Problematizing the Bible . . . Then and Now

I must confess that any publication featuring a phrase like "the Bible" on its title page attracts my attention, and this notice is not due solely to my having a significant professional interest in the literature usually signaled by that label. Over the past decade or so I have made a practice of surprising students with the terse pronouncement that "there is no such thing as 'the Bible.'" I have never meant anything flippant, perverse, or profound by this remark: it is simply a succinct iteration of an easily observable fact. We spend some time in my Jewish literature courses comparing the editorial structure and contents of such widely used English versions as the NJPS Tanakh, the 1611 Authorized Version, the Jerusalem Bible, and the New Revised Standard Version. I show them images of Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Syriac biblical manuscript leaves or fragments extracted from the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Cairo Geniza, Codex Sinaiticus, and Codex Ambrosianus, and we peruse the lists of writings found in manuscripts transmitting the Greek Orthodox, Armenian, and Ethiopic canons. I also insist (more on this anon) that they carefully study certain passages found in the Qur'an. By the time we finish this taxonomic exercise, the students are largely receptive to the idea that the seemingly solid category of "the Bible" is actually an extremely fluid one which exhibits a multitude of shapes and contents over time, across locales, and along the margins of or even within the boundaries of supposedly rigid ethnic or doctrinal affiliations.

This lesson in conceptual demolition receives further reinforcement when we begin to examine the language of passages found in many versions of this popularly reified work. There was a time (long ago now) when I required students to purchase the same translation so that we might utilize a common text for our classroom assignments and discussions. Instead, I now prefer to display parallel English renditions, and I encourage the students to bring to class as many different translations as they can comfortably carry. We focus on an individual text-for example, the one that has been coded in many Bibles as Genesis 1.1-and we read each version's translation of that passage, eschewing for the moment any critical exposition of the Hebrew (or Greek, Aramaic, etc.) text(s) involving a special philological or exegetical expertise. The point of this exercise is not to endorse or to disparage any one particular rendering in comparison with another but instead to instill in my overwhelmingly monolingual students the underappreciated notion that the activity of "translation" from one language to another is an inherently subjective operation that necessarily distances one from and complicates the base text. Paraphrasing what some Muslim interpreters have traditionally affirmed of non-Arabic Qur'ans, "a translated Bible is not 'the Bible.' " The students soon learn that there are (seemingly) innumerable English Bibles, each of which intends to provide us with a vernacular reading of source manuscripts, but all of which fall short at various points of imparting that ephemeral "true" or "real" meaning which the majority of them are convinced must be present in allegedly divine writ.

But even at this stage of our joint inquiry the supposedly fixed texts (or so-called final forms) of our variegated biblical canons fail us. The students now learn that there are different textual forms and families whose relative ages are not necessarily secure indicators of their actual value for dating the history of a particular composition or work. Christian biblical manuscripts, for example, are rife with verbal variants and larger so-called omissions, "additions," and "expansions," and biblical scholars learned long ago from Harry M. Orlinsky (among others) that appeals to entities like "the Masoretic Text" may be disingenuous and invoke a scholarly chimera,¹ since no such thing has ever been extant in any period...