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A BIOGRAPHY OF THE BIBLE
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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
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
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
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
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
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.
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