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Whose Bible Is It? A History of the Scriptures Through the Ages Hardcover – March 3, 2005

by Jaroslav Pelikan (Author)

114 ratings

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A history of the Bible traces its evolution from an oral testament to its numerous modern iterations and translations, discussing such topics as the canonization of different versions, the adoption of certain books by religions and sects, and the varying schools of critical scholarship that exist today. 25,000 first printing.

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Starred Review. Pelikan, Sterling professor emeritus of history at Yale University and author of a number of respected books in the area of Christian belief and tradition (e.g., Jesus Through the Centuries), presents an outstanding introduction to the development, use and acceptance of the biblical canon over the centuries. As the title suggests, different groups have claimed ownership to the canonization process. Even today, Bibles vary in their content and in their philosophy of translation. Beginning with the long heritage of the oral tradition, then exploring the writing and editing of the biblical texts, Pelikan takes the reader through the process of scripture building with a fluency and ease that is both accessible and understandable to the nonscholar. His treatment of modern critical methods is particularly well done. Pelikan has a sure sense of history and context, surrounding the story with a wealth of detail, including some well-chosen anecdotes that add to the reader's enjoyment. He appreciates the ways in which tradition and commentary have influenced both the text itself and our understanding of the text, all the while expressing a love for the Bible and a perceptive grasp of the processes that brought it to its current state. This excellent work merits wide circulation and study. (Mar. 7)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

As the sacred text of Jews and Christians alike, the Bible has never lacked for claimants. Beginning with the ancient oral traditions surrounding Abraham and Moses, Pelikan recounts how the early Israelites finally recorded their beliefs in a Hebrew text. Continuous addition of historical and prophetic texts, the growth of rabbinic commentaries, and the translation of the text into Greek made construing scripture a complex task even before adherents to a new scriptural faith reinterpreted the entire Hebrew Bible as an Old Testament important chiefly for prophecies fulfilled in a radical New Testament. The writing of this Christian New Testament itself sparked controversies among divergent branches of Christianity, but it is the endless battles between Jews and Christians that Pelikan takes as his primary focus. In the surprisingly parallel strategies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Jewish and Christian leaders defending scripture against rationalism, Pelikan sees a tragically missed opportunity to heal the religious breach. Hoping the twenty-first century brings something better, Pelikan concludes with an appeal for an interfaith understanding of the Bible that will sweep away centuries of antipathy. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Viking Adult; First Edition (March 3, 2005)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0670033855
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0670033850
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.07 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.3 x 1.06 x 9.38 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #539,522 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #790 in General History of Religion
- #1,048 in History of Religions
- #8,880 in Christian Bible Study (Books)

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114 ratings

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Customers find this book to be an excellent history of the scriptures, with one noting how it objectively traces the Bible's long history. They appreciate its readability, describing it as easy to read and a great read.

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17 customers mention "History"17 positive0 negative

Customers appreciate the book's historical content, describing it as a concise and irenic exposition of Biblical versions.

"...and he carried it off well, it is a readable and enjoyable book, informative and insightful." Read more

"...yet short of a scholarly critique, this work will be found to be quite informative for those who seek a better understanding of how God's known Word..." Read more

"...and recently deceased professor at Yale provides a historic overview of Biblical development, particularly as it applies to the Christian era of..." Read more

"...Pelikan is writing as someone who highly respects scripture." Read more

12 customers mention "Readability"12 positive0 negative

Customers find the book readable and wonderful, with one customer noting it is to the point and another mentioning it is entertaining at times.

"...undertaking and he carried it off well, it is a readable and enjoyable book, informative and insightful." Read more

"...Instead, the author, a acclaimed, able, and recently deceased professor at Yale provides a historic overview of Biblical development, particularly..." Read more

"This book started out well, but then ran into a contradiction...." Read more

"Excellent and irenic exposition of Biblical-version and translation history by Mr. Pelikan...." Read more

6 customers mention "Readable"6 positive0 negative

Customers find the book easy to read, with one customer describing it as a joy to read.

"...His was an ambitious undertaking and he carried it off well, it is a readable and enjoyable book, informative and insightful." Read more

"Jaraslov Pelikan is easy to read in spite of the difficult topics he tackles...." Read more

"A bit condensed but very illuminating. A joy to read. One does not have to be out of the tradition to appreciate it...." Read more

"Very readable--entertaining at times. Straightforward, historically accurate knowledge-base, drifts along between original meanings of words/..." Read more

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F. Fritz
Elegant and approachable
Reviewed in the United States on July 4, 2006
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Pelikan writes in an easy style and smoothly flowing perspective born of his own long familiarity with the material. He chronicles the formation of the texts known as the Old and New Testaments from their earliest oral traditions. It becomes clear that through long years and re-scribing and translating the Bible, it has been in evolution. The major effort in recent years is to return to the earliest accurate version available, and that this requires considerable scholarship to accomplish.

Pelikan is strong in his description of the influences of various denominational decisions and later the conclusions of the historical-critical model on the understanding of the Bible today. He gives less time to more recent scepticism of some of these conclusions. He seems at times to being avoiding controversy by reaching softer conclusions than may be warranted by his data. Perhaps this represents the wisdom of age.

His was an ambitious undertaking and he carried it off well, it is a readable and enjoyable book, informative and insightful.

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Dennis J. Koupal Jr.
Excellent Historical work on the "making of the Bible"
Reviewed in the United States on January 30, 2012
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Wonderfully mis-titled, "Whose Bible Is It" will leave those seeking an authoritative document that proves their particular position regarding ownership of the Bible woefully disappointed. Bringing to bear the best of known historical information, facts, and background on both the Old Testament and New Testament through 2005, the date the book was published, Dr. Jaroslav gives the reader an excellent working knowledge of how the Bible came into being. Going deeper than a cursory overview yet short of a scholarly critique, this work will be found to be quite informative for those who seek a better understanding of how God's known Word came into being.

"If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free." John 8:31-32

Whose Bible Is It?: A Short History of the Scriptures

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J. A Magill
An interesting overview
Reviewed in the United States on June 10, 2006
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Pelikans's "Whose Bible Is It?" does not truly seek to answer the question posed in the title. Instead, the author, a acclaimed, able, and recently deceased professor at Yale provides a historic overview of Biblical development, particularly as it applies to the Christian era of the past 2000 years. While the author gives attention to the Jewish Biblical tradition, he spends a relatively short part of this extremely short work reviewing the Bible's pre-Christian development. One can well forgive this choice, since biblical origination is a topic requiring a great deal of conjuncture and anthropological analysis, while also being treacherously fraught with political and religious conflict.

Pelikan's makes a few mistakes along the road. For example he lumps Orthodox Jewish epexegesis in with the literalism of the Christian analytical tradition, a proposition proved demonstrably false by Maimonidies commentary on the Bible as metaphor and Nachmanidies positions on Genesis, such as positing that a day in the human experience is not the same as creations 7 days which refers to days in the life of G-d. Curiously, Jewish tradition, occupying a position of weakness in the social scheme generally allowed a greater diversity of textual approaches than the far more powerful Christian majority.

In the end Pelikan's text includes one overriding weakness; he never tells the reader definitively where he stands. One gets to the end of what seems an overly long introductory essay, only to find an all too brief conclusion that never lets us know this scholars answer to this important question. If he had a deep answer, it seems one he took with him to his grave.

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KathyL
Very responsive sellers.
Reviewed in the United States on June 17, 2021
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Fast delivery, price was great! However, when I mentioned something found in my book, I was immediately refunded the full price. I only mentioned this to make the seller aware but they insisted on a full refund. I would definitely do business with this seller again and again!

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Michael A. Johnson
half and half
Reviewed in the United States on December 9, 2012
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This book started out well, but then ran into a contradiction.
Although the Jews were the most literate ancient people, he insisted on their being not literate but a memorizing people for passing on traditions.
This results in the gospels not being written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John but being handed down by word of mouth until finalized and written out much later.
But at the same time and in the same place the epistles being written by the writer and spread in written form word for word.
So on the gospels he is a liberal/modernist, but on the epistles he is fundamentalist.
Sorry, but you just can't have it both ways.

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Jan
Jaraslov Pelikan is easy to read in spite of the difficult topics he ...
Reviewed in the United States on February 11, 2015
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Jaraslov Pelikan is easy to read in spite of the difficult topics he tackles. I would recommend this book to people who know something of the Bible and are interested in background materials. Pelikan is writing as someone who highly respects scripture.

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synapsys
Excellent and irenic exposition of Biblical-version and translation history by ...
Reviewed in the United States on July 24, 2018
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Excellent and irenic exposition of Biblical-version and translation history by Mr. Pelikan.
No one else writes on this subject with greater erudition and fairness.

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Tarashab
Scripture with evolving meanings
Reviewed in the United States on January 28, 2013
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A bit condensed but very illuminating. A joy to read. One does not have to be out of the tradition to appreciate it. I hope a story on the same lines be told about the Quran.

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Samuel Mung
Excellent
Reviewed in India on September 6, 2019
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Excellent book to read for those who thirst to know about the historical background of the Bible

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Mike
Biblical history a layman can understand
Reviewed in Canada on November 21, 2019
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I'm a layman who's interested in biblical history and theology. I find this book is a great resource for understanding the historical origins of the holy books of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. I'm now a fan of jaroslav pelikan and will be reading more of his books.

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Peter Hewlett-Smith
Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 9, 2016
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A must for anyone contemplating a journey along the Camino

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therealus
Excellent account, but weak on drawing conclusions
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 2, 2006
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Though probably the most read "book" in the western hemisphere, and certainly the most ubiquitous - thanks partly to the Gideons, as the author points out - very few will know the history of the Bible, nor the relationships between the Talmud, the Catholic and Protestant Bibles, and the Qu'ran. In Whose Bible Is It? Jaroslav Pelikan joins the dots, relating the development of the Bible from its Judaist origins, identifying the different types of book to be found there - the Bible is more like a library of books than a book in its own right - revealing the way in which the Old Testament was augmented by the New, and explaining the difficulties involved in translation.

First of these is that much of the source material is effectively a string of capital letters without vowels, gaps or punctuation, another that some of the words are untranslatable - nobody, not even the rabbinical scholars maintaining the Judaist oral tradition, knows what they mean. But even where they do, the meaning has been lost through translation and misinterpretation, perhaps for dramatic, perhaps for less innocent, purposes. So, just as Robert Alder, in his translation of Genesis, points out that nowhere in the first book of the Bible is Joseph's coat described as multicoloured (it is "patterned"), so Pelikan reveals that Mary is referred to as a young woman, not a virgin.

The chronology of the books is also revealing: the four gospels, for example, post-dated the crucifixion by several decades - over a century in the case of John, the final one to be written. The fact that there are indeed four gospels, and that they are so different, despite the overlaps (well-recorded in JW Rogerson's An Introduction to the Bible), is in itself worthy of note - what grand cosmic plan issues four different versions of its own backstory for its adherents to squabble and puzzle over?

In discussing the historical-critical method Pelikan reminds us that, though many of the personalities featured in the Bible, and the events, too, are based on actuality, the Good Book's adherence to historical verisimilitude is notoriously relaxed. The flight from Egypt, for example, would have left a crisis-inducing hole in the Pharaoh's economy. None such is documented by the famously record-retentive Egyptians.

Similarly, convention has it that the Christ was born in 7-6 BCE; some commentators have the Augustine census which forms the context for the Nativity occurring in 6 CE (though Pelikan himself writes that no record of this census exists); Herod, the instigator of the "subsequent" massacre of the first-borns, died in 4 BCE. Hmm. Pelikan discusses some of these issues, and points out the resultant difficulties they pose for the faithful, without drawing any conclusions.

He does concede that maybe the Creation story, together with those of the Garden and the Flood, should be taken as allegory. But the central assumption throughout is that despite the narrative contradictions there is something more to the Bible than a selectively assembled set of fables about the development of Western values. That this is the Bible's true worth is missed. It is noted that there is a switch from Lord of Hosts (the Hosts being armies, he informs us) in the Old Testament to Prince of Peace in the New. The irony is overlooked that Joshua in the Old is an invading militarist whilst his namesake in the New (known to the Greeks as Jesus) is a healer. The anomalies inherent in the acceptance of concubinage, polygamy and slavery are noted with no more than apparent puzzlement. Same applies to the conundrum of Abraham's near infant sacrifice, so ably satirised in Bob Dylan's Highway 61 and Jenny Diski's After These Things. What possesses a father to terrorise his son in such a manner? What kind of megalomanic, tyrannical, supreme being is it that expects this cruelty to be inflicted? But again these difficulties are mentioned in passing and we move on.

So although this book is enlightening in many ways, I was left with a feeling of unfinished business. Don't just write there, defend this ludicrous theology of yours!

To be fair, however, Pelikan never purports to be unravelling the inconsistencies of religion. He is chronicling the development of the Bible to its present manifestations, and in that he does very well.

So why just four stars? The Structure: at no time did I get a feel for where we were going until the Afterword, at which point I got an inkling we might be near the end. No Index. No Bibliography.

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4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent

5.0 out of 5 stars Biblical history a layman can understand

5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent account, but weak on drawing conclusions

Excellent

Biblical history a layman can understand

Five Stars

Excellent account, but weak on drawing conclusions