Writing the Bible
Jacob Jordaens. The Four Evangelists (oil on canvas), c. 1625-1630
Louvre Museum, Paris.
(Listen to an audio version of the blog post above!)
In my previous blog I chronicled my personal journey in reading the Bible and in teaching it. In today’s blog I’d like to focus on writing the Bible. How did the Bible come to be written? Who wrote it? How was it written? And when? These are excellent questions, and they deserve thoughtful answers. The answers vary, however, for each book of the Bible has its own unique textual history, sometimes simple, sometimes complex. St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, for example, has a relatively simple history, while The Book of Job could reduce any textual scholar to a quivering mass of tears.
Let me illustrate how the Bible came to be written—at least in part—by focusing on the four gospels, reviewing two basic hypotheses regarding them: the first might be called the traditional approach, and the second, the “form critical” approach. Once we examine each approach I’ll discuss its strengths and weaknesses, and then I’ll present four types of early manuscripts that transmit the New Testament text.
Traditional Approach
This approach to the gospels goes all the way back to the Church Fathers. It is rooted in the belief that the Bible is historically reliable, and that, although written by many different people over many years, each book having passed through the hands of editors and redactors, the gospels offer an accurate presentation of the person and work of Christ, inspired by the Holy Spirit and written under the Holy Spirit’s influence. The conservative Protestant churches often summarize this approach by saying that they believe in the “plenary, verbal inspiration of Scripture.” The Roman Catholic church echoes this belief in the Vatican II document Dei verbum (5, 18) when it declares that the four gospels “…whose historicity she unhesitatingly affirms, faithfully hands on what Jesus, the Son of God, while he lived among men, really did and taught…; they have told us the honest truth about Jesus.”
Such an approach to the gospels follows this line of thought:
Jesus of Nazareth was conceived of the Holy Spirit and was born of Mary, a virgin. He grew up as a τέκτων [tek’-tone, “carpenter” or “builder”] like his father, Joseph, and he began his public ministry when he was around thirty years old. For three years he traveled “throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people” (Matthew 4: 23). The miracles he performed were literal, historical events. After three years of mounting opposition to his ministry, he was arrested, tried, found guilty of blasphemy, crucified and buried. On the third day he rose from the dead. His bodily resurrection is a literal, historical fact. This same Jesus of Nazareth was the Jewish Messiah, the one spoken of in the Hebrew Scriptures. In Jesus, God himself walked among us.
During his three-year ministry, Jesus gathered around him many followers, including the twelve apostles. They traveled with him, lived with him on the road, witnessed him “teaching, preaching and healing,” saw him crucified, and saw him, spoke with him, shared meals with him, and touched him after his resurrection. They personally saw him ascend into heaven forty days after his resurrection. Shortly afterward, they moved out through Palestine, the Mediterranean, and other parts of the world spreading the “gospel” (literally, the “god-spel”-or “good news”) of what Jesus had done and what it means to the entire human family, both Jew and Gentile.
Four of Jesus’ followers wrote accounts of what he said and did:
Matthew, a tax collector, left his work to follow Jesus (Matthew 9: 9-13). One of the twelve apostles, he was a Jew—probably a Levite—and he wrote for a Jewish audience. The structure of his book suggests a carefully planned work using a variety of literary devices common to Jewish literature of the period. The early church fathers were unanimous in attributing authorship to him.
John Mark, a young man, was not an apostle, but he was on the fringes of the group that followed Jesus. He is first mentioned in Acts 12: 12—“When this dawned on him [Peter], he went to the house of Mary the mother of John, also called Mark, where many people had gathered and were praying.” Mark was a nephew of Barnabas (Colossians 4: 10) and the spiritual son of Peter (1 Peter 5: 13). Mark joined Paul and Barnabas in A.D. 46 for the first missionary journey (Acts 13: 5), but he turned back at Perga (Acts 13: 13). Paul and Barnabas had a falling out over this (Acts 15: 37-39). In Colossians 4: 10, though, (a letter written over a decade after the falling out) we hear that Mark is back in Paul’s good graces. In 2 Timothy 4: 11 (Paul’s last letter before his death in c. A.D. 64-68) he says, “Get Mark and bring him with you, because he is helpful to me in my ministry.” The early church unanimously agreed that the Gospel according to Mark was written by John Mark. Papias (c. A.D. 60-130) quotes an earlier source saying that: 1) Mark was a close associate of Peter, from whom he received the things said and done by Jesus, and 2) these things did not come to Mark as a finished, sequential account of the life of Jesus, but they came from Peter’s preaching. John Mark wrote for a Gentile audience, probably those who lived in Rome.
Luke was not an apostle—nor was he a follower of Jesus during his three-year public ministry. Rather, Luke, the “beloved physician” was a Gentile, a close friend and traveling companion of Paul during A.D. 50-68. Luke wrote both the Gospel according to Luke and the Acts of the Apostles. He was a learned man, writing some of the most eloquent Greek in the New Testament. He was also a careful historian who researched his subject. Here is what he says in a beautifully crafted sentence at the beginning of his gospel (Luke 1:1-3):
In as much as many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, it seemed good to me also, having investigated everything from the beginning, to write an orderly account…
The early church uniformly supported Luke’s authorship of both the Gospel according to Luke and the Acts of the Apostles.
John was an apostle, the son of Zebedee and Salome, and the brother of James. Of all the apostles, John was the most intimate with Jesus. He is the “beloved disciple” who rests his head on Jesus’ breast at the last supper and the one to whom Jesus entrusts the care of his mother, Mary, as he is dying on the cross. Traditionally, John is the author of the Gospel according to John, the three letters of John, and the Book of Revelation. The early church bears witness to his authorship, including Theophilus, Bishop of Antioch (from A.D. 169-182); Irenaeus (c, A.D. 130-202), who was a student of Polycarp, who in turn was a student of St. John; and Clement of Alexandria (A.D. 150-215).
The similarities among the four gospels are natural. Jesus had an enormous impact on the lives of those he touched. His teaching is masterful. From a rhetorical and stylistic point of view his teaching is easy to remember. (When we study the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5-7, for example, we see Jesus use “stepped-up” parallelism, antithetical parallelism, repetition of words and phrases, and so on; these are all the tools of a master teacher.) Consider, too, that the parables and teachings of Jesus were repeated over and over. We know from Josephus, a Jewish historian who wrote in the second half of the first century, that Galilee included 240 towns and villages (Life, 235 [45]). When a teacher has a good lecture, or a preacher has an memorable sermon, he uses it many times with many different audiences; he doesn’t just give it once and then shelve it. As an itinerant preacher, Jesus talked with hundreds of audiences during his three-year public ministry, doubtless retelling the same stories and parables in town after town. Each audience heard his words only once, but his disciples heard them over and over. It is no mystery that they remembered them.
As for the miracles, they had such a stunning effect on those who saw them that in retelling how they happened the stories naturally took on a consistent form from telling to telling. If the miracles did not happen as they are recounted in Scripture, Jesus’ opponents would be the first ones to point it out, and they don’t. Nowhere in the Bible (or outside of it, during the first century) does anyone ever question whether the miracles occurred; many people, though, ask how they occurred.
Each of the four gospels tells of events the writers’ witnessed (in the case of Matthew and John), heard about (in the case of Mark), or researched (in the case of Luke). But each gospel reflects how the writer himself experienced those events and how he chose to report them: in other words, the four gospels give us four points of view of the same set of events told for four different audiences. Just as four books about you would reflect four different points of view if they were written by your mother, your brother, your son or daughter, and your best friend, so do the four gospels reflect the four different experiences of Jesus by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
Each author uses his own unique talents, gifts and abilities to shape his narrative strategy and prose style. If we contrast Mark and Luke, for example, we find that although much of the content from Mark is included in Luke, each author treats his material very differently. For example:
1) Mark’s gospel contains 11,022 words: 5,826 (53%) are spoken by the narrator; 3,944 (36%) by Jesus; and 1,252 (11%) by other characters—in Mark, the narrator drives the story. Luke’s gospel contains 19,165 words: 7,690 (40%) are spoken by the narrator; 9,038 (47%) by Jesus; and 2,437 (13%) by other characters—in Luke, dialogue drives the story.
2) Mark’s style is abrupt and fast-paced. His gospel begins in the original Greek language with a sudden and dramatic proclamation of fourteen words: “Beginning the gospel of Jesus Christ, Son of God, as it has been written in the prophet Isaiah…” (Mark 1:1-2); Luke’s style is eloquent, his first sentence consisting of 42 words in which the two halves of the perfectly balanced sentence contain a protasis and an apodosis, with three parallel phrases each.
3) Of Mark’s 11,022 words, 1,084 (1 in 10) are “and,” and Mark uses the word “immediately” 43 times, creating a sense of urgency; Luke uses the word “and” far less frequently, and he uses the word “immediately” only once.
As we study each gospel we investigate the author’s narrative strategy and style in depth, and we find that although each author shares content, each gospel writer presents that content very differently to accomplish his narrative goal.
Form Critical Approach
This approach to the gospels began during the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Germany. Karl Ludwig Schmidt and Martin Dibelius both published books in 1919 that launched the study of literary “forms” in the gospels. They called the approach “Form Criticism.” In 1921, another German, Rudolf Bultmann, published The History of the Synoptic Tradition which attempted a very detailed classification of all the stories and sayings of Jesus according to their “forms” or “patterns.”
Today, “form criticism” is a popular approach to reading the gospels in seminary and academic circles. It hypothesizes four stages in the development of the gospels:
First Stage
According to form critics, the first stage began with teaching and preaching by Jesus himself, sometime around A.D. 29-32. An itinerant preacher, Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching and preaching the good news of the kingdom. He was a dynamic teacher and drew large crowds wherever he went; Jesus was also a masterful teacher, telling stories, parables and prophecies in memorable and dramatic fashion. The form critics argue that Jesus was one of many such itinerant preachers, although he was one of the most dynamic. Jesus’ native language was Aramaic, and he spoke principally to Jewish audiences living in Palestine.
Second Stage
As Jesus carried out his teaching and preaching, he gathered a large group of followers around himself. Some stayed with him and became his inner circle. After Jesus death, these disciples told stories about him, principally to Jewish audiences in Palestine. Others spread the stories, especially among Hellenistic Jews traveling the trade routes throughout Palestine and Asia Minor. This is an important hypothesized stage of development, for it required that the Aramaic stories be translated into Greek, the language of Jews living outside Palestine. Those Greek-speaking Jews took the stories back to their native lands, principally the Mediterranean countries.
Third Stage
As the followers of Jesus became more numerous, the form critics suggest that Christianity took on a definition of its own, apart from Judaism. It developed fixed forms of story—such as pronouncement stories, miracle stories, stories about Jesus identifying himself as the Messiah, and sayings of the Lord—and those forms provided the basis for Christian preaching in the population centers of the Greco-Roman world. Christianity spread from Palestinian Jews, to Hellenistic Jews, to Gentiles. As it began to include non-Jews, the stories placed less and less emphasis on traditional Jewish religious practices, eventually reflecting hostility toward them. At the same time, they focused more and more on Jesus as Χριστός (khris-tos’, the “Anointed One”). During this stage, the form critics claim that layer upon layer was added to the stories, principally those layers that focused on healing and miracles. St. Paul was a central figure in this hypothesized shift from the second to the third stage of development. He preached from approximately A.D. 40-68.
Fourth Stage
To this point, the form critics claim that nearly all of the stories about Jesus were oral: they were subject matter for preaching and for spreading Christianity. Only a few of Jesus’ sayings, they suggest, may have been collected and written down. In this fourth stage of development, the stories were gathered together in writing. This probably occurred in the 60s and 70s, a full thirty to forty years after Jesus’ death. According to the form critics, Mark was probably the first gospel to be written. Textually, the hypothesized relationships among the gospels look something like this:
Proposed Relationships among the Synoptic Gospels
(Matthew, Mark and Luke)
In this scheme, the “Matthaean Source” is a collection of stories, basically Jewish in nature, that anonymous compilers drew upon to edit and shape the gospel according to Matthew. “Mark” is the gospel itself. According to the form critics, it is probably the earliest written gospel, composed sometime in the mid 60s or early 70s by an anonymous author or authors; it then passed through the hands of several editors to become the text that we have today. The “Q” Document (“Q” = Quelle in German, or “source”) is a hypothetical document that includes sayings, stories and other material not common to Matthew, Mark and Luke; it is all that material, in other words, for which there is no other apparent source. Importantly, there is not—and there never has been—a physical “Q” document; it is only an intermediary source hypothesized by the form critics. The “Lucan Source,” like the “Matthaean Source,” includes source material, basically non-Jewish in nature that compilers drew on for the gospel according to Luke. Unlike Matthew, the gospel according to Luke went through an intermediary stage, referred to as “Proto-Luke.” Again, there is not—and there has never been—a physical manuscript of “Proto-Luke.”
Discussion
The “Form Critical Approach” to the gospels focuses upon how the texts came to be written, rather than on the completed text, and the textual relationships among the three gospels—Matthew, Mark and Luke—is referred to as the “Synoptic Problem.”
Today, in the academic world, the form critical approach dominates thinking about the synoptic gospels to such a degree that it is often the only approach taught at many seminaries and universities. As “educated readers of scripture,” however, we should view any approach to the gospels (including our own) with a critical eye, recognizing its weaknesses, as well as its strengths. Although the form-critical approach offers many unique insights into the formation of the gospels, it does have several major weaknesses.
First, the form-critical approach assumes that the time and culture of Jesus was primitive; that is, that it was an oral culture, not a literary one.
Since form criticism developed during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, we have learned a great deal about the time and culture in which Jesus lived. Far from being primitive, it was a highly literate culture. Jesus spoke Aramaic, and probably some Greek and a little Latin; he also read Hebrew. Paul was a highly literate man, conversant in at least four languages: Aramaic, Greek, Latin and Hebrew. His epistle to the Romans is a masterpiece of classical rhetoric, suggesting a man highly trained as a rhetorician and prose stylist. Luke, too, writes a Greek prose style that suggests a highly educated man. The literacy rate in the ancient world was quite high, contrary to the beliefs of previous generations. This is especially true among Jews, since post-exilic Judaism was fundamentally a religion of the book. Among Jewish males of Jesus’ day, literacy was nearly universal.
Second, it assumes that a literary work such as a gospel evolves.
This is based on the understanding that the time and culture of Jesus was an oral one, and that stories were passed on through an oral “story-telling” tradition, analogous to that used by a primitive tribe, which adds layer upon layer of folklore and myth as time goes on. There is no evidence to support this assumption among first-century Jews. There is also no external evidence supporting the existence of evolving oral stories about Jesus, nor is there a single manuscript bearing witness to a “Matthaean source,” “‘Q’ document,” “Lucan source,” or a “Proto-Luke.” Both an evolving oral tradition and intermediary “sources” are arrived at inductively to support the form critical hypothesis.
Third, it assumes that the gospels are a patchwork of “forms” stitched together by compilers and smoothed out by editors; no gospel is the work of a single author.
This assumption overlooks the extraordinary unity and literary architecture of the gospels. Witness the beautifully balanced, chiastic structure of Matthew and the geographically structured shape of Mark, with its dramatic turning point at Peter’s confession of faith. In structure and style the gospels suggest carefully planned, intricately-woven, and masterfully-executed literary works.
Finally, the form critical approach assumes that the gospels as we have them include a large dose of folklore and mythology, especially in stories that involve the miraculous.
Form criticism rests on the a priori assumption that stories which cannot be explained or validated by modern criteria did not happened; thus, the gospels do not offer historically accurate portrayals, but later expressions of faith.
As we continue studying Scripture together we will strive to develop a set of critical tools that will aid us in engaging the full depth and breadth of the text. Although we read the Scriptures in our classes from a traditional approach with a distinctly literary perspective, we will investigate other approaches, as well, recognizing the strengths and weakness of each.
New Testament Manuscripts
The New Testament was written entirely in koine Greek, that is, the “common” Greek understood by ordinary people living in Palestine at the time of Jesus. They understood Greek because Alexander the Great had conquered the region in 331 B.C., establishing a long period of Greek rule that lasted until the Roman general, Pompey, conquered the area in 63 B.C. A Jew living in Palestine at the time of Jesus would have spoken Aramaic as his native language, understood Greek and been able to read Hebrew. Most would also have had a working knowledge of Latin (especially in they were involved in commerce) since they were living under Roman rule.
Although the events in the New Testament happen in the first century A.D., the manuscripts that record those events date from much later. Manuscripts of the New Testament are divided into four types: papyri, uncials, minuscules, and lectionaries.
Papyri manuscripts are generally the oldest, dating from the 2nd century through the 8th. Often just fragments, these manuscripts are written on papyrus, a material made of reeds.
Uncials range from the 3rd century through the 11th. The name “uncial” refers to the style of handwriting—large capital letters, often in a beautiful hand. The three most important New Testament manuscripts are codices Vaticanus (4th century), Sinaitics (4th century), and Alexandrinus (5th century). All three are uncials.
Minuscules comprise the largest group of New Testament manuscripts, and they date from the 9th through the 16th centuries. “Minuscule” also refers to the style of handwriting—both upper and lower case letters in cursive. The minuscule style is faster to write and is often quite beautiful.
Lectionaries (which may be in either uncial or minuscule handwriting) appear from the 4th through the 16th centuries and are portions of the New Testament collected together for liturgical purposes.
At the time I’m writing this blog, there are 88 papyri, 274 uncials, 2,795 minuscules and 2,209 lectionaries, for a total of 5,366 New Testament manuscripts. The oldest is a small fragment of the Gospel according to John (John 18: 31-33 on one side and John 18: 37-38 on the other). It dates from A.D. 125. Keep in mind, though, that additional New Testament manuscripts and fragments surface from time-to-time and add to the total.
The text of our Bibles results from the work of textual critics, scholars who have studied all of the manuscripts and have reconstructed what they consider to be the most accurate text of the New Testament. This standard critical edition of the New Testament is published as: Eberhard Nestle and Erwin Nestle (continued by Kurt Aland, et al.). Novum Testamentum Graeca, 28th edition. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2012. It is often referred to simply as the “Nestle-Aland 28th edition.” Every credible translation of the New Testament should begin here.
Below I have included examples of each type of New Testament manuscript.
Example of a Papyrus Manuscript
This is the oldest existing manuscript of the New Testament. It dates from A.D. 125. Only a fragment, it contains John 18: 31-34 on one side and John 18: 37-38 on the other. It was acquired in Egypt in 1920, and it resides in the John Rylands Library in Manchester, England.
Example of an Uncial Manuscript
This is Codex Sinaiticus, probably the most important of all the New Testament manuscripts. Dating from the 4th century, it contains part of the Old Testament and all of the New. It has a fascinating history. It was discovered by the 19th-century scholar and textual critic Constantine von Tischendorf at the monastery of St. Catherine on Mt. Sinai. The manuscript was in a trashcan about to be burnt! Tischendorf rescued it, brought it to St. Petersburg in 1859 and presented it to Alexander II, the Czar of Russia. After the Russian revolution, Lenin sold it to the British Museum for the then-staggering sum of 100,000. It is still there. The text is Luke 24: 23-53.
Example of a Minuscule Manuscript
This is a parchment manuscript (Minuscule 1739) from the 10th century containing the Acts of the Apostles and the general and Pauline letters; Philemon 10-25 is shown above. The manuscript is 102 pages long, with an average of 35 lines to the page. It is an especially interesting manuscript, in that we know the name of the monk who copied it: Ephraim. We have at least three other New Testament manuscripts in his hand, as well. This one resides at the Great Lavra Monastery (B 184) at Mt. Athos.
Example of a Lectionary
This is a parchment codex containing a gospel lectionary dated A.D. 991. It is carefully written with elaborate decorative letters in yellow, blue, green and scarlet. According to the colophon, Kyriakos, a monk and presbyter, wrote the manuscript in the town of Capua and finished it on the 12th of June. The manuscript resides in the Vatican Library. The text is John 19: 10-16 and Matthew 27: 3-5.