The Rise and Fall of the Bible by Timothy Beal

Author:Timothy Beal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Like Jerome, moreover, many of these scholars raised questions about the boundaries of the canon itself. Remember that Jerome had excluded the Apocryphal books from his Vulgate Bible because they did not appear in his Hebrew manuscripts, but only in the Greek Septuagint. After his death, others added them back in. Now many Protestants, also working from Hebrew versions in their translations of Jewish Scriptures, were pushing these Apocryphal books back out. Many seventeenth-century editions of English Bibles, for example, didn’t include the Apocrypha. The practice was common enough by 1615 that Archbishop Abbot prohibited stationers from publishing a Bible without it under penalty of a year in prison. Indeed, some more radical reformers were going so far as to question the canonical status of other, more central biblical books. Martin Luther himself said that he hated the book of Esther, that James was “an epistle of straw,” and that he saw no evidence of the Holy Spirit’s inspiration in Revelation. Although he did not dismiss them from the canon, later editions of his German Bible did exclude the Apocrypha.

In response to growing criticisms of the Vulgate as inaccurate and corrupt, the Roman Catholic Church under Pope Sixtus V (the same pope who erected the obelisk of Santa Maria Maggiore) commissioned a group of biblical scholars to produce a new standard edition of it based on careful comparison of many early manuscripts, the Codex Amiatinus prominent among them. First published in 1590 and then revised and republished in 1592, the “Sixtine Vulgate” became the Bible of Roman Catholicism for the next three and a half centuries. Of course, Roman Catholicism was by then one of many Christianities in the West, so its official Bible was but one of a great many others now being, to borrow Jerome’s image, “scattered throughout the whole world.”

The print revolution lent a sense of fixity, closure, and immutability to the idea of the book. As Walter J. Ong famously observed, the printed book “encloses thought in thousands of copies of a work of exactly the same visual and physical consistency.” And what was true of books in general was especially true of The Book of books, that is, the Bible. Yet the reality of the Bible in the age of Gutenberg has been quite the opposite: it has led to the proliferation of more Bibles in more forms and translations than ever.

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