By Karen Armstrong

Introduction
In nearly all the major faiths, people have regarded certain texts as sacred.
On them, the religion's members base the morality and spirituality of their lives.
Both Jews and Christians treat their scriptures with ceremonial reverence.
They were documents which exposed new meanings for each generation.
Their exegesis was a spiritual discipline, not an academic pursuit.

CHAPTER 1 : TORAH

In the 700s, the prophet Hosea condemned worship of the popular God Baal,
whilst Amos poured scorn of the Temple rituals, challenging current orthodoxy.
During this time, Israel was absorbed by Assyria and Judah became an Assyrian vassal.
In subject Jerusalem, Isaiah prophesied the birth of a baby who would redeem and free the land.
The baby became King Hezekiah, whose anti-Assyrian foreign policy was a disaster.
Judah was laid waste, mainly due to his efforts to banish foreign Gods.
His son, Manasseh (687-642, reversed that policy and welcomed Baal.
The biblical voices were appalled, but the country prospered.

As Assyrian power diminished in the area, Judah was left to its own devices.
The Temple was rebuilt and new writings of Moses were "discovered".
The revised Torah called for radical changes, for reform.
The reformers introduced new ideas but also rewrote history, as needed.
The conquest of Canaan was added, as was much of the Davidic legends.
However the independence of the Judean state was soon over.

In 597 BC, the Babylonian army beseiged Jerusalem and deported the ruling classes.
In 586 BC after a further rebellion, the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and its temple.
The exiles blamed their failure to keep God's Laws as the cause of their situation.
This, they believed, must be a divine punishment!

The exiles had carried a number of historic scrolls with them.
They studied these, and edited them, adding and adjusting as necessary.
These did not yet have any sacramental overtones.
A coherent narrative was built from the legends of the composite tribes.
However recent research has found no credible evidence to substantiate
such tales as the Exodus, or even the proclaimed might of the Davidic empire.

New ideas were generated and new adjustments made as they cam to realise that
Israelites were a people because they lived in the presence of their God
not because they lived in a particular country.

Eventually the exiles were allowed home, though many decided not to go.
They took with them new teachings and writings to form the basis of the Hebrew scriptures.

CHAPTER 2 : SCRIPTURE

Once the new Temple was created, the Judaites hit a spiritual malaise; lost their moral focus.
Ezra, the Persian-appointed leader, found a lawless people, disobeying the most basic of God's laws.
It was a situation which he swiftly took steps to correct, assembling diverse laws into the a single entity,
which became "The Torah" in about 400BC as the law of the land under Persian dominance.
Because of the way that people treated it, the Torah became sacred scripture.
The new diviner of God's will was not the visionary or caster of lots
but the person who could interpret the scriptures.

The way of Judaism became the constant search for meaning
and the reinterpretation of the sacred texts, which continues to this day.
Revelation was not a one-time event but an on-going process.

There were now three elements of scripture:
* The Torah - the Law of Moses as revised by the Babylonian exiles.
* The Prophets - a selective record of their inspired visions.
* The Writings - which filled the gaps left by the other two.
The Writngs included Wisdom literature associated with King Solomon
and promoted the Sage as the source of divine inspiration rather than the pages of the Torah.

By the 300s, these threads had begun to merge.
Wisdom became seen as the, female, active element of God.
Judah had fallen to the Grecian Empire and was imbibed with Hellenistic ideas.
These ideas were strongly opposed particularly when the Greeks violated the Temple precincts.
The, fictional, Book of Daniel was written in these times as a story of hope of freedom.
Daniel is shown as a visionary who foresaw the victory of the Macabbeans.
Torah study had become a prophetic disciple, requiring due preparation.

The Macabbean dynasty was a disappointment; corrupt and irreligious.
The Jewish people split into many competing sects, each convinced of their righteousness.

In the 1st Century, the Qumran and Essene movement represented one aspect of Judaism.
Exclusive and strictly puritanical they lived in separated self-supporting communities.
Another small group were the Pharisees, open to to such new ideas as resurrection.
There was a desperate search for God, even going so far as rewriting scripture.
But there was no coherent vision of a redeeming Messiah in the Davidic mode.

Things changed with the Roman occupation and the rise of small groups in rebellion.
Such uprisings were savagely suppressed; at one stage 2000 crosses stood outside Jerusalem's walls.
In the 20s, John the Baptist drew large crowds with his preaching of the need for repentance.
Even though John did not preach armed rebellion, he was executed by the authorities.
The Jesus movement arose at much the same time. Its leader was also executed,
but the movement itself lived on, and found a new focus through his death.

A group, traditionally of seventy (hence "The Septuagent") translated the Jewish scriptures into Greek.
A group of Greek scholars attempted to find deeper meanings within the Biblical accounts.
Philo wanted to show that the events reported had a dimension that transcended time.
To take the scriptures literally was foolishness and not taking them seriously.

In 66AD, a group of Jewish zealots evicted the Romans from Jerusalem and held on for 4 years.
Fearful of the spread of such a rebellion, the Romans destroyed the city and its temple.
The Temple was never to be rebuilt and with it went the heart of Jewish religion.
Only two of the Jewish sects found a way forward from this disastrous situation.
The first was Christianity, which then wrote a whole new set of scriptures
to refocus spirituality on the figure of its founder.

CHAPTER 3 : GOSPELS

We actually know little about Jesus.
He was the leader of one divergent Jewish sect, amongst many
and spoke of the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of Heaven.

The Gospels were, in part, a response to the destruction of the Temple.
After the death of Jesus, the Galilean movement moved to Jerusalem,
possibly in anticipation of the coming of God's Kingdom there.
They worshipped daily in the Temple and followed the Torah.

In some ways the movement was different, especially in its inclusive nature
and their outreach beyond the bounds of Israel and even to the gentiles.
The work, and doctrine, of Paul typifies this contraversial approach,
with its selective application of Torah to his converts
and his interpretation of scripture to predict Christ.
In the hands of Paul and the author of "Hebrews",
the whole history of Israel was redefined!

The destruction of the Temple, again, initiated a burst of writing.
As well as the Canonical books there many others
a few of which survived the destruction of orhodox cleansing.
The bishop Irenaus formed a list of approved books,
formed formed the kernel of the New Testament.

Christian scriptures were written at different times in different places.
There was no integrated view of Jesus, nor is it easy to separate fact from fiction.
The different writers formed and developed their own views of Jesus,
nor do we have any knowledge who those writers actually were.

Mark's Gospel, shortly after the war and the destruction of the Temple,
points to the divsions between the Temple worshippers and the Christians.
There is a sense eof the painful rupture between Christians and Judaism.
The death of Jesus was not a scandal. It had been foretold.
It was good news, because the Kingdom was already here.

By the time of Matthew's Gospel, written some ten years later hope had faded.
Nothing had changed. Yet Matthew pointed out that this was to fulfil the scriptures.
The life and ministry of Jesus mirrored that of the people in the Torah,
which must now be observed more fully than it had been before.
Like the Rabbi Hillel, Jesus preached the Golden Rule.
Christians could meet God through Jesus.
The Temple was redundant.

The Christian sect was convinced that they alone were right and the whole world was against them.
For John, Judaism was well and truly over. God could now only be experienced through Jesus.
The Book of Revelation reveals the bitterness of Johannine Christianity to the world.
It is embedded throughout with fear of those outside its narrow conclave.
It is a toxic book that appeals to those who feel alienated and resentful.

CHAPTER 4 : MIDRASH

After the fall of Jerusalem, Jewish scholarship was centred in the coastal city of Yavneh.
Here the Pharisees led a resurgence of Judaism in a new diversified form.
As it grew this became a serious threat to Christianity.
The new approach centred on Torah study rather than the Temple;
looking for fresh meaning, relevant to their current circumstances, in the ancient texts.
Revelation had not happened once and for all on Sinai, but was an ongoing process.
Practical charity became seen as of equal importance to divine worship.
There could be no definitive interpretation of scripture.

Roman repression led to to rebellion and brutal reprisals.
A new, Roman, city was built over Jerusalem. Jews were exiled beyind Judah's borders.
In the early 200s, the rabbis, newly assembled at Usha and feaful of politics,
produced a new writing, the Mishnah, a formidable collection of legal rulings.
It was independent of the Torah and did not claim any support from it.
The will of God was embodied in the words and rteachingof the rabbis.
Concern over belief was replaced by concern over behaviour.

As Palestinian Judaism declined under the Romans, it flourished in Babylon,
which became the intellectual centre of the Jewish world,
producing the Babylonian Talmud (the Bavli), which became central to Rabbinic Judaims.
The Bavli compelled its studetns to integrate writen and spoken traditions,
but favoured the flwxibility of the spoken word over the bounded written.
Christian ideas were developing along similar lines.

CHAPTER 5 : CHARITY

Christians were suspect by Rome, and therefore persecuted, because they did not worship any acknowledged deities.
So some argued that Christianity was really merely a reinterpretation of ancient scripture.
The apologist Justin, argued for a common basis, the Spirit, for all faiths
and saw Jesus as the incarnation of that Spirit, or Logos.
That Logos became foundational for the Church Fathers,
who extended the idea, making the OT an elaborate sign system, pointing to Jesus.
To understand this required a "correct" interpretation of the scriptures.
However this allegorical interpretation did not fit everyone's ideas.
The concepts of Antioch and Alexandria were miles apart!
Devotees, such as Origen, probed for unlikely mysteries
in the depths of straightfoward scriptural accounts.

In the fourth century, Christians began to take to the desert for a life of prayer.
One of these, Antony of Egypt, had given up great wealth to do so,
having read the bibical story of the rich young man.
These Monks were revered as "doers of the Word"!!
They reinterpreetd scripture to focus on love of neighbour.

At much the same time, the Trinitarian debate was initiated.
Arius insisted on the basic humanity of Jesus,
in conflict with Anathasius who saw him as divine.
Discussion raged for 200 years and involved all the great names of the early church,
and the problem of how should scripture be read and applied to our lives.

The Byzantine theologian, Maximus, proposed an explanation that became standard in the Greek world:
Jesus was the first fully deified human being. We could all be like him.
The Latin Fathers took a different view perhaps influenced by the plight of Rome itself.
Perhaps looking for a place of security and firm foundations amongst a world in chaos.
Within this, Jerome, in the safety fo Egypt, translated the Bible into Latin ("The Vulgate")
and Augustine found himself drawn to the Christian faith through a child calling "Pick it up and read".

Augustine's analysis of the Bible was that the Torah was all about Love and Charity.
This was the same conclusion which Hillel, the Jewish Rabbis and Jesus had reached.
However the way inwhich that Love was expressed could be culturally conditioned
and righteous condemnation is not only unkind but impedes our understanding of scripture.
Whilst Irenaeus had insisted on the "Rule of Faith",
Augustine pointed out that the "Rule of Faith" was not a doctrine, but a pathway of Love.
Any interpretation of Scripture that spread hatred was illegitimate.

CHAPTER 6 : LECTIO DIVINA

As the Roman Empire was consumed by the Vandals, St Augustine became convinced of man's sinfulness,
and the place of sex in transmitting this through the generations. Through their lust, they could no longer hear God's voice!
The monastic life, as introduced by the disputant monk John Cassian, suited this doctrine
with its central focus on the withdrawal from society and the study of scripture.

The rule of St Benedict also focussed on such "Lectio divina" (sacred study),
even though many of the monks involved never actually saw a complete bible.
The purpose of Lectio Divina was not to complete a section of text,
but to hear the word of God embedded within it.

The biblical theology of this time was overshadowed by the aftermath of the fall of Rome.
Mankind was beset by original sin and separated from God.
Darkness was our natural element.
However, unlike Origen,or Augustine, or Jerome,
Pope Gregory wasted no time on the literal meaning of scripture.
We needed to look beyond the broken human words to find God's message.

By the 1000s AD, Europe was emerging from the Dark Ages,
but the people were illiterate, uneducated and taught to follow the Mass as a mystery,
through which they could enter the Holy places. It was the secular Lectio Divina.
Spirituality and warfare intertwined in the First Crusade (1090s).
30,000 Jews and Muslims were slaughtered in Jerusalem.
Although Christianity endorsed feudal violence,
Western scholarship was reborn under the wing of Muslim teachers.

In an attempt to make some sense of a disordered mix of copies and translations of the Bible,
French scholars put together a standard commentary, endorsed and completed by Archbishop Anselm.
Other scholars began to analyse and critique the Biblical text, as a literal view came to the fore.
Rather than seeking a spiritual meaning some scholars sought what it had meant to the writers.
Andrew of St Victor was thus one of the first to make a quasi-modern critical approach to biblical scholarship.

However Archbishop Anselm was a limited theologian with a shallow knowledge of scripture.
From the perspective of medieval chivalry, he argued that the sin of Adam required atonement.
Because God was just a human must atone, but only a God could make that reparation.
Therefore God had to become man.
This, strange, theology became normative in the West
while Greek Orthodoxy prefered the ideas of Maximus the Confessor.

The Frenchman Peter Abelard (1079-1142) came up with the new idea
that it is our compassion, when we see the crucified body of Jesus, that saves us.
Abbot Bernard (1090-1153) led the Cistercian Order and opposed Abelard.
He saw himself as driven by a desire for God, not by reason,
and centred his teaching on an allegorical interpretation
of the mysteries of 'The Song of Songs'.

The Dominicans were heirs to the controversies of the century, under the wing of the works of Thomas Aquinas (1225-74).
God was said to order human events to reveal the truths of salvation.
The events of the Old Testament prefigured the work of Christ.

In the late 1200s, the Kabbalists found that scripture could introduce them to the inner life of God!
They revived the mythical element in Judaism, which the rabbis had downplayed,
and reintroduced the gnostic traditions which they shared with the Muslim world.
By studying scripture the Kabbalist descended into the text, finding an exoteric meaning in every verse.
These myths were designed to make the unknowable God known to man.
Anyone who simply read the Bible literally had missed the point.
However, in the main body of Europe, Christians took an opposing view.

Francis Bacon (1214-92) encouraged schollars to studt the Bible in the original language.
John Wycliffe (1329-84) argued for freedom of the Bible from the control of the church,
so that common people did not have to rely on the priests to read the word of God.
Tyndale (1494-1536) translated the Bible into English to facilitate that purpose.
The roots of revolution against abolute church authority were growing fast!

CHAPTER 7 : SOLA SCRIPTURE

By the 16th C a new scientific spirit was undermining medieval cetainties.
People were finding it impossible to be religious, and to read the Bible, as they used to.
They wanted to get back to the roots; to read it in Greek; to analyse its content and meaning.
They wanted to eliiminate the accredition of errors in the text that had built up over the years.
Scholars, not yet the church, rejected the official Vulgate translation as inaccurate and error-prone.

People, in a time of change and uncertainty, empathised with Paul's emphasis on sin.
Martin Luther, in particular, felt an extreme fear of death,
which could not be assuaged by the traditional forms of piety.
He came to see a new view of scripture as centred on Christ.
He came to view "righteousness" as a divine gift, which clothed the sinner.
All that man needed for salvation was "faith" in what Christ had already done.
By "faith" Luther did not mean "belief", but radical Trust and Abandonment.
In 1517, Luther nailed his 95 theses on the church door
pitting the Bible against the ways of the church.
Proclaiming "Sola Scriptura".
He was happy to use the ancient liturgies and creeds
so long as they did not contradict the words of scripture.
Luther's translation of the Bible into German became widespread
and was foundation to the formation of nation states across Europe.

Zwingli and Calvin based their reforms on Sola Scriptura but differed from Luther in several respects.
They were more interested in social and political reform than in theology.
They wanted to make the Bible relevant to the daily needs of the people.
The Bible was not about what God had done in the past,
but about what He was doing here and now.

Calvin took a deeper interest in the Hebrew Bible,
seeing it as the way that Christians could understand the Gospels.
God condescended to our limitations through the developing message of His word.
So, the Creation Story was framed as baby-talk, suitable for an uneducated people.
The scientific discoveries of Calvin's day were there to unfold the mysteries of God.
This view was shared by the great scientists, perhaps as protection from clerical persecution,
for the literalist view of scripture was soon to become de-rigour within the churches.

The different views of scripture and its meanings promoted controversy and anger. Rage!
Calvin's views supported the move of the work ethic away from agricultural surplus
to a community in which everyone shared a modicum of education,
and thence they claimed a share in political decision making.
The individual reading of scripture led to independence
of mind and spirit and thence to revolution.

However modernisation had an inbuilt intolerance born of individualism.
Freedom of thought and action for some meant enslavement for others,
all justified by selective reading of Biblical texts.
Sola Scriptura could point people to the Bible,
but could never provide definitive answers.

By the seventeenth century, a time when clarity and rationality were highly valued,
people came to realise that the Bible was confusing and indefinite.

CHAPTER 8 : MODERNITY

By the start of the 1600s, Europeans had entered the Age of Reason.
Instead of relying on sacred scripture, they were ready to look to the future.
Truth was never absolute and was always liable to be replaced by new discoveries.
Instead of conserving what had been achieved scholars were becoming innovators and pioneers.
Instead of seeing things as a whole, people tried to analyse what it was made of; made it tick.
All this had a profound effect on mankind's approach to scripture and the Bible.

The new humanism even became antagonistic to the Bible, with its unproven mysteries.
Such scholars as Isaac Newton saw his knowledge as derived from God's universe, not the written word.
The religion of Deism, espoused by John Locke was founded on reason alone.
Others, such as the philosopher Denis Diderot took no interest in the existence of any God.

Some scholars applied their critical skills to an analysis of the Bible,
pointing out that its multiple contradictions and errors denied its divine origin.
A plethora of varying options and religious sects spread throughout Europe,
based on new ideas derived from critical analysis of the ancient texts.
Within Judaism, Torah study took the form of experiencing the word,
rather than just reading the text.

By the early 1800s, scholars had come to some agreements that:
the Pentateuch originated from four indpendent sources:
** Deuteronomy, Elohist1 (of priestly origin), Elohist2 and the Yahwist.
of these Elohist1 was never referred to by the others, so was the latest.

Many Christians found these discoveries disturbing.
Friedrich Schleiermacher responded by promoting a spiirituality based on experience;
an experience that was common to all religions, though expressed in different ways.
The scholar's task was to peel away the cultural shell of the Bible to find the truth within.

The publication of Essays and Reviews by 7 clergyin 1861 exposed Higher Criticism to the man in the pews.
They were told that Moses did not write the Pentateuch nor David the Psalms
Biblical miracles should no longer be taken literally and many events in the Bible were not historical.
This caused major dissent between those who valued change and those who needed stability.
Modern thought required that the truths of religion be factual;
the stories must be taken literally.

In 1886, Dwight Moody founded an institute in Chicago to combat Higher Criticism;
to create a cadre of true believers to combat its false ideas,
creating a safe fundamentalism haven in a Godless world.
There arose a widespread hunger for certainty.
Some even saw every word of the Bible as inerrant.
This was a concept that became central to Christian fundamentalism,
and to the apocalyptic vision that swept America in the late 1800s.

The events of the 1900s seemed to mirror Biblical prophecy.
When they read the Bible, fundamentalists saw themselves in the frontline against Satanic forces.
The atrocities of wartime seemed to prove the corrosive effects of Biblical Criticism.
This was, and is, an approach inspired by deep fear.
Selection of a fundamentalist "canon within the canon" led to a distortion of the gospel.
The horrors of major warfare swung the religious balance towards the need for firm boundaries.
The teaching of Darwinian evolution became banned in many places.
Fundamentalist swung to the certainties of the far right in politics.

In a pre-critical world most readers of the Bible assumed that the stories were historical.
After the Enlightenment some misconstrued the narratives as purely factual.
However the Bible has meant differenet things to different people at different stages of history.
It can not be read only through the eyes of the author or of present religious concerns.

CHAPTER 9 : EPILOGUE

Many Modern assumptions about the Bible are incorrect.
It does not encourage conformity tp onr idea or doctrine.
It calls on the student find his own answers.
A literalist interpretation conflicts with tradition.

Different texts can be used to support opposing views.
The process of producing 'proof texts' is fately flawed,
but the Bible has been used to justify horrific acts, even in our time.
It has become a witness to, and source of, the danger of fundamental orthodoxy.
Perhaps a new, and more compassionate, scripture is needed in our times,
for charity and loving kindness are key to biblical interpretation.
We need to embrace, and value, the teaching of other faiths.

Today the religious sphere includes too much certainty.
The Bible is in danger of being murdered
by those who distort its claims
to meet their own desires.

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