The Canon of Scripture, Part 1
The Gutenberg Bible, c. 1455.
Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
[The Gutenberg Bible is the first large-scale book printed in Europe on a movable-type printing press. Printed in Mainz, Germany by Johann Gutenberg and his associates, Johann Fust and Peter Schoeffer, the Gutenberg Bible is the most famous printed Bible in the world. Gutenberg printed roughly 175 copies, but only 48 survive today, 36 on paper and 12 on vellum (prepared animal skin). The above copy, printed on vellum, resides in the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. Until Gutenberg’s invention of the movable-type press, books had to be hand copied one-by-one. Gutenberg’s invention changed the history of the world . . . and it put the Bible into your hands.]
(Listen to an audio version of the blog above!)
In my last two blogs I discussed my personal journey in reading the Bible and how eventually I came to teach it at UCLA in a course titled, “The English Bible as Literature.” I then went on to discuss how the Bible came to be written, focusing in particular on the synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke. In this blog, I’d like to move on from reading and writing the Bible to how the books we have in the Bible came to be there in the first place; that is, to how the canon of Scripture was formed.
It’s a fascinating story.
The word “canon” derives from the Greek κανών, a “measuring rod” or “standard.” Canons are common in every art and discipline. Today, for example, we have inherited the canon of Western concert hall music, enshrining Bach, Beethoven, Brahms (the “killer Bs”); Haydn, Handel, Vivaldi; Mozart, Mendelsohn, Mahler; Tchaikovsky, Verdi and Wagner. Go to any concert hall and you will hear one or more of these composers performed; rarely will you hear 20th-century composers like David del Tredici, George Crumb or Peter Maxwell Davies. The canon of Western concert hall music—for the most part—has essentially been stable for more than a century: a modern-day composer needs a bazooka to break into it!
Literary canons offer another example. For generations Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton; Donne, Herbert, Vaughn; Byron, Shelley, Keats; Dickens, Trollope, Hardy were staples of university English literature programs: every undergraduate and graduate student studied them. Not so today. Many of the formerly required courses that included writers from the established canon have been replaced by “Gender Studies”; “Imperial, Transnational and Postcolonial Studies”; and “Interdisciplinary Studies.” I’m sure there are plenty of excellent writers working in these categories who are well worth reading, but should they replace Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton?
A canon—be it in music or literature—does not come into being because it’s declared from on high. No one can declare a work canonical if it has no canonical pedigree; one can only affirm a work’s canonical status because it has already been accepted as canonical by consensus. That’s the flaw in requiring such “politically correct” literature courses as those above: they were placed in the curriculum by political pressure and by the “powers that be,” and they will surely meet an early demise, unless ultimately they make it into the canon on their own literary merit. Importantly, canons emerge, they are not declared; no canon is forever fixed; and all canons are in constant flux, though the pace may be glacial.
And that brings us to Scripture: How do religious canons develop and how do they become viewed as sacred texts?
Background
As pre-literate societies developed and became more complex, memory no longer served adequately for record keeping and for managing those societies: something more stable and permanent was needed. Evidence suggests that writing (in the West) developed first in Mesopotamia in cuneiform script around 3100 B.C., writing which employed a round-shaped stylus impressed into soft clay at different angles, such as this tablet which lists wages paid to 656 day laborers by Amar-Suen, third king of the Ur III dynasty.
Cuneiform Tablet Collection #13 (2039 B.C.)
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
At about the same time in Egypt, writing combined logographic, syllabic and alphabetic images written with a reed pen on papyrus or inscribed in stone.
False door in the tomb of Mereruka (Chamber A8), Vizier (and son-in-law) to Teti,
first pharaoh of the Old Kingdom’s 6th dynasty (2345-2333 B.C.).
Saqqara, Egypt.
Photography by Ana Maria Vargas
In the case of Mereruka’s tomb, the false door of Chamber A8 is for Mereruka’s ka (or “soul”) to enter. The upper horizontal hieroglyphs are magical incantations inviting Mereruka’s ka into the afterlife; the lower vertical hieroglyphs name Teti, the pharaoh whom Mereruka served, along with Teti’s various titles.
The idea of writing—of expressing transient oral speech in a permanent fixed form—seemed miraculous to the ancients; indeed, writing was viewed as a gift from the gods.
In Egypt, the god Thoth was scribe to the gods, and the Egyptians credited him with the invention of writing and of giving his divine gift to humans. This divine gift of writing was the purview of professional scribes, men trained in this esoteric art. Like skills in many of the later trade guilds, scribal skill was passed on from father to son, and because scribes worked in the upper echelons of government, they quickly became an elite, privileged class.
The Seated Scribe (limestone and quartz), c. 2600 B.C. [4th Egyptian Dynasty (c. 2613-2494)].
Louvre Museum, Paris.
In the ancient Near East, literacy among the culturally elite spread rapidly from government to religion. In the temples of Mesopotamia and Egypt, temple liturgies, oracles and sayings were written down to preserve their exact wording, and hence, their efficacy. What’s more, writing down religious texts restricted access to them, making such texts available only to the elite and the properly initiated, while creating an aura of sanctity around them.
In fact, writing literature enabled the creation of sacred texts. Only an educated, elite class has the time and ability to probe the great questions of life: the origin of the cosmos, the creation of humanity, the nature of evil, and so on. Such concerns of the human condition characterize most sacred texts, including those of the Hebrew Scriptures. The early stories in Genesis, for example, may appear simple, but they are highly intellectual and exceedingly complex; the stories in the “historical” books examine the meaning of history and the destiny of Israel, Judah and the surrounding nations; the Psalms probe the deepest longings of the human heart; and the prophets voice the concerns of Israel’s God to a stubborn and intransigent people. What’s more, the stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses and David are stories that can only be told through writing, through a literature capable of sustained character development, intricate plotting, complex structuring and subtle nuance. Such written works, elevated to the position of sacred literature, were then collected and catalogued by the elite class of scribes and made available to the people through oral recitation of a controlled text.
Consider, for example, the early version of Deuteronomy, found in the Jerusalem Temple in 622 B.C. by the priest Hilkiah and given to Shaphan the scribe:
“The high priest Hilkiah informed the scribe Shaphan, ‘I have found the book of the law in the temple of the Lord.’ Hilkiah gave the book to Shaphan, who read it. Then the scribe Shaphan went to the king and reported . . . ‘Hilkiah the priest has given me a book,’ and then Shaphan read it in the presence of the king. When the king heard the words of the book of the law, he tore his garments. The king then issued this command . . . ‘Go, consult the Lord for me, for the people, and for all Judah, about the words of this book that has been found, for the rage of the Lord has been set furiously ablaze against us, because our ancestors did not obey the words of this book, nor do what is written for us.”
(2 Kings 22: 4-13)
Leonaert Bramer. The Scribe Shaphan Reading the Book of the Law to King Josiah (oil on copper), 1622.
Private Collection.
As a result:
“The king then had all the elders of Judah and of Jerusalem summoned before him. The king went up to the house of the Lord with all the people of Judah and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem: priests, prophets, and all the people, great and small. He read aloud to them all the words of the book of the covenant that had been found in the house of the Lord. The king stood by the column and made a covenant in the presence of the Lord to follow the Lord and to observe his commandments, statutes, and decrees with his whole heart and soul, and to re-establish the words of the covenant written in this book. And all the people stood by the covenant.”
(2 Kings 23: 1-3)
Only 17 years after Josiah’s reforms, however, in 605 B.C., Judah and Jerusalem fell to the Babylon Empire, and the people of Judah were taken captive to Babylon in 586 B.C.
The Babylonian Captivity (605–539 B.C.) prompted much soul-searching. How could this possibly have happened? The obvious answer was that the Israelites had violated their covenant with God, and God had punished them for doing so: 1 Chronicles 9: 1b states plainly: “Now Judah had been exiled to Babylon because of its treachery.”
But when Cyrus the Great, king of Persia, annexed Babylon in 539 B.C. and allowed the Jews to return home and rebuild, Deuteronomy acquired chapters 1-4 and 29-30 to form an instructive story of a people about to enter a “Promised Land,” a story that highlights the requirements of a reinstated covenant relationship with God, updated to 4th-century B.C. requirements, with an appropriate ending in chapters 31-34. If that’s the case—as the vast majority of Hebrew scripture scholars suggest—then the “words that Moses spoke” in Deuteronomy 1: 1 are the words of the literary and theological portrayal of Moses, not the words of Moses the historical figure. They are the ipsissima vox (“the very voice”) not the ipsissima verba (“the very words”) of Moses.
The distinction is important for two reasons: first, crafting Deuteronomy in “the very voice” of Moses carries with it an implied, divinely-sanctioned authority for what is being said; and second, it allows the authors to lift the narrative outside of time and create an historical continuum that spans countless generations, past, present and future. If Deuteronomy were simply the historical Moses speaking to the Israelites on the plains of Moab—the ipsissima verba (“the very words”) of Moses—it would make a good story, a bridge between the Exodus tale and the conquest of the Promised Land. But by the 4th-century B.C., authors, editors and redactors had created the literary figure of Moses—the ipsissima vox (“the very voice”) of Moses—allowing the story to transcend its historical roots and become a universal statement, the narrative of all liberation stories, the narrative of redemption. When Ezra the scribe and priest returns to Jerusalem in 458 B.C., it is this story that he reads to the returned exiles in Nehemiah 8, and it is this story—the book of Deuteronomy, in its final, finished form—that rises quickly to the top of Hebrew literature, an early entrant into the canon of the Hebrew Scriptures.
Of course, there were many other works written from the 3rd century B.C. through the 3rd century A.D. that did not make it into the Hebrew canon, books such as the “Apocalypse of Abraham,” the “Letter of Aristeas,” the “Revelation of Ezra,” the “Martyrdom and Ascension of Isaiah,” and many more. All of them vied for readership, but only the cream rose to the top. The books that didn’t make it are classified as “Pseudepigrapha,” from the Greek ψενδής [psyoo-dase’] “false,” and ἐπιγραφή [ep-ig-raf-ay’] “name” or “inscription.” Every book of the Hebrew Scriptures has its own more or less complex textual history, and each book followed its own path to canonization, although many vanished through neglect or were tossed aside along the way, relegated to minor literary artifacts. You can read these pseudepigraphal books in James H. Charlesworth, ed., The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, 2 vols. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2010), 2,104 pages of works that didn’t make it into the Old Testament!
So, now we know how “canons” evolve, how oral stories become written, and how the written word as literature rises to the level of sacred Scripture. Stay tuned for “The Canon of Scripture, Part 2” as we continue our discussion!