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Whose Bible Is It? A History of the Scriptures Through the Ages

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This book is not going to serve certain views very well--particularly those of readers who hold some form of close biblical literalism as a stark basis for their faith. Still, there is nothing here that, say, a fairly orthodox Catholic would find shocking or offensive. Nevertheless, because of the topic, a fair number of faithful readers won't agree with some of Pelikan's historical insights or with the straightforward explanations he offers in support of his perspectives. Doctrinal issues bubble up less than they might. Overall, the author is respectful and gentle--one might say rabbinical.

Set down as an elegant but approachably brief history filled with a number fun touches for the more aware (e.g. it is written in 12 chapters), it is the sort of casual brilliance only the most learned writers achieve after a life of dealing with contested but essential ground. It might be compared to a light work on the law by a great constitutional scholar or a text by a famous physicist explaining some basic idea to us all. To call it liberal or conservative or this or that is simply unfair. This is a thoughtful but understandable piece by a great scholar. It isn't doctrine; it is serious but introductory history.

Professor Pelikan has written or translated well over 200 major works in a career spanning over 60 years. He has been praised by virtually every learned theologian and biblical historian including Pope Benedict XVI (when he was Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger). One might not agree with parts of it or with the implications some treatments serve up for doctrinal issues, but it isn't false or unfair in any historically honest way I can see.

If you seek a gentle introduction to the concept of scripture(s) from a multi-faith or simply historical perspective, this is a good, solid place to start. If you have solved all of your issues of faith with regard to scriptures and are looking to buttress your own ideas, you most likely won't be happy. For many, this work will help build a legitimate, spiritual view of the written Word and a sense of the necessity for tolerance and humility--indeed for real faith. Well worth it.

Pelikan provides an exceptional overview on the happenings of the Bible since its inception. He does so in a humble and accessible approach by limiting scholarship as an end in itself. Rather, he knows when when to convince the reader with compelling evidence, and when to back away from mere dogmatic assertion.

Certainly the Bible possesses some of the finest, most staggering, and beautiful statements every recorded. Additionally, it's a book placing love, fear, and conviction in the hearts of people through various times, and in diverse places. As a result, it's been the subject of some of the most contested battles witnessed through the corridors of history.

The central 'shift' in history which Pelikan outlines is the reaction against a highly symbolic form of biblical interpretation common in the middle ages, and in some ancient times. The conviction that perhaps the Bible literally means what it says was, to put it mildly, revolutionary. Of course this assertion manifested itself in the reaction against Rome as it played out in the reformation. And Pelikan allows these events to come to light and life.

Pelikan's last chapter is a compilation of reflections on the Bible, including its persistent mystery, its enduring qualities, and its ability to capture our hearts and minds. Here is the pinnacle of the book as Pelikan finishes strong on one of the most captivating of subjects - Holy writ.

To answer the title question by saying that the Old Testament belongs to the Jews and the New Testament to Christians is far too simple. The Septuagint not only made the Tanakh available to the Greek-speaking Jews of the Diaspora, it also made those texts available to early Christians, who promptly ransacked them for prophetical "proof texts" foretelling the story of Jesus Christ and the New Covenant. In Christian eyes, Jewish Scripture was properly appropriated to become their Old Testament. The closing of the Hebrew canon was partly motivated by this incursion as, ironically, the closing of the Christian canon was later to be in part motivated by Marcion's preemptive strike.

Scripture originated in oral form, only later "reduced" to writing. Even then it was transmitted primarily by being read aloud to assemblages of believers. It was only relatively late in the game that the authority of commentary and interpretation, also originally oral, was seen to depend on a reading of the texts in their original, spoken languages. But the communicative superiority of the spoken word was never entirely superseded. Pelikan quotes Luther as observing that "nowhere in the New Testament does Jesus command his disciples to go out into the world and write books."

In 250 pages, Pelikan provides summaries of the biblical texts, reviews a range of issues concerned with problems of translation (Jesus said "Repent," not "Do penance" as the Vulgate mistranslated it), describes and evaluates the Protestant reformers approach to the Bible ("Calvin maintained that whatever church practice was not commanded by Holy Scripture was forbidden, whereas for Luther it was permitted but could not be required"), considers the challenges presented by rational and historical analyses ("If it is profoundly true that there are truths in the Bible that only the eyes of faith can see, it is also true that the eyes of unfaith have sometimes spotted what conventional believers have been too preoccupied or too bemused to acknowledge"), and much more. Many questions are raised that cannot be handled in depth, but there are entry-level bibliographical suggestions in the notes for each chapter.

The focus of the book is on the competing claims of Jews and Christians for ownership rights to the Old Testament, or Tanakh. The problem has been simplified by more accurate translation; but it can't be solved that way, because precisely the same text may be subject to quite different interpretations. For Pelikan, the Bible is God's book, and thus does not belong to any religious community. We can only be temporary custodians of tradition, and to claim ownership of the Bible is, he argues, not only presumptuous but blasphemous. That's probably about as judicious as it's possible to be on the question, but if I were Jewish, I'm not entirely certain I could look at it that way.

Jaroslav Pelikan has written a superb book for those interested in an elegent and shortish history of the scriptures through the ages from an oral tradition until the historical/contextual/linguistic debates of the 19th century. The author takes an expansive view, bringing in many different viewpoints while always slyly making his own views known. For such an obviously learned writer, he manages to make the book quite clear and comprehensible for the general reader, as well as still intellectually challenging for those with a little more knowledge on the subject. The author ended the book with a more personal, powerful examination of the Bible, beyond the preceding academic debates, as a moving spiritual document that even this non-believer was touched by.

Professor Pelikan has been around forever and is fearsomely learned. That said, this is not so much a popularized history of the Bible (readers wanting one of those can find serviceable titles from Dorling Kindersley or other publishers like that), as it is his ruminations on its development through ages. It borders on being turgid here and there; a fair use excerpt shows his somewhat prolix style:

"The presence in the Bible of attitudes toward nature and the universe that are, in our judgment, "prescientific" is[...]not simply a nutshell that can be discarded to find the eternal kernel inside. [...T]hese attitudes are bound up with its fundamental message. Nevertheless, when seen in the light of the history of biblical commentary and interpretation, whether Jewish or Christian, this "prescientific" picture of the universe is in fact one that it has been possible for widely divergent "scientific" pictures, as they have succeeded one another through the ages, to accommodate. It is a fair generalization that there is no scientific or philosophical cosmology with which the biblical message has been unable to come to terms at least in some measure, and at the same time none with which it has been entirely comfortable. What is more, the accommodation of the biblical message to this or that cosmology has often reached its completion at just about the same time that the cosmology was yielding to its successor. It is impossible to make up an alternate formulation, using the vocabulary of any scientific or philosophical worldview ancient or modern, that could have the eternal staying power of the sublime opening words of the Book of Genesis, "In the beginning
God created heaven and earth." The very irrelevance of Biblical cosmology has made it relevant over and over."

And this passage is really just an aside. But he also drops in a witticism occasionally, too. For example:

"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!"

One of the main themes of the book, announced in the opening pages, is the role of the Bible as the Word of God. Prof. Pelikan takes a mostly Catholic stance, pointing out that the Bible has been through many revisions and was once a body of oral tradition. Hence his opening sally about the Bible being as much the spoken Word as the written. He also rejects, or rather asserts the general rejection of, the primacy of individual conscience in the interpretation of the Bible, instead insisting on the communitarian nature of the Body of Christ and the Nation of Israel, for whom the Scriptures were given. Although this is not a book of polemics, he does fault the Protestants of the Reformation for prizing the Bible over the Catholic church and tradition, since it was the church and tradition that had compiled and preserved the Bible. True enough, but of course Protestantism's beef with the papacy was its corruption and failure to uphold the Bible. Hence, the Catholic Reformation.

So despite the density of detail, this feels like a personal book. Its scope and abundance of marginalia reminded me of Jacques Barzun's From Dawn To Decadence, in that it felt a bit like a final debriefing, or a farewell. Both scholars are closing in on the end of their careers, and both books are stuffed to bursting with detail (Barzun's more so, though), as if the authors were thoroughly debriefing themselves, getting it all out there for the public. Whose Bible Is It won't do for a general audience primer, but it is a window on one superb scholar's lifetime of study of Holy Scripture.

Topic: The History of the bible, its translations, and attitudes towards it.

Author: Dr. Pelikan was the leading Christian history expert of the 20th century, a scholar of ancient languages, and a theology professor at Yale and, later, St. Vladimir's Seminary. A long-time Lutheran minister, and son of one, he returned to the original Orthodox Christian church in his latter years. He wrote over 30 books.

Review: This book is so readable yet so scholarly that it is amazing. In 250 pages, Pelikan will take the interested reader on a journey through the spoken and written word, the history of the Old Testament, the content and translations and sources for many bible editions, and their strengths and flaws. (he assumes at least a minimal familiarity with the OT and NT and their history)

Pelikan will explain clearly why the Bible is NOT a literal history or geography text and why it is MORE than a literal book- as he unfolds how moral, escatalogical, and symbolic (metaphorical) levels entwine with the manifest content.

One interesting hypothesis of the author is that the two most important events in the history OF the Bible are the translation of the OT into Koine (The Septuagint) and the first printing press bibles.

Flaws: The topic is too broad for 250 pages and among the things left out was a good chapter on how the early church decided on which books were in Scripture and which were not. Also, Pelikan's long-time Lutheranism has led him to dwell too long on Martin Luther, comparitively (for instance, not a word on Wesley, Knox, Smith, Arminius, Hussand their views of Scripture).

Overall: Brilliant and accessible- a must for any professed Jew, Christian or bible scholar.

At just over 250 pages, Jaroslav Pelikan's "Whose Bible Is it?" provides a quick survey of the development of the Bible and its interpretation over the past several millenia.

It is the antithesis of a polemic. Anyone looking for a thorough dismantling of the Biblical text--or a full-throated affirmation of its inerrancy--had best move on. Pelikan is respectful and circumspect in describing various schools of interpretation, and does not endorse any particular one. However, Catholics and mainline Protestants will probably feel most comfortable with his approach, while skeptics and fundamentalists may be disappointed.

The lack of a strong argument or point of view ultimately makes this book uncompelling. The passions (often quite violent)aroused by Biblical interpretation over the years are smoothed over or ignored to the point that one wonders what all the fuss was about. The "literary-critical approach" that roiled Biblical scholarship in the 19th and 20th centuries is alluded to frequently, but never described in sufficient detail to judge the strength of its arguments or the effect of its insights.

Pelikan is convincing on at least one issue: the importance of studying the original languages of composition (Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek) in order to understand the meaning of the Biblical text. This stance (like most other opinions expressed in the book) is unlikely to offend anyone. As such, it may appeal to a broad audience, but I would have preferred a sharper argument, no matter where it might lead.

It begins well, with the promise of moving through time in an analysis of how the various peoples of the Book reshaped the book (and their thinking). But it majorly peters out, and I think it reflects a basically lazy attitude on the part of the author. While there is a nod and a wink toward Rashi and Maimonides and a little later Gershon Scholem, Jewish attitudes and thinking are frozen around the second century. No attempt is made to sort out the various Hasidic and other Jewish approaches to the original texts as they occurred over time, or to explore how Talmudic scholarship grew and changed in The Pale. Quakers and millenarians are absent from the Reformation, as are Unitarians later. The book has no index, and the argument, after the first couple of chapters is relatively difficult to follow.

It's a great subject, but awaits a better treatment.

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.

Mr. Pelikan is a renowned expert on this subject. He is erudite and his words are chosen with an eye towards accuracy that is rarely seen today. Maybe that's my dilemma with this work. Mr. Pelikan's gentle style lacks a firmness and directness that I typically appreciate. He writes so subtlety that I find it difficult to explain what this book was about and what its implications are except on the most general of terms. Several times in the course of reading this book, I had to re-read a passage multiple times to grasp what his point was. It can be argued that I may be obtuse or lack knowledge in this subject. And while that may be true, I was looking for something more from the author and he didn't deliver the goods. I wanted to hear from Mr. Pelikan the "So What?" or his take on the significance of something I invested my time into.