I really had a wonderful time reading this one. John Barton, Oxford Theologian and ordained Anglican Priest, managed to write a very thorough, honest history of how the Bible that we have today came to be in it's present form. Or rather, the best guess we have at how it came to be in it's present form. Naturally, there is a still a lot of controvery over many of the details. He managed to do this in a way that felt refreshingly honest, without the circular reasoning of theists (the scriptures are the word of God so therefore we can make certain assumptions about how it evolved and because it evolved that way we know it is the word of God…) or the point-and-laugh antics of New Atheists.

A lot of ground is covered so I won't try to go through it all, but there a couple of things I thought were just really cool:

• The Pentateuch (or first five books of the Hebrew Bible: Gensis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy) is thought to be weaved together from four distinct sources:

  • The priestly source (P) “marked by ponderous repetition and a tendency to use set formulas” and generally concerned with issues of purity and liturgy. This is thought to derive from the priests of the second temple.
  • The Deuteronomistic source (D), very overtly concerned with matters of law.
  • The saga sources, marked by their plain, laconic language and the extent to which God is a bit player in the narrative. There are thought to be two separate sources in the saga style, which you can tell apart because one referes to God as Elohim (E) and the other refers to God as Yaweh (Y)

• The four gospels represent two separate traditions. The Synoptic Gospels (Matthew,Mark and Luke) are thought to have a commmon lineage, with Mark being the earliest. Matthew and Luke are thought to either be separate works both using Mark as a source or potentially both using a common source called Q (and now lost to history). John came later and in many ways represents a very differnt Christology than the Synoptic gospels.

• There is a common misconception that the current canon was winnowed down from a much larger set of texts, but in fact the “official” canonization was mostly a rubber-stamping of what was generally regarded as the set of canonical texts already. And there were unlikely to be any major omissions. The texts that were excluded are generally agreed to be rightly excluded as they were works that came about later than the canonical gospels.

• That said, there is much more variance within the canonical texts. There are thought to be numerous additions, deletions and interpolations that resulted from either transcription errors or conscious efforts to align the existing texts with doctrinal orthodoxies that coalesced centuries after the original texts were first put to paper.

• Ever wonder what the “Jesus Fish” magnets are all about? In early christian writings, there is a phenomenon we call “Nomina Sacra” (literally “holy names”) in which certain words or phrases are consistently writting in abbreviated form. One such example is the acronym ICHTHUS, or IEOSUS CHRISTOS THEOU UIOS SOTER (“Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour”). ICHTHUS is, of course, also the Greek word for fish.

• Reading the Bible in translation gives us a very misleading sense of it's consistency. Since translators generally take great pains adopt a consistent style, their translations often read very much like the work of a single author. The actual texts, in their orginal language on the other hand, vary quite widely in both style and command of the language in which the author is writing. Certain New Testament works are written in a very stylish and competent Greek. Others are quite clearly written by authors with a less than fully fluent grasp of the language, leasing to texts that are in some instances horrendously agrammatical.

There is of course much, much more of interest so do go read the whole thing.