believe that the copies of Jewish Scriptures used by early Christians were no less varied than they were among Jewish communities. We already mentioned how the Gospel of Mark begins with a quotation that conflates lines from Isaiah and Malachi, attributing them to Isaiah alone. Perhaps that was how the writer’s copy of Isaiah looked. Or perhaps the writer drew the quote from a testimonia document of scriptural passages believed to contain messianic references. Or perhaps the writer simply drew the quote from memory and wasn’t that worried about being altogether accurate. In any case, the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, both of which appear to have used Mark as one of their literary sources, implicitly correct Mark’s merging of the two prophetic passages by quoting the passage from Isaiah alone (Matthew 3:3 and Luke 3:4).

  As another example, consider the passage from Isaiah that Jesus reads in the Gospel of Luke. It appears to be a quotation from a Greek edition of Isaiah, but it differs significantly from any version of the Septuagint that has survived. The line “he has sent me out to herald relief to the captives” normally appears two chapters earlier in the Septuagint version of Isaiah. Moreover, the phrase “to heal the brokenhearted,” which appears in the Septuagint version of Isaiah 61, does not appear in most surviving copies of Luke (some copies do include it as if to correct the original omission). What to make of these differences? Either the Gospel writer felt at liberty to move things around in the process of quoting Isaiah, or was working from a different version of Isaiah, one that has been lost. In either case, we must conclude that the text of Isaiah was far from fixed and changeless among different Christian communities in the late first century.

  We’re used to picturing the genealogy of a text like a family tree: one original at the base ascending like a single trunk, with copies branching off it, and copies of copies branching off them. And so on throughout the generations. We imagine an original from which all the generations of diversity spring as scribes make revisions and introduce copying errors. But the reverse seems to be the case when it comes to the origins of the Bible: the further you go back in its literary history, the less uniformity there is. Scriptural traditions are rooted, quite literally, in diversity.

  No Canon

  Nor was there anything like a closed canon of Scriptures among early Christians. Not in the first century, not even in the third or early fourth century. In the second letter to Timothy, we read, “All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” Does this refer to Paul’s own letters as they now appear in the New Testament? Certainly not. No one in the first century could even have imagined such a thing as a New Testament canon, let alone the Bible as we think of it these days. Does it refer to the Gospels? No. The earliest of those wouldn’t even be written until long after Paul died. Same with the other writings that eventually made it into the New Testament. No, this passage refers to Jewish Scriptures, probably the Torah and the Prophets. It was not talking about the Bible. There was no such thing.

  Likewise when John of Patmos, in an ancient attempt at divine copyright protection written at the end of the book of Revelation (aka the Apocalypse of John), promises plagues of apocalyptic proportions for anyone who dares change a thing in “this book”:

  I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book [biblion]: if anyone adds to them, God will add to that person the plagues described in this book; if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away that person’s share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book. (Revelation 22:18–19)

  This passage is often used to argue that the Bible claims its own authority, that its perfect inerrancy is built in, and that messing with even one jot or tittle of it is grounds for damnation. But just because this writing, originally a scroll (biblion, like the scroll of Isaiah that Jesus read), eventually ended up as the last book of the New Testament and thus the Christian Bible doesn’t mean that its warning here refers to the whole Bible. “This scroll” (a more accurate and less misleading translation) circulated independently for hundreds of years before it was bound together in a big book along with what eventually became the Christian canon of Scripture. Indeed, its inclusion in the canon was a matter of dispute among many Christian leaders well into the fourth century. And its author could never have even imagined such a thing as the Bible. Not even in his wildest dreams. And some of his dreams were wild indeed, including one in which an angel hands him a little scroll, not to read but to eat. No, this warning refers not to the Bible but to this particular text.

  Adding insult to injury, there are significant variants among the earliest surviving manuscripts of Revelation. Although most manuscripts say that the infamous “mark of the beast” is 666, for example, the earliest known copy, which dates to the late third or early fourth century, has 616. Another has 665.

  Early Christian Network Society

  Imagine: small house-church communities made up of very different populations scattered throughout Palestine and the entire Greco-Roman world; many Jewish, many Gentile, some literate, most illiterate; various groups translating, copying, and disseminating scrolls and codices of Jewish Scriptures, testimonia, and early Christian writings, sharing with one another through loose networks and informal patterns of exchange; communities that were more or less marginal to state power and regulation. Different communities inevitably had different collections of texts, different libraries of Scripture. These libraries were never closed or fixed, but were interconnected with the libraries of other communities, so that texts flowed and morphed within larger, non-centralized social networks. Not unlike the emerging digital network culture of today.

  It was not until 367 CE, in an Easter letter from Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, that we find a list of the twenty-seven writings of the New Testament as they now appear in the Christian canon. Of course, the fact that he wrote this letter did not mean that the canon was effectively closed. Indeed, he admits that he’s compelled to write the letter because others are promoting different canons that include additional texts. He thinks those texts are fakes and that their promoters are deceiving and misleading Christian communities. We don’t have the other side’s point of view in this debate, but we can imagine they beg to differ. In any case, it’s clear that the reason Athanasius wrote out his closed canon was that the Scriptures he rejected were being embraced as canonical by other Christian leaders and communities. His letter is proof that, as of 367, the canon was still open.

  A few decades before Athanasius wrote his letter, another influential bishop, Eusebius of Caesarea, took a descriptive rather than prescriptive approach to the question of canon. In his Ecclesiastical History (325 CE), he made a catalogue of early Christian writings, grouping them according to three categories. First are the “undisputed” writings (homolegomenon, “same voice,” i.e., unanimous), which, he sa
ys, all Christians recognize as authoritative and authentic. Among these are the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the Acts of the Apostles (the second volume of Luke), the letters of Paul, the first letter of Peter, and the first letter of John. He also includes the Apocalypse of John (Revelation), “if it seems right” to do so, suggesting that this text’s status was less secure among some Christians. Note, moreover, that his list of “undisputed” writings does not include five other writings that eventually became part of the New Testament canon: the second letter of Peter, the second and third letters of John, and the epistles of James, Jude, and Hebrews.

  Eusebius’s second category is for writings that are “disputed” (antilegomenon, “contradicted”), accepted by some but not others. Interestingly, he includes the Apocalypse of John here as well as in the previous category. He also includes the second and third letters of John, the second letter of Peter, the letter of James, and the letter of Jude, all of which eventually became part of the New Testament canon (he doesn’t mention Hebrews). Others in this category, however, did not ultimately make the canonical cut: the Shepherd of Hermas, the Apocalypse of Peter, the letter of Barnabas, the Didache (Teachings of the Apostles), the Gospel of the Hebrews, which he acknowledges to be popular among Hebrew-speaking Christians, and the Acts of Paul, which included the very popular short story about Thecla, a woman who abandoned her family and fiancé to follow Paul.

  Eusebius’s third and final category is for writings that should be rejected as “fictions of heretics.” These writings claim to go back to the disciples and earliest Christian leaders, but he considers them to be fakes, insofar as their literary style and theological ideas diverge from those early texts that he considers normative. He offers only a few examples: the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Matthias, and the Acts of Andrew and John. Apparently there were many others, too many for him to list conveniently. And again, we can be sure that his assessment of them as heretical was itself disputed by those who embraced them in their communities. Otherwise, why mention them at all?

  History is usually written by the powerful. Canons too. Eusebius and Athanasius were certainly among the most influential Christian leaders of the fourth century, as Christianity came to be identified with Roman state power under Emperor Constantine and, in the process, developed parallel structures of government and control. They were no doubt instrumental in establishing a narrower theological orthodoxy in what was by then a Christian empire, and in ruling out those Christian texts that did not fit well within that orthodoxy. Yet even during their time, after Christianity had become the religion of the state, three hundred years since Jesus’s time, scriptural network cultures continued to thrive, thereby resisting centralized, top-down attempts to close the canon definitively. Roman Christianity had a loose canon at best.

  6

  The Story of the Good Book

  Remembering What’s Lost

  A massive obelisk towers above the Piazza Santa Maria Maggiore on the Esquiline Hill in Rome. On its tiptop, overlooking the ancient ruins of the Forum and the Colosseum a mile away, stands a most imposing bronze statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary. When I first beheld her, having just huffed up the hill from the Forum, I thought she was an emperor or crusader saint. Broad-shouldered and muscular, she carries the baby Jesus like a rugby ball in her left arm while extending her right hand toward her audience below. Erected in the sixteenth century, it is an imposing image of the church as masculine, patriarchal power.

  A stone’s throw down the hill from Mary Maggiore is the modest church of Santa Pudenziana, now the Filipino center of the Roman Diocese. One of the oldest churches in Rome, its construction began in the fourth century. Its floor is several feet below the city’s modern-day street level, so you have to walk downstairs to the main door. Buried beneath it is another, earlier level of occupation: an ancient Roman complex believed to be the remains of a first- or early-second-century Christian house church. Excavations during the late nineteenth century revealed a series of rooms connected by narrow hallways along with the remains of a thermal bath system. Many of these areas were badly damaged or filled in when the church’s foundations were built centuries later. The excavation area has now been deemed structurally unsound and is closed indefinitely.

  The docent was kind enough to take me to a poorly lit back area where there were two small holes in the floor that offered partial views of the ancient space. She slid back the wrought-iron grate covering one of them, and I peered down with a flashlight. I saw a small room with a floor of round, flat stones. On one wall was a narrow archway leading I know not where. I looked into the other hole and saw even less, a stone shaft leading down into seemingly bottomless blackness.

  What extremely partial windows onto the past! They reveal very little, almost nothing. I tried in vain to imagine life down there, before churches, before cathedrals, before the Holy Roman Empire, before a follower of Jesus could even have imagined such a melding of religious faith and state power so boldly proclaimed by the obelisk of Santa Maria Maggiore.

  I did visit other, somewhat more whole, remains of what might have been early house churches in Rome. Beneath the nearby twelfth-century Basilica San Clemente, for example, is an older basilica whose construction dates back to the fourth century. Beneath it are two large complexes of rooms and hallways divided by a narrow alley. In the first century, they probably comprised two separate houses. Legend holds that one of them was the house church of Saint Clement, an influential early church leader and author of a letter that was widely influential among early Christians. One problem with this claim: the only religious space found thus far among the earliest remains is a small, second-century temple dedicated to the service of the Persian god Mithras. Built to resemble a cave, it is a windowless space with a low, arched ceiling and raised benches along the walls where initiates shared ritual meals during services. On the east end is a stone podium on which is carved a depiction of the young, energetic Mithras slaughtering a bull whose tail looks like a shock of wheat, representing springtime fertility. A religion based on rites of initiation, Mithraism was popular in Rome, especially among the military, until the fourth century, when the newly Christianized empire eradicated it.

  On the nearby Aventine Hill is the church of Santa Prisca, built over what was long believed to be the first-century house church of Prisca and Aquila, the couple mentioned in Paul’s letters and in the book of Acts. In 1934 Augustinian Fathers from the adjacent monastery began excavations in search of remains. What they found was another late-second-century Mithraeum, very similar to the one under San Clemente. Again, no signs of that early Christian community, only of another religious import, which thrived alongside Christianity for centuries.

  These and other ancient remains shed no more light on earliest Christianity than do the iron-grated holes in the floor of Santa Pudenziana. More than anything else, they convey the attendance of an indeterminate past. They testify to what has been irrevocably lost. They bear witness to the presence of an absence that shapes us in ways we can never articulate. Being accountable to them means never forgetting what’s been forgotten. It also means resisting the temptation to project the present into the silent gaps of the past, pretending that the way we are is the way they were.

  Scrolling Down to the Book

  In the house churches of the early decades of Christianity, most of the copies of Jewish Scriptures and early Christian writings would have been scrolls and, increasingly by the second century, codices. As we have seen, scrolls were the dominant medium for literature throughout the Greco-Roman world at that time. Codices were used primarily as notebooks for lists and writing practice. They were usually made with one or more wooden pages that were hollowed out and filled with an effaceable surface like wax. Later, as they came to be used for literary works, they were made by stacking sheets of papyrus or parchment together, folding them down the middle, and stitching them together along the fold. So one sheet made two leaves with four page
s, and a quire of four sheets would make sixteen pages. These quires could then be stacked together and bound into larger books.

  The media revolution of the book was a slow and mostly quiet one. It took a good three centuries. During most of that time, scrolls and codices coexisted. The earliest reference to the use of a codex for literature comes from a Roman poet named Martial who, writing in the 80s CE, recommends that his poems be kept in a small codex with parchment pages. Interestingly, archaeological evidence suggests that early Christian communities may have been among the earliest adopters of the new medium. Most, though not all, surviving Christian manuscripts dating as far back as the second century are papyrus codices. The oldest, which dates to the first half of the second century, is a tiny fragment of a codex of the Gospel of John. Intact, it measured about eight inches square and contained about 130 pages.

  The prevalence of the codex among early Christian manuscripts of the second and third centuries stands out sharply against the larger Greco-Roman cultural context of the same period. There, the vast majority of literature continued to be published in scroll form. So striking is the contrast between Christianity’s apparent preference for the codex and its larger literary-culture’s preference for the scroll during this time that some historians believe that the codex was essentially a Christian innovation.