About the Bible – Good Question

Is the Bible what it has become?

In this series I’ve used the following examples to explore generally whether the accumulated marks of an artistic creation’s subsequent history as a cultural artifact become part of its essential substance and meaning. I’ve done this as a means of asking specifically whether chapters and verses and other historical accretions should now be considered an integral part of the Bible:
– The cleaning of the Sistine Chapel ceiling;
– The famous crack in the Liberty Bell; and
– The isolation of the figure from Whistler’s painting Arrangement in Grey and Black as “Whistler’s Mother.”

What can each of these examples help us understand about the Bible?

To take them in reverse order, the detail from Whistler’s painting provides a great example of how “snippets” from an artistic creation can be isolated and given a meaning contrary to the one the artist intended. This effect is particularly pronounced when they’re also given a different name and when other material is added that reinforces the contrary meaning, like the potted flowers in the “Mothers of America” stamp.

This happens all the time with the Bible. Episodes or even sentences are snipped out, isolated, and supplemented, and as a result, even if they still say something edifying, we miss what they really meant in their original context. The “parable of the prodigal son,” for example, is a wonderful story of repentance and reconciliation, but if we don’t see it as only one part of the “parable of the unforgiving older brother,” we miss the overall point that Jesus wanted to make. So there’s a strong case for the approach taken in The Books of the Bible: removing chapters and verses and headings and presenting the books of the Bible as whole literary compositions.

However, the example of the Liberty Bell shows us that sometimes the settings and adaptations introduced by later users can enhance rather than obscure the original creative intentions behind what has become a cultural artifact. This is true of the Bible in the sense that all of its individual works take on a deeper significance (but one that is still consistent with their original meaning) when they are gathered into a collection where they can be read in light of one another and in light of the grand story they all tell together. The Books of the Bible is designed to encourage such a reading by grouping those books that can be read most meaningfully together and by situating each book within the grand story of Scripture.

Finally, the example of the cleaning of the Sistine Chapel ceiling shows that we do become accustomed to engaging artistic creations as they have become known, and that it can be a pleasant surprise (or even an unpleasant shock) to encounter them in something much closer to their original form.

Some people may always prefer what the Bible has become, and see it as a book inherently divided into chapters and verses. But our hope is that through The Books of the Bible, many will be able to encounter the artistic creations (literary compositions) it contains in a form much closer to their original one, and so have a more enjoyable and meaningful encounter with God’s word than they otherwise would have had.

Interior page from The Books of the Bible

Are the “red-letter” parts of the Bible superior to the “black-letter” parts?

In the current issue of Christian Ethics Today (#89, Spring 2013), Tony Campolo, one of the founders of the Red Letter Christian movement that seeks to promote non-violence and social justice, makes some provocative statements about the biblical basis for its positions. He writes, “Our critics responded to our new name by saying, ‘You people act as though the red letters of the Bible are more important than the black letters.’ To that, we responded, ‘Exactly!'”

While I am very sympathetic to the overall aims of this movement, I am concerned that statements like this one actually undermine its otherwise solid biblical grounding. So I would like to explain what I feel are the dangers of asserting, as Campolo does, that “the red letters are superior to the black letters of the Bible,” and suggest another way to understand how the Bible undergirds the progressive vision of the Red Letter Christians.

By way of background for those who are not familiar with the source of this terminology, in some editions of the Bible the words of Jesus are printed in red. This was first done by Louis Klopsch, then editor of the Christian Herald, for a New Testament in 1899 and a full Bible in 1901, so that followers of Christ could “gather from His own lips the definition of His mission to the world and His own revelation of the Father.” Since then the format has been adopted widely by publishers, so that most contemporary translations of the Bible are available in “Red Letter Editions.”

The name Red Letter Christians, therefore, expresses a commitment to be guided by the words of Jesus (printed in red letters), in preference to any other teachings in the Bible (printed in black letters), since the latter have now been “transcended by a higher morality,” as Campolo puts it. (The group’s name has been adopted specifically as an alternative to labels such as “fundamentalist” and “evangelical,” which originally conveyed a similar commitment to following Christ’s teachings, but which he says now carry much “negative baggage.”)

Now as I’ve said, I’m very sympathetic to the aims of this movement. As I write in this post, I believe personally that “Jesus’ life and teachings provide, for his followers, the interpretive key to the entire Scriptural record of God’s dealings with humanity. In light of them, believers identify what things are normative and what things are exceptional.” However, I also believe that this involves a process that’s more complicated than simply reading and following the red letters at the expense of the black ones. Let me explain why.

For one thing, there is the practical issue of what actually are red-letter statements and what are black-letter ones. Interpreters and publishers don’t agree about this. In the gospel of John, for instance, there are places where it’s not clear whether Jesus is still speaking or whether the gospel writer has resumed the narrative. There are actually no quotation marks or any other punctuation in the earliest NT manuscripts. So in many cases it’s an interpretive decision where to put quotation marks and thus which statements to attribute to Jesus.

Publishers also disagree about whether only words spoken by Jesus on earth should be put in red, or whether things he spoke after his ascension to people back on earth should be in red as well. For that matter, some biblical statements are “black letter” when they first appear in the Old Testament, but then “red letter” when Jesus quotes them in the New Testament. Is the identical statement in its red-letter presentation superior to its black-letter form?

Because of such considerations, some translation committees actively discourage red-letter editions. The Committee on Bible Translation, for example, says in the Preface to the New International Version (NIV) that it “does not endorse” such editions. So treating them as the default presentation of the Scriptures and a suitable source for a meaningful allusion puts the Red Letter Christian movement on shaky ground. There really are no “red letters” in the Bible.

But this is not the most important problem with the approach Campolo describes. Rather, we need to recognize that “red-letter” statements, even if there were such a thing, and we could identify definitely which ones they should be, would only be meaningful in the context provided by the surrounding “black-letter” statements. This is true in the case of individual passages and books, and in the case of the Bible as a whole. Just as a word is only meaningful in the context of the other words around it, so a statement in a literary work is only meaningful in the context of the statements that surround it. No black letters, no meaningful red letters.

In other words, we can’t simply extract isolated statements, whoever made them, from the rest of Bible and use them as the basis for contemporary moral and ethical decisions. The difficulty of this approach becomes evident as soon as we begin to compare various “red-letter” statements with each another. For example, Campolo sees a mandate for non-violence in Jesus’ statement that we should love our enemies. But Jesus also told his disciples at the Last Supper, “If you don’t have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one.” Now it may be possible to show how this statement can be reconciled with an overall commitment to non-violence. But this can’t be done by pitting one isolated statement against another. On that level, there’s no basis for deciding which should take precedence.

The fact is that the Bible is not a compendium of individual statements. It is a collection of literary creations that together trace God’s redemptive dealings with humanity over the course of history. As we catch the flow of those dealings, we can work out, with fear and trembling, how our lives form part of the story they tell, and we can begin to determine how, in our day, we can help move the story towards its anticipated culmination. But this necessarily involves ambiguity and perplexity as we struggle to appreciate, perhaps never with complete success, how the parts of the story that seem anomalous somehow nevertheless bring it up to Christ and through him to us today. It’s not enough to dismiss them as having been “transcended.”

Even so, a Bible that properly consists of all black letters can still get us where the Red Letter Christians want to go; it’s just a little more complicated. As Campolo himself acknowledges, “The black letters all point to the Jesus we find in the red letters.” But they do this, for one thing, by identifying him with figures such as Moses, who delivered all those black-letter laws, and Joshua and David, who led violent military campaigns. Take away these figures and the New Testament portrait of Jesus becomes too vague for us to recognize who Jesus is and why we should follow his teachings and example. But see Jesus in light of these earlier figures and the challenge of following him becomes complex and nuanced.

Even so, I believe we can still live out the spirit of Christ’s teachings in our own day, as the culmination of the entire biblical story. I know this is what the Red Letter Christians are trying to do, and I truly admire them for that. I just think the formula for doing this can’t be expressed quite so simply as reading the red letters and leaving the black ones behind. To me that disintegrates the very Bible that, taken as a whole, can be understood to provide solid support for many of the positions the Red Letter Christians advocate. I wish them well.

Why isn’t Galatians Paul’s first letter in The Books of the Bible?

Q. If you’re trying to place Paul’s letters in chronological order in The Books of the Bible, why isn’t Galatians first? I was taught it was the earliest of Paul’s epistles, written around AD 49.

Actually, scholars disagree about when Galatians was written. The date depends on how the visits to Galatia and Jerusalem that Paul describes in the letter correlate with the ones described in the book of Acts. A related issue is what Paul means by “Galatia.” If he’s speaking of Galatia simply as a province, the letter was probably written to people he visited in the southern part of the province on his first journey, or even from Tarsus before going on any of his journeys. But if he’s referring to Galatia as the home of an ethnic group, the Galatians or Gauls, who lived in the center and north of the province, then the letter was likely written later, to people he visited on his second journey (when, as Luke tells us in Acts, “Paul and his companions traveled throughout the region of Phrygia and Galatia“).

After considering all of the evidence and arguments, our Bible Design Group, which created The Books of the Bible, agreed that a date towards the end of Paul’s second journey made the most sense to us. Our “Invitation to Galatians” explains:

“It’s difficult to know exactly when and where Paul wrote his letter to the churches in Galatia. He doesn’t say where he’s writing from, as he does in his letters to Thessalonica and Corinth. And while he says he’s writing on behalf of all the brothers and sisters with me, he doesn’t say who these ‘brothers and sisters’ are. Many interpreters believe that Galatians may actually be the earliest of Paul’s letters. However, its themes and language are so close to the letter he sent to the church in Rome that it is quite probable Galatians was written about the same time as Romans. This would mean he wrote it from Corinth around 56–57 AD while arranging for the offering to be sent to the poor in Judea.”

In my study guide to Paul’s Journey Letters, I offer this fuller explanation:

“The scholarly conversation about when Paul wrote this letter continues. But this study guide will follow the interpretation that it was written in Corinth, when Paul was preparing to travel to Jerusalem with the collection. Many interpreters believe that Galatians was actually written several years before this. However, certain details in the letter arguably correspond best with this particular moment in Paul’s life:
• Paul writes in Galatians that the apostles in Jerusalem asked him to ‘remember the poor,’ and that he was ‘eager’ to do this. It’s unlikely he would bring this up years before he’d actually done anything about it, but it makes sense for him to mention it in the middle of the collection.
• Paul’s language of being ‘eager’ is identical to his reference in 2 Corinthians to the ‘earnestness’ [‘eagerness’] of the Macedonians in their giving.
• Paul’s encouragement to ‘do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers’ may similarly refer to the collection. (The Galatians were taking a collection of their own at this time.)”

The study guide also notes the similarity between the language and themes of Galatians and those of Romans—for example, the discussions of what it means to be dikaios (righteous or justified) by faith; the appeals to the example of Abraham; and the believer’s relationship to the law.

While it is possible that Galatians was written at an earlier time (this is a respected position among scholars), a setting in Corinth while Paul was arranging for the offering provides a reasonable and cohesive account of the letter that is consistent with its contents. This is what persuaded me and my fellow editors of The Books of the Bible to place Galatians just before Romans as we worked to put Paul’s letters in their likely chronological order.

The Roman province of Galatia stretched from near the Black Sea almost to the Mediterranean Sea. One issue in dating Paul’s letter to the Galatians is whether he was writing to people in the south or the center/north of the province. Image courtesy Wikipedia.

Were the verses really put in the Bible by someone riding on horseback?

Q. I’ve heard that the verses were put in the Bible by someone who was riding on a horse, and that when you come to a bad verse division, that’s where the horse stumbled. Is that true?

This story is almost true. The verses were added to the New Testament by Robert Estienne (also known as Stephanus), a French printer, linguist, and classical scholar. He wanted to create a concordance to the Greek New Testament and needed to mark off small stretches of text so words could be easily located.

Robert Estienne, the French printer who added the verses to the Bible

His son Henri finished the concordance project in 1594 after his father’s death and tells us, writing in Latin, that his father put in the numbers in 1551 while traveling inter equitandum from Paris to Lyon and back. This could mean “on horseback,” but it more likely means “while traveling by horse” or simply “while on a journey.”

Bruce Metzger explains in The Manuscripts of the Greek Bible:

“Although some have understood [inter equitandum] to mean ‘on horseback’ (and have explained inappropriate verse-divisions as originating when the horse bumped his pen into the wrong place!), the inference most natural and best supported by the evidence is that the task was accomplished while resting at inns along the road.”

Caspar René Gregory says similarly in The Canon and Text of the New Testament:

“Henri uses the words ‘while riding,’ ‘inter equitandum,’ and it has sometimes been supposed that he actually did it while jogging and joggling along the road upon the back of his steed. . . . Yet I do not think that he did that, or that his son Henri says that he did that. It seems to me to be more likely that the words ‘while riding’ simply mean that he did it in the breaks of this long ride. When he got up in the morning he may have done something before he set out. During the morning he may have rested a while at a wayside inn, and certainly at noon he will have done so. And at night he doubtless . . . ‘divided’ away until it was time to sleep.”

So Robert Estienne wasn’t actually on horseback when he added the New Testament verse divisions. Nevertheless, as Gregory notes, this was a hasty, distracted job.

The verse divisions in the First Testament (Old Testament) have a different history. As I explain in my book After Chapters and Verses:

“By the early centuries of our era, those who read the Hebrew Scriptures aloud in the synagogues had to pause at regular intervals to allow for an Aramaic translation, since most Jews no longer spoke Hebrew. By the year 500, the short stretches of text that were read before a translation had become standardized. They were indicated in manuscripts by a soph pasuq mark (:). Even so, two different systems remained in use, one in Palestine and the other in Babylonia, until they were harmonized by ben Asher in the tenth century. When Stephanus versified the New Testament five hundred years later, similar ‘verses’ were created in the Old Testament by numbering the stretches of text between soph pasuq marks.”

So the First Testament verses were created in a haphazard process over the centuries, and this, too, made for some arbitrary and senseless divisions, as anyone who reads through the Bible, rather than picking out a verse here and there, will find out very quickly.

And so we shouldn’t think there’s any such thing as a “Bible verse,” a portion of the text that has been carefully marked off for us as a unit of meaning and authority. The verses as we know them today are historical accidents that are just as likely to mislead us as to inform us. Indeed, there are many places where it would almost be preferable to appeal to a horse stumbling than to admit that a person had introduced a verse division there intentionally!