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 | | Whose Bible Is It? A History of the Scriptures Through the Ages by Jaroslav Pelikan ISBN-10: 9780670033850 ISBN-10: 0-670-03385-5 ISBN-13: 9780670033850 ISBN-13: 978-0-670-03385-0 Hardcover 2005-03-03 Viking Adult Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description No book has been more pored over, has been the subject of more commentary and controversy, or had more influence not only on our religious beliefs but also on our culture and language than the Bible. And certainly no book has been as widely read. But how did the Bible become the book we know it to be? In this superbly written history, Jaroslav Pelikan takes the reader through the good books evolution from its earliest incarnation as oral tales to its modern existence in various iterations, translations, and languages. From the earliest Hebrew texts and the Bibles appearance in Greek, then Latin, Pelikan explores the canonization of different Bibles and why certain books were adopted by certain religions and sects, as well as the development of the printing press, the translation into modern languages, and varying schools of critical scholarship. Both an enduring work of scholarship and a fascinating read, Whose Bible Is It? will be eagerly welcomed by the many fans of Elaine Pagelss books and Adam Nicolsons Gods Secretaries. | ||
Download Description Jaroslav Pelikan, widely regarded as one of the most distinguished historians of our day, now provides a clear and engaging account of the Bible's journey from oral narrative to Hebrew and Greek text to today's countless editions. Pelikan explores the evolution of the Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic versions and the development of the printing press and its effect on the Reformation, the translation into modern languages, and varying schools of critical scholarship. Whose Bible Is It? is a triumph of scholarship that is also a pleasure to read. | ||
Reviews | ||
The Bible: the Making-Of Following the example of Aristotle, who in his Poetics summarizes the Odyssey in three sentences (`This is essential; the rest is episode'), one might offer a brief summary of the Bible thus: "God creates the earth and makes a covenant with his people. They enter the promised land and build the temple, then survive its destruction and their dispersal. God sends his Son, who dies on the cross and is resurrected. Various letters follow." But of course, this would not do justice to the greatest book written by mankind under divine inspiration. Jaroslav Pelikan's Whose Bible Is It? pays its proper due to the Holy Book and to the scholarship that it has inspired, not by providing a summary of its content (although some paragraphs come close to paraphrasing the plot line) but by presenting a brief and personal survey of how the Bible was compiled, translated and interpreted throughout the ages. It is, if you wish, the Bible's making-of, the behind-the-scenes documentary that will make the reader eager to watch and rewatch the film all over again. It is replete with snippets and excerpts from the Old and from the New Testaments that make you grab your volume of the Scriptures to check the original context, with teasers sampling the most famous scenes from the church's history that you may or may not remember from school days, and with a cast of characters that makes church fathers and reformationists look like intellectual heroes. The soundtrack should be set to one of the classical masterpieces that the Bible has inspired: Bach's Saint Matthew Passion or Haendel's Messiah are the director's top recommendations. Bonus features include an introduction to the Jewish tradition that may be unfamiliar to some readers, but which illustrates the close ties between the "peoples of the book"--an expression which, interestingly, comes from the Qur'an, a reminder of the lacking third party when one speaks about the Judeo-Christian civilization. There were many notions or words that I was not familiar with, and I made notes to check their definition and remember their meaning. The Tanakh, the expression that the author uses to designate the Old Testament, is an acronym for the three parts of the Hebrew Bible: the Torah ("Teaching", also known as the Pentateuch), Nevi'im ("Prophets"), and Ketuvim ("Writings," or Hagiographa). The Septuagint (the earliest Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, from Alexandria in Egypt under the Ptolemies) was generally abandoned in favour of the Masoretic text as the basis for translations of the Old Testament into Western languages from St. Jerome's Bible (the Vulgate) to the present day. In Eastern Christianity, translations based on the Septuagint still prevail. A number of books which are part of the Greek Septuagint but are not found in the Hebrew Bible are often referred to as deuterocanonical books by Roman Catholics referring to a later secondary (i.e. deutero) canon. Most Protestants term these books as apocrypha. Evangelicals do not accept the deuterocanonical books as canonical, although Protestant Bibles included them in Apocrypha sections until around the 1820s. However, the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Oriental Orthodox churches include these books as part of their Old Testament. But these reading notes do little justice to Jaroslav Pelikan's beautiful prose and gentle humor, and they make little more sense than attempts to summarize the Bible. There are entire paragraphs or even chapters that I would like to quote extensively to convey the impression they make on the reader. Here are three excerpts that I find typical of the author's sense of humor: "[Serbs and Croats] speak basically the same language--which means they can understand each other very well when they call each other some of those obscene and quite untranslatable names, and they are kept apart by a common language. Sometimes it almost seems as though the peoples of the Balkans might get along better if only they could not understand each other's language so well." "An appalling ignorance of the Bible seems to have become epidemic in our time, as is evident from the nervous laughter when on a stage or at a dinner party someone mentions the subject of angels or prayer or the immortality of the soul. Nevertheless, one of its positive features (although it is hard to think of what the other positive features may be) is the thrill of discovery that comes to otherwise fairly educated people when they confront it for the first time." "To invoke a Kierkegaardesque figure of speech, the beauty of the language of the Bible can be like a set of dentist's instruments neatly laid out on a table and hanging on a wall, intriguing in their technological complexity and with their stainless steel highly polished--until they set to work on the job for which they were originally designed. Then all of a sudden my reaction changes from 'How shiny and beautiful they all are!' to 'Get that damned thing out of my mouth!'" | ||
BERN iN HeLL BBERN IN HELL FOR READING AND RIGHTIN THIS BOOK! YOU'LL BE SORRY!!! I am over the age of 13. | ||
celebrating the nature and function of Scripture Reading any book by Jaroslav Pelikan is a rare privilege and pleasure, not to mention an occasion for envy and humility by lesser mortals who fancy themselves as scholars. Magisterial, meticulous, encyclopedic, prolific, and prodigious, Pelikan is the Sterling Professor Emeritus of History at Yale University where he served on the faculty from 1962-96, the past president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2004 the recipient of the Library of Congress's annual John W. Kluge Prize in the Human Sciences (the $1 million award focuses on academic disciplines not covered by the Nobel prizes). Most in his guild would consider him the greatest historian of Christian thought in his generation. Now in his early eighties, Pelikan has written a wonderfully accessible book about the nature and role of the Bible in its worshipping communities that follows as a sequel to his Jesus Through the Centuries (1985) and Mary Through the Centuries (1996). The Biblical documents are decidedly historical documents, not gold tablets dropped from heaven and kept "pure" from human time and place. The thirty-nine books of the Hebrew Scriptures, for example, were written across about 1,000 years. The twenty-seven books of the Christian New Testament, he observes, are hardly a single book but rather a sort of mini-library of early believers. As documents embedded in human history, Pelikan reviews how these Scriptures were first written, then transmitted, formed into a single rule or canon in a way that excluded other noteworthy candidates, translated into other languages, hand-copied and then commercially-printed, and variously and often divergently interpreted. Along the way he demonstrates how the Scriptures impacted and were impacted by art, architecture, hymnody, classical music, liturgy, economics and politics. However historical, though, believing readers rightly approach the Scriptures as more than ancient artifacts that require, even deserve, scholarly scrutiny, for in them we encounter the God who speaks and acts. Pelikan clearly loves "the Good Book" that he has studied so assiduously for sixty-plus years (both his grandfather and father were Lutheran pastors), and he always has one eye on the ordinary believer in the local church or synagogue. In their personal piety and corporate worship believers encounter "the power of the Bible to change lives" (p. 133). We can and must analyze and scrutinize the text with all the tools of the historical sciences, but ultimately, Pelikan reminds us, "I am not the subject but the object in my encounter with the word of the Bible...The historical or philological desire to comprehend what it says has been and is vastly less important than the religious need to understand it in order to obey it" (pp. 249-250). This is because "to the eyes and heart of faith," the Bible is, "after all, a love letter, one long love letter." Pelikan's ultimate intention, then, in this book about the Book, is "not to undermine its authority but to celebrate its message" (pp. 201, 231). | ||
Interesting and well organized history If you have a large study bible with many features, you probably have a diagram in the back that looks like the "family tree" of various bible translations--who went back to the Hebrew texts, who to the Vulgate, etc. I always found this interesting, as it helped explain why some versions of scripture were so markedly different, as well as giving the year of translation which helps understand the historical and cultural climate. Pelikan's "Whose Bible Is It?" is like that diagram--only more dynamic, more interesting, more informative and more complete. He gives you the cultural, political, and social climate throughout the evolution of the Scriptures as we have them today; in addition, he touches on important historical and cultural events that were impacted by Scriptural translations, or influenced the actual translations or transcriptions. I found this book to be interesting and informative. It is at times challenging to read--not something to read piece-meal, or while you are half asleep, as Pelikan's sentences are longer than the Apostle Paul's, and his train of thought rather convoluted at times. He weaves history and his commentary together in a very readable way, highlighting major figures and events not like a textbook, but as someone who is so well aquainted with the whole story and all of the details that he is chosing to share only the juiciest, most relevent and interesting sections with his readers. This is not a book to fortify one's faith as a Christian, it is not a book to put on the shelf next to books by Lewis, or Packer, or Vieth, or Pless. In particular, it seems to deliberately try to discount the notion of the innerrancy of scripture and even the one-way-to-salvation held by the Christian faith. Pelikan was Christian (Lutheran then Orthodox), but seems to be trying so hard to be "fair" or "PC" or "well rounded" that he does not push Christianity as "the way"; maybe it is that he did not let his personal religious convictions mingle with academic objectivity, but this is not a book that promotes Christianity above Judaism or even Islam. It is also apparent that Pelikan was at least something of a proponent of the "higher critical" way of thinking; he does discuss this aspect of the history of scripture in interesting detail. Overall, I enjoyed the book. When I opened it for Christmas, my brother in law saw the title and said "when you finish reading it, let us know [whose bible it really is]". I don't think there is a good answer to that question--which ambiguity seems to be even what Pelikan intended. | ||
A brilliant history of the formation and use of the Bible through the ages Jaroslav Pelikan's wide-ranging book follows the origins of the Bible from oral tradition and early writing, the gathering of the canon, translations from the Septuagint to modern missionary translations, the impact of the Reformation on use of the Bible and historical-critical study and the ways in which this has changed our view of Scripture. He writes with a wonderfully light touch, adding occasional flashes of humour and referring to history and scholarship within the Jewish, Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox traditions as well as commenting on the Qur'an. His chapter which outlines the books and message of the Old Testament (Hebrew Tanakh) is masterful and there are many other highlights of the book which offered new insights into how modern Christians see this amazing piece of literature that has so shaped our western culture in the last 3000 years. This is the best book that I have read on the history of the Bible and it is a wonderful resource as well as a fascinating read. | ||