In English, we often speak of something called the Bible, in the singular, and speak as if it were some agreed-upon object. The Bible, someone might say, commands us to help the poor. Or, the Bible clearly teaches that men should wear their hair short. Or, the Bible contains sixty-six books.
Now, the English Bible comes from the Latin Biblia, which has the interesting property of being a plural word. The oversimplify, where an English speaker might say “the Bible is …”, in Latin one would say, “the Bible are“. This is due in turn to Biblia coming from the Greek Βιβλια, “scrolls”, which is the plural of Βιβλιον, “scroll”.
Why should you care about grammatical details like this? Well, first of all, because grammar is an inherently delightful thing. But in this particular case we can go further. The shift in the grammar of Βιβλια to Biblia to Bible mirrors physical and conceptual shifts that happened in parallel.
For, you see, before there was any Bible there were scrolls, scrolls containing a variety of texts. Some of these texts were seen as holy. You could call these the holy scrolls. If you you spoke Greek, you might call these scrolls τα βιβλια τα αγια, “the holy books”, as the translator of 1 Maccabees 12:9 did.1
Since you already know that these holy scrolls are going to become the Bible, it would be easy to imagine that these scrolls constituted a well-known, fixed, agreed-upon collection. This would be an oversimplification. It is true that, eventually, it became desirable for Jewish and Christian communities to define which particular scrolls are holy, and to produce a fixed collection. But this took time.
How much time? This is where Edmon L. Gallagher and John D. Meade come in handy. In 2017, Oxford UP published their book The Biblical Canon Lists from Early Christianity: Texts and Analysis. In the case of the New Testament, the earliest list which corresponds perfectly to the New Testament used today is that of Athanasius, produced in 367 CE. About the same time, the Talmud records the earliest Jewish canon to contain all the same books as the present Hebrew Bible.
If you put together Athanasius’ New Testament and the Talmud’s canon, you’d have a modern Protestant Bible. Jerome seems to have done this, more or less, though his most influential work was the production of a translation of the Bible which included more books than the Protestant canon.
Some time in the mid or late fourth century, the Synod of Laodicea produced a canon fairly close to the Protestant canon of today, although it excluded the Revelation in the NT, and included Baruch and the Epistle of Jeremiah in the OT. Around the same time, a work called the Apostolic Constiutions included a few more books in the OT, and two letters of Clement in the NT.
I could go on, but for now I’ll just recommend reading Gallagher and Meade to anyone who wants the full picture. To briefly summarize: the exact contents of the Bible continually fluctuated throughout the early history of Christianity, varying from time to time and place to place.
In the modern era, there are two biblical canons which have the greatest influence: the Catholic Bible and the Protestant Bible. As currently reckoned, the Protestant Bible contains sixty-six “books”, and the Catholic Bible seventy-three. Both Catholics and Protestants today tend to encounter the Bible as a single-volume work, and the average layperson is unacquainted with the history of how the canon developed.
As a result, Protestants ask, “Why did the Catholics add seven books to the Bible”? And Catholics wonder, “Why did the Protestants remove seven books?” Both questions presuppose the idea that the Bible once was a well-defined collection, only to be interfered with later. This is backwards. The available evidence shows, instead, that Christians have never had a unanimously agreed-upon list of which works make up a Bible.
I apologize advance for using the term “the Bible” as if this refers to a simple subject. It’s just to cumbersome to repeatedly say, “the works that make up the Hebrew Bible, plus the works that make up the New Testament, and also usually a somewhat smaller number of works that many Christian communities have read in association with the Hebrew Bible.”
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