Book of Books: Doctrine vs. Dialogue in a Particularly Influential Anthology

The United States may not have any special claim on the Bible, but it is fair to say that given the consistent importance of religious identity, both Christian and Jewish, in national cultural and political discourses—a more central importance, as we are often reminded, than confessional identities have in many other modern nations—the Bible does have a special claim on the United States. While John Barton's millennia-spanning account does not focus particularly on any given national context (though his home country, England, understandably receives a little extra attention), the central argument of his history is also of strong relevance for a country in which evangelical, fundamentalist, and biblical-literalist approaches to the Christian faith, in particular, remain a substantial factor, as a cluster of references in the Introduction makes clear. He demonstrates in a variety of contexts and from a number of angles the ways in which the Bible is many books to many people, and always has been. Attempts to force it into accord with any single "interpretative scheme" or, indeed, "belief system" (p. 326)—an impulse that Barton identifies as more characteristically Christian than Jewish (p. 4)—are, as he patiently and thoroughly argues, with only occasional hints of exasperation, misguided. The Bible does not determine what any given religion believes; it is a resource for believers, rather than a blueprint.

As an Oxford professor of biblical studies, theologian, Anglican priest, and author of numerous works on the Hebrew as well as the Christian scriptures, Barton is notably well-equipped to survey his immense topic; he is also more than alert to the strong feelings that discussions of the Bible can raise among scholars, believers, and those who like himself are both.¹ His even-tempered, lucid account of the Bible's content and formation, textual history, and interpretive receptions engages with an impressively thorough and up-to-date scholarly bibliography. Anyone looking for a general account of how the Bible came and kept coming into being will find it here; those with expertise in particular areas of biblical studies will find their specialty set in context and perhaps discover new points of contact or resonance in different realms; and others who simply like striking details and historical tidbits will be rewarded. If you have always wanted to know more about scripture as that which defiles the hands, the shady history of the Johannine comma, or the Complutensian Polyglot's improbable layout, this is the book for you.

Barton's argument that the Bible simply does not provide a road map for any specific, existing faith practice (nor, indeed, for any historical one) is grounded in an account of the multiplicity of "the Bible" in its creation, genres, textual presentations, and receptions. He spends a certain amount of time working against his own subtitle, given his consistent emphasis on the Bible as an immensely influential "collection of books of different sorts" (p. 414) rather than a single, monolithic, stable book. This is not startling news—the very word "Bible," after all, derives from the Greek plural biblia—but Barton's account of the historical contexts that shaped the biblical books' form and content (in the first two sections), their compilation, interpretation, and reception over many centuries (in the second two) brings the point home in a variety of ways.

From the beginning, the case for the Bible as a many-splendored thing whose splendors do not include a single, fixed plan for either life or belief is made, for the most part, in a positive vein that emphasizes responsiveness and mutuality. The early part of the book sets the stage by consistently imagining the formation and content of both Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament, as well as their reception, in terms of conversation. Not only does a certain amount of the Bible take place in explicitly dialogic form—as we see, for example, in...