The Bible: A Global History

in the show notes. And so, without further ado, here is historian Bruce Gordon with The Bible A Global History. All Right, welcome back. As I mentioned moments ago, sitting down with historian Bruce Gordon. Here we're talking about his most recent book, The Bible a Global History. It's a really interesting book that I really enjoyed reading, and I wanted to kind of start with the introduction because in the reduction, you write, the Bible is constantly becoming itself

eternal and perfect. But each version or edition reflects what it cannot be, because it is the work of humans. And I thought that that was such a such a wonderful sentence and introduction, and I thought we could dig into it a little bit, like how should we see the Bible? Is it a historic document? Is it something else?

we have you know, proverbs. You know, many different types of genres of literature are in this book, and each has their own very distinctive history. And in some cases we have some idea who may have written them, and other cases we have less idea of of who wrote them or from what historical period they come from. You know,

there are many mysteries about that background. But we do know that both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament evolve over time, and that that that they emerged as the book that we know over a period of time, because there was considerable development and disagreement over particularly with the New Testament, which you know, which not so much in which gospels, but you know, but also the gospels, but letters and were to be included in which were

not to be included. That that took centuries to emerge, and even today, the you know, the canon of the Bible varies in you know, across different denominations of Christianity. So it's it's a book that's had a historical development that continues that in a sense that historical development continues to this day. It's extraordinarily dynamic.

in a little bit about that. But first, I'm really fascinated with sort of the early Church and the earliest versions of the Bible and what those might have looked like. And I'm always surprised when I talked to Historicrians who study the early Church who tell me that we don't know as much as maybe we'd like to know. And so I guess I'm interested in knowing, like what what do we know about the earliest versions of the Bible? You know, when were these documents put together for the

first time, and what did that look like? What was that process like? Like what what can we understand? You know, we're talking about you know, obviously first century here, like the the beginnings of the church.

of of what Jesus said. These these become the Gospels, but it's you know, biblical scholars will tell us that those gospels probably circulated to some degree independently, but then over a period of time, particularly the Synoptic Gospels of Uh you know, Mark, Matthew, and and and Luke were interacting with each other and evolve over a period of time in the first and into the second into the second centuries. We know that these texts circulated amongst different communities.

You know, obviously only small numbers of people could actually read them, so they had a vivid oral tradition. They were heard, the sayings of Jesus were repeated. So it's it's the early versions of scripture were very much within communities that were bread increasingly across the Mediterranean world and east in towards you know what is modern day Iran and and and further, so that these texts are in circulation, but there's no clear you know, you know, canonical form

of them. They're texts that are evolving over a period of time. If we take also the letters of Paul, you know, they're they're circulating, but we you know, we now know that some of those letters that were thought to be by Paul may not be by Paul. They may not be. They may be by you know, a disciple of Paul, they may be by someone else. We have names for a number of the letters, but we don't really know for certain whether these are the these

are the actual authors of them. But in a way that didn't matter hugely because they they were greatly treasured as accounts and teachings of the church that were in circulation. But they were in circulation with a much broader literature of other letters, other gospels that are, that were being used by different communities. I think it's important to remember that a lot of these texts really existed at the local level in communities, some of which were in contact

with each other. Others they were they were isolated from. So the the emergence of the of the Bible is not a kind of easy trajectory. It's it's about a lot of different areas using different versions of of of scripture we know from you know when, which is where you know, my book really picks up with the emergence of the Codex, which is the Bible and in a book form which emerges really from the second century onwards.

That those collections of the Hebrew Bible and of the New Testament were made up of many different versions that may have been compiled together. So there there are many versions of the Gospels and many versions of the Letters which are lost to us, where we might only have the smallest of them. So exactly as you say that

our knowledge of them is is is very partial. But we know that they were circulating amongst Christian communities, they were being read, they were there was preaching, but there was also enormous variety, and so that the the kind of text that we have now only comes together over a period of centuries. It's not set at an early

at an early stage. There are many different versions that were in circulation at the same time, and these versions were then sometimes brought together and compiled, or they existed quite independent of each other. So it's a we talked about this idea of the Bible having a history from its earliest stage. It's it's it's it's a book that is coming together in different ways over over a long period of time.

papyrus into into vellum. The skin of animals is put together, bound together as in the form of pages in a

book that can be carried around. The earliest forms of the Christian codecs were probably quite rough forms, rather loosely bound, stitched together, so that they could be used for transportation, They could be used in put into people's pockets, they could be moved from community to community, and this was particularly important because you know, Christians are being persecuted these communities. They needed to be able to have access to their

sacred texts in a way that was easily transportable. Of course, the Jewish tradition is of roles, of the sacred roles of the Torah. These roles were kept in specific locations. They were not generally meant for rapid dissemination through through transportation. The Christian idea is somewhat different. These these texts are really going to be for the people. They are not for simply an elite clergy. But the idea right from the beginning of the of the New Testament writings is

they are for the people. It is a text that should be highly accessible. This is why, you know, very quickly it is translated into the languages of people across you know, the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern world, as they say, from from from the Euphrates to North Africa and into

what is modern day Turkey Anatolia. These these texts are being translated, and they're being carried in a way that is distinctive from the Jewish tradition, and and they're being bound together very much in a practical way that that allows the people to transport these. But it also has another significant aspect to it. When we look at a book as opposed to a scroll, which is the traditional form of writing both in the Hebrew tradition but also in the Roman Greek world, a book it allows us

to do something quite different. Whereas you might have to consult different roles or roles in to get to a text, a book allows rather easy access between or a codex allows easy access for you to move through the whole text from beginning to end, to the middle, backwards and forwards.

It allows you to cross read texts. It introduces different ways of reading of a sacred text that had not existed before, and this becomes a distinctive aspect of the Christian communities from the second century onwards towards the fourth and fifth century, where you get the creation of these extraordinary, large and complex codices which bring together divergent traditions of the manuscripts. But the first forms of the codex are really quite rough and ready texts that were being carried

through communities. They were very practical, and they demonstrate that the text itself is not a kind of sacred thing which is separate from the people, but it's something that's to be brought into the communities that people have that have access to it. The Christians do not invent the Codex. It's there in the Roman world, but they make it a very distinctive part of their sacred writings from a fairly early stage.

or reading in the family, or reading in communities. What we really see is that you know, what will become the Bible is a text that's circulating in parts, very widely across a large territory of of you know, both the Roman Greco world, but also east into the Syriac and Persian worlds. So of a text that's constantly in motion, is being read by local communities, is being part of worship, but it's not existing as a Bibles we would think of it now, but as many different parts that are

being transported. And sometimes we can know from these early codexes that different parts of it were being stitched together, so it always it had many you know, depending on the location and depending on owners, it could have very many, many different forms where different books of the texts are stitched together in different orders. The idea that it has a form like we know it now doesn't emerge till till much later. So there's extraordinary fluidity of these texts in their numerous localities.

the world. It's a missionary religion. It means it's a it's a religion of travel, so that these sacred texts, right from the beginning are on the move, which means they are going into different communities widespread in the in the first and second centuries. It's a media being translated into those communities. Every time you have a translation, you have a new version of the text. We don't in a sense the Christian Bible or the Biblical text er

so there's no sense of a strong sacred language. There's Greek, and of course there's the Hebrew of the Hebrew Bible Old Testament, but very quickly it seemed that it's essential to the missionary nature of Christianity that it's translated into other languages. So therefore, very early on we get Syriac, we get Coptic. It will move ultimately towards the Caucusus and we'll get Armenian and Georgian. It will you know, in Latin in the West.

the life of the Bible. It's it's existed in its in localities through language and textual forms, and later this will take on traditions of illustration and binding, so that you get unique cultures of the Bible from the earliest stages in the many different lands that it goes to but the codex, as you say, gives it that ability to travel, and it also gives you the ability, as I mentioned before, to read the text whether you know, it's unlikely in the early centuries that they had complete Bibles,

but it allows you to read whatever texts that you have sort of with, you know, together, to read them as as a whole, to refer back and forth between them. This is something that's quite unique in the Christian formation of its Bible.

our culture, it's ourselves, it's it's everything about us. And so translation is the shifting up the Bible from culture to culture, not simply from one language to another, but right from the beginning, as I've said before, the Bible is a book that is being translated very quickly from you know, we go back to the earliest languages of Hebrew, Aramaic, and the Semitic languages Syriac, and then of course the Greek of the of the New Testament is translated into

into Latin, it's translated into Coptic of Egypt. Later it will go into the Ethiopic of Geeze, of the egypt Ethiopian Church. It's it's spreading very very quickly, because language is at the heart of the dissemination of the Bible. But as I say, not just in terms of words, but in terms terms of the whole shifting of the culture of the Bible, as it's spreading very quickly geographically.

But translation exactly as you say, is at the heart of this because in its origins, of course, we have the Hebrew and then the Greek in which most of the New Testament writers wrote, but also we have Aramaic, and we know, for instance, the septuagen which is the Greek translation of the of the of the Hebrew Bible, which was created in Alexandria in Egypt for a for for Jews who were living in a kind of Greco

Roman world who no longer knew Hebrew. So that there was the question of of you know, what is the exactly authentic language that that one should go back to in in in Christianity sate before, there's no sense of a sacred language. The language is always of the of the scriptures, has always been the language of the people. But you know, anyone who is engaged with translation knows that it's extremely challenging to move the concepts that are

formed in one language into another. How do you accommodate

one language with another? How do you And this will become a major issue later as I talk about when you go into Asia and you have translated and India where you have translations into Chinese into a range of Indian languages, in Tibet or in Southeast in the Pacific world, where languages that do not have exact translations for Christian ideas such as as the Trinity, or even for the Christian notion of a monotheistic God, so that it becomes very controversial. But how do you find the right words

in this other language to express the original idea? So so translation is an extremely fraught endeavors and which exists right from the beginning. How do you how do you shift these ideas across cultures, across languages and in translation. The Scripture has a number of remarkable effects in an

early stage. So you can use the example of Armenian where Christianity, which is the first Christian kingdom, when when the Greek writings of the of the both the Old and New Testament arrive in Armenia, there there they want to convert the people. But Armenian that point is not a written language. It's it's a spoken language. And this happens again and again. This will happen later in the nineteenth century with colonialism is how do you take how do you bring the Bible into a language that is

primarily oral. And in the case of Armenia that I mentioned before, the Bible actually plays a crucial role in the creation of a written language, So the Bible becomes this instrument of language creation. So it's not just being translated, but it's also creating languages, and it creates forms of languages. So there's always this dynamic relationship with language. But then you raise the question of the Latin famously translated by Jerome in the fourth and fifth centuries from the Greek

and Hebrew into Latin. There had already been many, many Latin versions of Scripture known as the as the Old Latin versions, circulating in innumerable forms around the Mediterranean world. But Jerome is famous because he has to decide how do you translate Hebrew and Greek into Latin. Jerome was an extraordinary well educated person, a great class educator, a

great writer, a great literary figure. And he believed that you should translate the Hebrew and the Greek into the best possible Latin, and so that the poetry of the Psalms or of the Hebrew Bible should be poetry in Latin, and that the writing of the New Testament should be brought into elegant Latin. Because in the classical world, the Christian writings were generally regarded as an inferior form of literature.

But how do you do that? He said, of course, you can't go immediately with a literal translation from these languages into Latin. You have to do it where the sense of the original language is conveyed in the Latin form. So he creates society of sense for sense rather than a literal translation. Well, this is decisions that will go

on for centuries and centuries afterwards. What is the correct approach to bringing, you know, from original languages into a contemporary language, which is a very different form of language. So it's there right from the beginning. And of course the worry is that in translation you're going to corrupt or distort or change the original and that's why their

constant translations are created. And then there's retranslations and retranslation because there is an anxiety that surrounds translation right from the beginning of Christianity.

That's not what we're talking about here. And you make a point in the book that I didn't think very much about, but I think we probably should, which is translators will leave notes or explanations as to how they approached their translation, and that's really interesting. What do we gain from those notes? Because I never thought about it before, but I do think it's really important.

Hebrew was. But I think one of the lessons we learned from Jerome and his reflections on translation, which we can pick up from others, is you know, I use the word anxiety, but I think what any good translator realized is the contingency of their work that they they are never able to convey completely from you know the original languages of the Hebrew and Greek. They're very aware that they're doing their best, but it's never going to

be an exact version of the original language. And then others and there, you know, the good translator, traders, translators always make clear that somebody else will come along and do a better job of this. Jerome was, you know, Jerome was very proud. He was a very Some people thought he was arrogant, but he was, you know, he

was an extraordinarily proud and highly educated person. He believed he had done, you know, the best that he could, but there was still an acceptance that the translation would would would develop. He never believed that his translation would be for forever. And we get that, whether we go through to Martin Luther or translations of a later day, they realize they're doing the best they can, but they

will never be able to provide a definitive translation. You know, the King James is constantly you know, it's created in sixteen eleven, but it's constantly revised right through to our own time. People are changing it. They find ways of improving the Greek or improving the Hebrew. So translation is a dynamic thing. There's never a sense that one translation completely captures the essence of one language into another. And of course there's a recognition that language itself is changing.

Language is dynamic, so that translations are created, but within a generation the language becomes archaic and less accessible to people. So there's a need for translations into a version of a language which is more accessible. And I found this right from the start, this concern that language, you know, dates, language changes, and therefore translations of the Bible have to be have to be changed. There is there is sometimes

and you see this. I saw this, you know, with with Bibles in Russian and some of the other Slavic languages, but also to a certain extent, King James is an example of this. The old as the language became archaic, as the language of the people developed and changed, that archaic nature of the language sometimes conveyed a kind of sacredness,

a holiness to it that people very much appreciate. So you get the creation of a kind of biblical language which is separate from the language that people speak, so that that dynamic emerges. You know, many people love the King James because of its older form of English, and they believe that that conveys a sense of holiness, a solemnity, a beauty, a transcendence that perhaps our modern English lacks

for them. So there's there's a kind of sense in which translations can are both constantly being changed, but there's also in many ways they're they're valued when they become sort of linguistically linguistically dated. So there's there's so many aspects of to this, but it induces a kind of sense of humility. You know that your translation will be eventually replaced by another translation, and and that's just the

way it goes. And that's part of the you know, the overall argument of the book is that the Bible in a sense is always becoming itself. It's constantly being retranslated, it's constantly being you know, re edited. No form of the Bible is forever because it's always trying to capture that the best possible sense of the Word of God.

a very practical creation. But by the you know, the moving into the fourth and fifth centuries, where you know, we have developments towards perhaps more agreement on which books constitute the canon or the actual body of the Bible that's starting to emerge. We have the decree of Athanasius, his Festal Letter, which sets out these are the books of the New Testament. Now that's often seen as the moment of the creation of the canon. That's a problematic

story because he was in North Africa, in Egypt. That letter probably had little influence on other parts of Christianity, but there is a kind of growing sense over time of you know, which are the gospels, which are the letters, and which are the ones that will be left outside the door. There's not complete agreement by any means, but they're starting to move towards a consensus, which means that the codex form becomes an embodiment of what is the Bible.

And this is something we see fourth fifth centuries and that is exactly as you say, means that there's a new veneration of the physicality of the Bible, and that takes place through a variety of ways. One way is the growth of illustration, where the you know, one of the first you know to extraordinarily one of the first uh illustrated gospels that we now have are the Garima

Gospels from the Ethiopian Church. We have the creation of what are called the Eusebian canon tables, maybe going back to Eusebius himself, but nobody knows exactly, which are beautifully illustrated that you know, what we would think of as a kind of comparison of the gospels, the cross references of the of the gospels, but they're arranged in this beautifully illustrated, often illuminated architecture, so columns and often depending you know, in various traditions in the in the in

the African ones you find native wildlife, birds, different you know, you see cons that are reflected of Byzantine architecture. So that that as we get into the fourth, fifth, sixth century, the Bible becomes an object of beauty, whereas if we think of the Codex before it was a very practical thing, but it becomes an object of beauty that really from the fifth century has a physical the physicality of it

has a sacredness. You have at early councils from the fifth century, this idea that the presence of the Bible at the council conveyed the presence of the Holy Spirit. So the physicality of the book becomes an embodiment of the presence of of of the Divine in this meeting,

conveying authority. That's that's developing. Also, as I say, in the in the in the illustration, which makes you know, you get in these in these beautiful Risantal Gospels, for instance, you have this tradition where the the the the parchment is is dyed purple, reflecting not only the royalty of Christ, but the royalty of the aristocratic or royal owners of the text. So the text itself becomes you know, I think the way in which I like to think about

it and do in the book, it becomes iconic. It becomes itself like an icon of the Church that mirrors the divine in its physicality. That and there's a long tradition of referring to books as being like icons. And this is something that develops as Christianity becomes more established, not only in the Mediterranean world, but in Asia and then of course spreading through Europe, that the Bible itself becomes a physical symbol of what it is, the Word of God, the presence of God, and that is taken

in extraordinary artistic developments. Is that a problem? Yes, in some ways it is because you get these great debates that Christians inherit from from their Jewish tradition, of a kind of ambiguity about the role of images. Can you, going back to the Ten Commandments, can you actually convey images of God? Is that? Is that not a terrible sin?

And so though there is a kind of ambivalent relationship between images and you know, and the text of the Bible, there is a huge debate that will rage through the Greek world, the Byzantine world about this issue of images ultimately is resolved in favor of images, and that becomes the tradition also in the West. But the Bible becomes a sacred object. And the other way that this is this is conveyed is in the growth of liturgy, the very complex and beautiful forms of worship. We see them

emerging out of in the Orthodox tradition. We see it in the Coptic tradition in Egypt, we see it in the Ethiopian tradition, where the Bible is a physical object at the center of this liturgical world that connects the divine and the human. In this biblical drama, the Bible is processed, it's carried, it becomes people know what its presence means. It means the presence of Christ himself. It becomes like a sacrament, like the body and blood of Christ,

where the bread is the body of Christ. Well, the Bible acquires this sort of sacramental nature. It is the physical presence of God that will very much inform the medieval world as well, where the physical text has a holiness to it. The Protestant reformers will reject that and say, you know, with their emphasis very much on the written word.

But even within Protestantism, and you see this in Puritanism, and you see it in modern day Pentecostalism, the physical object of the book is often used as a sign of holiness in worship. Think of Protestant churches where the Bible is displayed at the front. It has a physicality and a as a creator of sacred space that although Protestants will generally not think of it in that way, they're very much continuing a long tradition that emerges from

the fifth and sixth century. So it's problematic for many people in this relationship between images and materiality and the spirit and the word, but it has been very much at the heart of the emergence of the Bible right through today, where you will see in services where Bibles are held up to both curse and to bless people by the actual holding of the Bible in either an individual or in communal worship.

that were ongoing. I'm interested about another portion of the book where you write about how, and I think this is absolutely true, how the Bible has typically reflected and then also just shapes the world and the time period that it occupies. I'm fascinated by the Middle Ages myself, and we can talk about early High late whatever, but I'm interested as to how that worked in the Middle Ages.

many different ways. Most people, you know, the vast majority of people in the medieval world would certainly not have possessed a Bible, and they would only have seen it, probably in worship, where it was, you know, part of liturgical processions held up the Gospels were held up to then and then read, so they knew it in a kind of liturgical sense. Very few people would have, you know, except the privileged few would have had access to a Bible. But that's not to say that that the medieval world

wasn't highly biblically literate. So the Bible is. And one of the points I want to make is that the Bible has always never or always been more than a book. It has been a presence that you have to be open to in many different respects. You know, the churches, even the most humblest, even the humblest parish churches they went into, would have wall paintings depicting scenes of the Bible. There, they would have listened to preachers who would be recounting

Biblical stories. They would have, particularly in the late Middle Ages, there were traveling troops that would perform Biblical plays. There were innumerable ways in which people had access to the Bible and were very familiar with the stories of the Bible. Who would not be able to read, who would not be able to to to be able to afford or have, you know, either any part of the Bible. And generally the Bible existed in parts such as you know, the

Psalms or the Pentateook, or the Gospels or the letters. Again, really until late in the Middle Ages, it was very rare for the complete Bible to exist. But what I really want to make the point is is that the Bible was a compelling and pervasive presence in medieval society. But you have to see it as not just existing for those who have the book in front of them, but it informs the geography of the world in which people lived. They lived in sacred landscapes that were defined

by stories of the Bible. They would see, you know, the last judgment, often in public places where they lived, certainly over often the entrances of churches. They the Bible was was was you know, I think we have to get away from the Protestant idea that it's simply a book to be read. The Bible was you know, I like to think of in the medieval world. It wasn't it was a phenomenon.

world that they would have entered into. And then they would have encountered the liturgy, which is centered on the stealth, the telling of the sacred story in which the Bible is read. They would hear the both, you know, from from the from the Old and New Testaments. So there's a biblical world that these people existed in that that moves far beyond the book. And that's why I want to say that the Middle Ages was very much an age of the Bible.

for a divination? And two, if that's the case, and if we are in the age of Faith, when the Church is supposed to be all powerful, why were efforts to clamp down in that behavior so ineffectual.

off evil, but in many other ways. For instance, it was very common throughout the medieval world that particular versus, whether from the Psalms or perhaps from the Gospels, were used to ward off demons, to ward off the evil

in many forms, terrible weather. So there's there's a sense in which the Bible has always and you know, we have many stories of very holy people or of kings, you know, placing the Biblical text under their pillow to to as not not only as protection, but as also a way of you know, learning of the learning of

the future. The Bible is used as a physical object in judicial cases, and it was you know, it played a role in that people would consult open the Bible and consult different texts to determine the meaning of the case. We have the story of Francis of Assisi, which is you know, a longstanding sort of trope in the medieval world and going back into the ancient world where he

talks about going well. His biographer describes him as going away from the crowds into a kind of cave where he opened, you know, he swears that he will open the gospels and wherever he opens the Gospels to that will determine what his calling will be, and he opens it to the passion of Christ and he determines from this that this will be, you know, his his future

is to follow the sufferings of Christ. And he does this multiple times where he can flips open the Bible and puts his finger on it and says, this is going to This is God speaking to me, telling me it's not just a random thing. This is the Holy Spirit acting has opened the page the Bible to this page, or the Gospel to this page with a specific instruction.

That belief that the Bible had this immediate and powerful effect was widespread, you know, and sometimes it takes forms that we might find amusing, but it was this belief that the Bible itself was a book of power, it was a text of power, and that the words of the Bible, and this is something that exists, you know, very much within the global Christian world today. The words of the Bible have power, and they can have power against evil, and they can be used to denounce evil.

This is, you know, as I say, it's you know, the the you know what the Church has suspected as being superstitious used it's very difficult to determine the line between that and a belief that the materiality and oral quality of the Bible actually has power to affect the world around us, which is an idea that's still quite

widespread in many Christian communities across the world. That so, the official condemnations of this really kind of don't reflect what was the reality that within the Church and within the lay world, the Bible was regarded, or the Biblical texts were regarded as ways in which God speaks and acts.

Obviously we've just gotten to the Middle Ages. But I really think it's fantastic, and I think it does a great job of laying out the evolution of the Bible and how important that is to understanding how it functions still in our society today. I want to thank you so much for coming on the show. This was amazing, and I know that the book is going to do tremendously well.