I’m hoping to produce a Boring Bible, and I’d like to start in the most pedantic way possible: by defining a word. In this case, that word is Bible. (I will be demonstrating, rather than explaining, the meaning of boring as we go along.)
People talk about something they call the Bible, as if they were referring to a singular, well-defined object in mind. But it would be more accurate to speak about Bibles.
The Hebrew Bible
The story of how we got the Bibles begins back in the ancient Levant. Many of the details are a bit murky, and as an amateur in this field I may get some things wrong in the following summary — qualified scholars continue to argue back and forth about the details of these things.
It is possible that some portions of the Hebrew Bible, particularly a few poems, were composed in the latter part of the second millennium BC, but the bulk of its contents were written in the first millennium, when monarchies in Israel and Judah were organized, and later crushed: Israel by Assyria in 722, and Judah by Babylon in 587. The Northern Kingdom, Israel, effectively ceased to exist after 722, and did not recover. The elite of the Southern Kingdom were in large part exiled to Babylonia, and some of them returned to re-found Judah as a province within the Persian Empire, after the Persians conquered the Babylonians in 539. Judah remained a province within the Persian Empire until it fell into Greek hands in 332.
Over centuries, and through the hands of many writers and editors, a variety of works were produced and revised, many of them grappling with the questions raised by this history. Who were the people of Israel and Judah, and how were they to relate to their god? Why did their states fall, and how should the Judahites live in their diminished circumstances? What kind of future could they look forward to?
Within this collection of books, some were more important than others to the emerging Judahite, then Judean, then Jewish community — all three of these terms are etymologically related, and used to refer to different stages in the history of Judaism and its antecedent communities.
Most central to Judaism is the Torah, or Pentateuch, which is today divided into five “books”, known as Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy in English. They present a mixture of narrative and legal material — the narrative material painting a portrait of Israelite origins and identity, the legal material providing a sort of constitution for its audience.
In Hebrew Bibles as they exist today, the Pentateuch is followed by the Deuteronomistic History, or “Former Prophets”, a collection of four books which interpret the history of the Israelite nation in terms of its fluctuating relationship to its god and his laws. These are Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings.
Next are the prophetic books, known traditionally as the “Latter Prophets”, which consists of three major prophets — Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel — followed by a collection of twelve smaller prophetic works, the “minor prophets”. Mostly written in poetry, the prophets deliver various messages from God about how the Israelites and Judahites are to act, along with threats and promises concerning God’s responses to their behavior.
Finally there are twelve other works which have found their place in the canon of rabbinic Judaism, a section known simply as the “Writings”. It contains Psalms, a collection of hymns, along with Proverbs, full of life advice, and Job, a reflection on the difficulty of seeing justice in the calamities that befall the righteous. The Song of Songs and book of Ruth, in very different ways, tell stories of love. Lamentations poetically bewails the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians. Ecclesiastes is a difficult piece of wisdom literature, while the Book of Esther tells a tale of Jews finding their place within the Persian Empire.
The book of Chronicles retreads much of the ground covered by Genesis – Kings, and is followed chronologically by Ezra-Nehemiah, which tells of the establishment of Judah and its Temple within the context of the Persian Empire. Finally, the book of Daniel, through coded language, tells an apocalyptic story of Judean history culminating in the Maccabean rebellion.
Now, these are simply the books which made it into the Hebrew Bible. While some sort of Hebrew canon existed in the time of Josephus, and it was likely identical or very close to the collection of books now known as the Hebrew Bible, it does appear that different communities of Jews had somewhat different collections of sacred books, and the full listing of the current Hebrew canon does not appear until the time of the Talmud in the fifth century AD.
Originally, the books that make up the Hebrew Bible circulated as independent scrolls. It was in fact not until about 920 AD, when the Aleppo Codex was created, that we have any evidence for the existence of the Hebrew Bible as a physical single-volume book.
As we will learn shortly, Christian Bibles were bound into single-volume books quite a bit earlier, but I’ve started with the Hebrew Bible because its contents would become universal in Bibles. The Hebrew Bible is the smallest of the Bibles, and all the various larger Christian Bibles contain all the contents of the Hebrew Bible, plus various other books.
The Deuterocanon
As mentioned above, the earliest surviving articulation of the Hebrew Bible that lists all the books in it comes from about 400 AD. Earlier, it appears that many Jews used a collection of Scripture much like the Hebrew Bible, if not perfectly identical to it.
But there are other indications that the situation was more complex for some communities. For example, the scrolls found at Qumran include not only almost all the books of the Hebrew Bible, but also some of the books that later found their way into other canons, including Ben Sira, Tobit, and the Letter of Jeremiah.
When Christianity arose, Christians initially used as scripture books that are now known as part of the Old Testament, and we find some variation among the books included, and indeed, Christianity wound up with a variety of canons. All these canons contained the books of the Hebrew Bible, as well as the New Testament, and most of them contain additional works. The term deuterocanon, from “second canon” has been used to describe these works.
The deuterocanon of the Roman Catholic Church includes Tobit, Judith, the Greek additions to Esther and Daniel, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Wisdom, Ben Sira, and Baruch. In Eastern Orthodox Churches, one finds 1 Esdras, the Prayer of Manasseh, 3 and 4 Maccabees, and a 151st Psalm. Here and there one goes even further afield: the Book of Enoch, the Book of Jubilees, and others appear in the canon of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahido Church.
Protestants for the most part don’t accord any official status to Deuterocanonical works, Anglicans being a notable exception.
The Production of Christian Canons
From its beginning, early Christianity was deeply concerned to justify in teachings through Scripture, which for the earliest Christian communities appears to have consisted of the same books that were being used as Scripture by Jews. The writers of the New Testament, for example, quote most of the books of the Hebrew Bible, but there is also a quotation of 1 Enoch.
The first few centuries of Christianity have produced an extensive literature, and it simply does not appear that nailing down the exact boundaries of a canon was a major concern of the first three centuries. In the fourth and fifth centuries, we find the codices Alexandrinus, Sinaiticus, and Vaticanus, three relatively complete Bibles that have survived to the present day.
Alexandrinus contains books much like one would find in a Roman Catholic Bible today, but additionally contains 3 and 4 Maccabees, Psalm 151, and 1 and 2 Clement. In Sinaiticus, much of the Old Testament is now missing due to damage, but what is left shows that Tobit, Judith, 1 and 4 Maccabees, Wisdom, and Ben Sira were all included in the Old Testament. The New Testament contains the 27 conventional books used today, along with Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas. Vaticanus has none of the Maccabees, but otherwise contains the usual complement of deuterocanon. Its New Testament is missing the Pastoral Epistles and Revelation.
Another way to look at the development of Christian canons is to read Gallagher and Meade’s The Biblical Canon Lists from Early Christianity, where the interested reader can see the gradual process as early Christianity worked its way toward a fixed canon.
Implications
To sum it up, it appears that Second Temple Judaism saw the growth of a collection of literature that was treated as authoritative for Jews, although it appears that the exact borders of that collection were not formally and totally defined until some time after the destruction of the Second Temple. When the Jesus movement began, its believers picked up the somewhat-undefined set of sacred Scriptures that various Jewish groups were using, and began adding their own literature.
Judaism — with the exception of Beta Israel — wound up settling on a well-defined canon by Misnaic or Talmudic times, while as Christianity spread far and wide, it never did settle on one single canon. We are left with a situation where there is a smaller Protestant canon, a larger Catholic canon, and a variety of even larger Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox canons.