How the Writings Entered Our Bible

Before He ascended, Jesus gave His disciples one commission: “go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19–20). The disciples were to teach what Jesus had commanded. And that is exactly what they did. Yet the book we hold today contains far more than the teachings of Jesus. It contains the Law, the Prophets, the Writings, the Gospels and the Epistles, all bound together and all called the Bible. If His commandment was to teach what He had commanded, how did we come to have what we call the Bible, with the history of Moses and Abraham and every other book bound together with it? And now that we have it, how should we understand each part of it?

What the Apostles Taught

For the first three centuries, the disciples of Jesus taught the teachings of Jesus. They gave weight to nothing else. They were His disciples, and His last commandment was their whole agenda. Their textbook was what Jesus had taught.

They did not go to the Gentiles teaching the Law. The reason was not that the Law was inferior. The Law and the teachings of Jesus are exactly the same. The reason is that the Law was not essential for these people, and it was not their history. To teach the Law to people who had never heard of it, the apostles would first have had to teach them Israel’s history. They would have had to explain who Abraham was, how God sent a man called Moses, how He gave the Law through him, and how the nation was formed. None of that is essential for anyone to know Jesus Christ. To bring it in would have been redundant, because they already had something better and easier to understand. It would also have been confusing. The gospel is very simple. God stepped into history, and His name is Jesus. He gave teachings by which we must live, and if we live by them, we are united with God for ever. That is the gospel.

For the Israelites, the matter was different, because the Law was their history. It was already part of their culture and their life. That is why Jesus spoke to them of the Law. When He taught that we must do to others what we would have them do to us, He said, “this sums up the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 7:12). He included the Law because He was speaking to a people for whom it had always been relevant.

When the apostles spoke to Jews, as Peter did on the day of Pentecost (Acts 2:14–36), they spoke of Jesus as the Messiah the Jews had been expecting. The Messiah was a Jewish concept, and it was foreign to everyone else. So when they spoke to Gentiles, they presented Jesus as God, proved to be God by His resurrection (Acts 17:22–31). How did they know that He had risen? They were His witnesses. It had happened in their own century, and neither Rome nor the leaders of Judaism could disprove it.

“Gentile” comes from the Latin word for “nation”. It translates the Hebrew goyim and the Greek ethnē, which simply mean “the nations”: the peoples other than Israel. In itself, the word is not an insult. But it came to be spoken with contempt, as though other peoples were of lesser value: not fewer in number, but lesser in worth. The word may be used, but never with that contempt.

So the apostles taught the teachings of Jesus, and the gospel spread. How, then, did the Law, the Prophets and the Writings all come to be part of the Christian Bible? Two things made it happen: the Septuagint, and the Roman church.

The Law, the Prophets and the Writings

The Jews themselves divided their writings into three parts. The Law was called the Torah. The Prophets were called the Nevi’im. The rest were called the Ketuvim, the Writings.

The Prophets include the historical books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings, which the Jews called the Former Prophets. These books are human history, told from their writers’ own perspectives. What the prophets in them said is God-originated; the history around it is not.

The Writings comprised the following books. There were the poetical books: Job, the Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs. There were books that we sometimes consider historical: Ruth, Esther, and Ezra and Nehemiah, which are really one book. There was Chronicles, which is also one book in two parts. And there were Lamentations and Daniel. All of these were Writings. Ezra–Nehemiah and Daniel both come from the exile in Babylon or after it. Ezra–Nehemiah tells of what was almost a second exodus, the return from Babylon, and so the book mattered greatly to the Jews. The place of the Writings in Scripture was itself debated for a very long time.

Daniel was never counted among the Prophets. Today it is all the rage: anyone who talks about prophecy goes straight to Daniel, Ezekiel and Revelation. Yet the Jews never considered it a prophetic book. A prophet went to the people and said, “Come back to obedience.” That was the mission of a prophet; that was the office of a prophet. Daniel was not like that. He lived in the palace (Daniel 1:3–6; 2:48). He was a righteous man, and his heart was in the right place. He had concern for the people, and that is as far as it went. He never went to the people, and he never called them to repentance. He never said, “Come back to the Law; come back to obedience.” Ezekiel did (Ezekiel 18:30–32), and so Ezekiel is called a prophet. Daniel is not.

The devout Jews made the distinction themselves. By devout Jews† I do not mean every Jew or every Israelite. I mean those who truly followed God. Judaism itself had become corrupt, but there were always such people: Jeremiah was one, and there were others even in the captivity. We did not make the distinction for them. The Law and the Prophets, they said, were given by God, and so they were to be learnt and followed. The Writings were something else altogether: “This is our literature, our writing, our history. It has nothing to do with God.” The Writings were expressions, ramblings, rants, historical details, poetry and literature: the legacy of a people. They were relevant to the Israelites. The Israelites were even proud of them. But they were never considered the teaching God had given.

No writing is neutral. Even historical writing is never a mere capture of events. It always has a colouring and a perspective. We might think Kings and Chronicles are the same. They are not. Chronicles was written at a completely different time, and its perspective is very different. Chronicles is a flattery of the monarchy, a piece of propaganda that uplifts the kings. Kings is different. It is more historical, and it criticises the kings. At times it is satirical and sarcastic: it laughs at them. But both are human perspectives on the monarchy, not God’s word. History always takes sides. Ruth and Esther elevate one person or one people. So we should not go to the Writings to learn who God is or how we must live.

The Septuagint

The Greeks had a habit, an obsession even. They were voracious readers who prized knowledge, and they wanted to read anything and everything they came across. Wherever they went, and whichever nation they took control of, they had its best literature translated into Greek so that they could read it. This was not something special done for the Jews. They did it everywhere.

So it was with the Jews. In the third century BC, under Ptolemy II, the Greek king, the Hebrew writings began to be translated into Greek. The Greeks could not read Hebrew, so learned Jews of Alexandria who knew both languages were commissioned to do the work. Seventy-two of them were commissioned, and the translation is called the Septuagint, from the Latin for “seventy”. It is written LXX, the Roman numeral for seventy, though the Greeks themselves never used Roman numerals; Rome came later. The Law was translated first, and the Prophets and the Writings followed over a century or more.

The Greeks did not distinguish between what God had given and what He had not. For them it was not Scripture at all. They were not translating Scripture so that they could have a life with God. They did not even consider the Torah and the Nevi’im godly. For them it was all Hebrew legacy, Hebrew literature, so they translated all of it together. The same would happen with any language: translate everything a people values, and religious writings, histories and poetry are translated together. The Law, the Prophets and the Writings became one book. Other writings were included as well: the books we call the Apocrypha, such as the Maccabees, Tobit and Judith.

Later, whenever people thought of the Jews, they thought of the whole Septuagint as Jewish Scripture. That is how books that were never part of the Jewish Scriptures came to be counted among them. The Septuagint even became the textbook of the first-century Jews. It did not happen because God intended it. It happened because of a political agenda, and it fell into their laps.

Nor was the Septuagint the greatest of translations. It was done in a hurry, and with a political agenda in mind. Ptolemy ordered it, and accuracy was not the point. Wherever the Hebrew spoke of other gods, for example, the Septuagint often rendered the words as “demons”. The translators belonged to a Judaism that by then had borrowed ideas from Babylon, Persia and Greece, among them demons and rival cosmic powers. The Law and the Prophets know nothing of these. They know only one God, who created everything.

Yet the writers of the Gospels and the Epistles quoted from this Greek translation, not from the Hebrew scrolls. Even Matthew, writing for a Jewish audience, wrote in Greek, not Hebrew. There were three reasons. First, they wrote in Greek, and when writing in Greek it is easier to quote what already exists in Greek. Second, the Septuagint was easily available, because the Greeks had produced it for public distribution. The Hebrew scrolls, on the other hand, were few. Scribes copied them, but never in great numbers, and they were not accessible to everyone. Third, the Septuagint was in the same Greek they wrote in. They did not write in classical Greek, the Greek in which Homer wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey. They wrote in Koine, the common Greek: the lingua franca of the day, the language of commerce, business and ordinary people.

The Rabbis and the Writings

Something else happened during the Greek and Roman periods. The rabbis gained control of the people’s teaching, and they did not want anyone to go to the Law and the Prophets. They wanted people to go to the Writings, because the Writings suited them and their agenda. So the Writings were elevated. This was nothing new. The kings had already set their own writings beside the Law, and then above it. The aim was to do away with the Law: why would anyone need the Law when he has Proverbs?

Then Jesus came, and He brought the focus back to the Torah and the Nevi’im, away from the Writings. When He spoke of what God required, He spoke of “the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 7:12; 22:40).

The Roman Church and the Writings

For the first three centuries, Christianity was not influenced by the state. It was shaped by the apostles themselves, who taught what Jesus had taught. Then, in the fourth century, under Constantine, the Roman state “embraced” Christianity, and before the century ended it had become the state religion of the Roman Empire. “Embraced” is too kind a word. The emperor took up Christianity because he thought it would benefit him. He combined it with Roman ideologies and with the Roman pantheon of gods and goddesses, and the amalgamation came to be called the Roman church. Many pagan ideas entered Christianity with it, and Christianity became a ritualistic religion.

The first-century church was nothing like that. From the glimpse the book of Acts gives us, it was organic and spontaneous (Acts 2:42–47). The disciples of Jesus taught, others learnt, newcomers arrived and were spoken to. There was no liturgy. Liturgy† is worship turned into ritual: a priest in a particular attire, a fixed order of service, and everything done in a set sequence. There was no dogma enforced by one man, and no special building in which it all had to happen.

Over the centuries the Roman church in the west and the Greek church in the east drifted apart, and in 1054 they split. They claimed to stand on diametrically opposite sides. They did not. The Roman church was more driven by a political agenda than the Greek church, but both had become ritualistic. Denominations as we know them came much later, after the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. Whenever a charismatic teacher arose, a denomination grew up around him. People followed Luther and became Lutherans. They followed John and Charles Wesley and became Methodists.

The Roman church needed what is called the Old Testament for one reason. The teachings of Jesus are very simple and very plain. They are radical, and they stand against every kind of selfishness and wickedness. They are all about equality. Anyone who wants to rule over others cannot use them. If you want to create inequality, you cannot use the teachings of Jesus. If you want to justify inequality, or create a class of people who can say to others, “We are superior to you, we are a cut above the rest, and we stand between God and you”, you cannot use them either. So you go back to certain places in what is called the Old Testament and justify yourself from there. That is exactly how the Roman church grew: by bringing the Old Testament back into Christianity. The very distinction between an “Old Testament” and a “New Testament” is man-made. It does not reflect the unity of God’s teaching, as Jesus taught it and as we understand it.

But the Old Testament, as people call it, is not only the Law and the Prophets. It includes the Writings, and the Writings can always be used to exploit people in the name of Scripture. The Prophets will not allow that, because they stand against every kind of inequality, oppression and idolatry. Nor will the Law. We call it the law of Moses because God gave the Law to Moses and Moses gave it to the people, not because he created it. That Law will not let anyone trample over others. It forbids idolatry and oppression, and it does not let one group rule over another. Even the priestly class was never a superior race with the upper hand over the people. The priests had responsibilities, and those responsibilities mattered for the smooth functioning of society.

The Writings are different. With them, exploitation is easily justified. Chronicles justifies the monarchy, which God stood against. Bring Chronicles into the Bible and tell people, “This is what God has given,” and you are already justifying what God opposed. You are justifying inequality and monarchy. And monarchy can come in many forms. It need not be a king. It can be a leader, a charismatic preacher, a priest: anyone who elevates himself above everyone and uses and exploits other people. That is exactly what the Roman church created. The priest was given great authority, and that authority was used to exploit people for the benefit of the priests. People were made willing to be oppressed in the name of God, in the name of belonging to God’s Kingdom.

The same thing continues today. In charismatic circles above all, the pastor has become the man to whom everyone must go for everything. There is nothing wrong with discussing a matter with a pastor or seeking his counsel. But in some places it goes too far. The pastor must be involved in every individual matter of a person’s life, not because the person wants it, but because he is pressured into it: if the pastor is not involved, the pastor will be very angry. There is always one man above the rest, claiming superiority: almost a patriarch.

That is how what is called the Old Testament came into Christianity. This does not mean that all of it is bad. But if the Septuagint had not existed, and if the Roman church had not existed, none of this would have entered Christianity. We would have the teachings of Jesus, spread across the world, and every Christian would be talking about the teachings of Jesus rather than anything else.

Compilation, Not Canonisation

For the first few centuries there was no Bible. Nothing had been bound together as Scripture, and God never handed down a packaged book for people to follow. Towards the end of the fourth century, councils such as those of Hippo in 393 and Carthage in 397 came together and said, in effect, “Let us put these writings together for the future as Scripture.” Even the word “Bible” does not mean one book. It comes from the Greek biblia, which means “books”. Many books have been gathered together.

So there is always a human element in the compilation of the Bible. And it was not the Jews who compiled the Law, the Prophets and the Writings into one volume; it was the Greeks, in the Septuagint. Even if the Jews had compiled it, we would still have to ask why we should accept their compilation as our Bible. After the monarchy, they had gone far away from God, and God was always upset with them. The prophets told them so: the kings and the people had led His people astray. Muslims say that the Quran was handed to Muhammad, and that, since Allah gave it all to the prophet, nothing can be done with it. That is not how we understand the Bible. Anyone who thinks the Bible came that way is mistaken, and has no idea of its history. We know how it was compiled, and its history involves people and their agendas. And in history it was seldom the popular opinion that counted. It was always the opinion of the people with a little more power.

I prefer the word “compilation” to “canonisation” when speaking of the Law, the Prophets and the Writings. “Canon” is a Greek word, and to speak of the canonisation of Hebrew writings is an anachronism. “Compilation” is a general word, and it fits them. “Canonisation” fits the books written in Greek.

The Canon as a Ruler

The word “canon” is still a beautiful one. When the books were being put together, the compilers had criteria for choosing them, and they called their list the canon. That is why the Bible itself is sometimes called the canon. A canon† is a ruler: not a person who rules, but a measuring scale. Here the scale becomes the ruler, the final authority. A centimetre scale, an inch scale, a kilogram weight: you do not fight with any of them or defy them. If the scale says one kilogram, it is one kilogram. If it says twelve inches, it is twelve inches. You have to listen to what the scale says. That is why it is the ruler.

So the canon is the gauge by which everything else is measured. God is not going to teach us anything more than He has already taught through the Law, the Prophets and the teachings of Jesus. God Himself stepped into history and taught us all that we have to know. There is no new teaching. If there were, there would be no way to check whether it came from God, because there would be nothing to measure it against. If it is not what God has already taught, it is not from God. That is the baseline.

The Apocrypha and the Pseudepigrapha

The books known as the Apocrypha are books such as the Maccabees, Tobit and Judith. They are historical writings about events after the Greek invasion of the Jewish lands, with its rebellions and revolts. The devout Jews never considered them God-given. They did not even count them among the Writings. Not even the Jews of the time agreed about them. Not everybody took part in the revolt of the Maccabees, and not everybody agreed with it. To some, these books were good history and “patriotic”; to others they were not. So there was no agreement at all. They entered the Septuagint, and Roman Catholicism, which has its own way of doing things, brought them all into its Bible. Later movements took them out again. People sometimes ask, “Why have we rejected them?” It was not Christians who first rejected them. The devout Jews had already done so. They were never part of what God gave.

The pseudepigrapha are something else again, and they are not part of the Apocrypha. A pseudepigraph† is a writing that uses the name of a famous person who did not write it. The book of Enoch and the Assumption of Moses are examples. They were written in the centuries just before and after Christ, and their readers knew that Enoch had not written the book of Enoch. They knew that Moses had not written the Assumption of Moses, for Moses lived some 1,500 years before Christ. These books were historical fiction. Today I could write a story about Shakespeare living in a modern city, or a fictional story about Mahatma Gandhi. The name is real, but the story is not history. Historical is different from fictional. Using a famous name is a familiar ploy. In popular fiction, an unknown writer will sometimes use the name of a famous one, and famous writers sometimes use ghostwriters and put their own names on the book.

Marcion

No mainstream denomination has ever set everything else aside and followed the teachings of Jesus alone. Some fringe groups claim to follow Jesus alone. The “Jesus Only” movement is one, and Unitarians, who deny the Trinity, claim to follow the teachings of Jesus. Yet even they do not truly hold to His teachings. If they did, they would have to come to terms with what Jesus Himself said about God the Father and God the Holy Spirit.

Nor is Marcion such an example. Marcion taught in Rome in the second century, and the church there expelled him in AD 144. He rejected the Law and the Prophets altogether. He taught that the God who gave the Law was a different and lesser god than the God taught by Jesus. He kept only an edited version of the Gospel of Luke and ten of Paul’s letters. That stands directly against Jesus Himself, who said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfil them” (Matthew 5:17). There is only one God. The God of the Law is the triune God, though His people did not yet know that He is triune, and He is the God who stepped into history in Jesus. Marcion did not put the teachings of Jesus first. He set them against the very God who gave the Law.

The Masoretes and the Hebrew Text

When the writers of the Gospels and the Epistles quoted the Jewish Scriptures, they quoted the Septuagint. Our translations of the Law, the Prophets and the Writings, the NIV, the NASB and the rest, do not come from the Septuagint. They come from the original Hebrew.

That Hebrew passed through many hands. From the sixth to the tenth century AD, a group of scribes called the Masoretes kept it. They were keepers of the books, protectors of the scrolls. They were very disciplined, and they had a long lineage and heritage of safeguarding and copying the scrolls.

The ancient Hebrew scrolls differed from our books in one important way: Hebrew was written without vowels, only with consonants. Yet the people of the time were used to it and read it easily.

The Masoretes added vowel points. They did not change the content of the text, and they did not add new letters. They added marks: strokes placed with the consonants, each carrying a vowel sound, so that the reader knows how each word is pronounced. They did not tamper with the content, but they made the language far easier to read, so that people who no longer spoke the Hebrew of centuries earlier could still read it. The text they preserved is called the Masoretic text. The Masoretic text is the original Hebrew text with the vowel points added. Most of our translations use it for the Hebrew part of the Bible, rather than the Septuagint, so that they translate directly from the Hebrew. The Septuagint was the translation available to the writers of the Gospels and the Epistles when they quoted the Jewish Scriptures, but it is not the translation we should go to. They quoted only a line here and there, where it helped establish their point. Had they been handing on the whole Law, they would not have used so poor a translation.

What We Do with What We Have

Jesus commanded His disciples to teach His teachings to the whole world. Today we are left with one big book. It contains the Law, the Prophets, the Writings that were never part of what God gave, the Gospels and the Epistles. What should have been handed on to the world, and kept first, is what Jesus Himself taught, as He commanded. That does not set aside the Law and the Prophets. His teaching and theirs agree, because they come from the same God. But the Writings and the Epistles should never have been placed on the same level as the teaching God Himself gave.

Do we miss anything essential if we have only the teachings of Jesus? No. The Law teaches the same thing in a different package, for a different people. But since we have it, there is no reason to miss what it teaches. Nor are we the first to say that the teachings of Jesus come first. Throughout history there have been people who insisted on it. But history records what is large, and the popular clouds what is true.

We cannot turn back time. We are not going to tear pages out of the Bible. Whatever was supposed to be there is there, and whatever was not supposed to be there is also still there. What we must do is analyse it critically and ask whether each part fits the agenda of God.

Take Proverbs as an example. In Deuteronomy, Moses tells Israel that keeping the Law “will show your wisdom and understanding to the nations, who will hear about all these decrees and say, ‘Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people’” (Deuteronomy 4:6). That was some 1,500 years before Christ. Centuries later Solomon, a king, comes along and says, in effect: follow my teachings and you will be wise and understanding (Proverbs 1:1–7). Immediately there is a red flag. The nation already had the Law that God had given, and the Law already made it wise. So what is the king trying to do? He has already replaced God’s theocracy with his monarchy. Now he is trying to replace God’s Law with his own teaching. He gathers wise sayings from other nations, from Sumer and from Egypt, and offers “the proverbs and parables, the sayings and riddles of the wise” (Proverbs 1:6). Which wise? Isn’t God the wisest of all? Then he says that fools despise this instruction (Proverbs 1:7). So whoever stands against the king’s teaching is made to look as though he stands against God. This is not a conspiracy theory. Read analytically, it is plain. Take verses out of context and you can reconcile anything with anything. Read in context, some passages cannot be reconciled. If two passages speak of the same thing and cannot be reconciled, both cannot be right: one is right and the other is wrong.

So we do not tear such passages out and throw them away. We read them critically, compare them with what God has said, and say plainly: this is not what God said; this is the opposite of what God said. Then they become material we can learn from. They show how people used the name of God for their own purposes. The same can happen today, so we must be careful never to become its victims, or its perpetrators. We must never treat the Bible in its entirety as though every part were the same. Its parts have different agendas. What God gave has one agenda: its recipients were people, and its beneficiaries were people. What came from the kings, from the monarchy and from Judaism has a different agenda altogether. It was never for the benefit of the people. It was for the benefit of the kings, the priests or the rabbis.

We need a proper perspective on what comes first: what is primary and what is peripheral. And that is exactly where the problem lies. Instead of the Law, Proverbs is given pride of place. Instead of the Prophets, the Psalms. And instead of the Gospels, the teachings of Jesus, the Epistles. The Writings entice far more people than the Law and the Prophets do. They take up a large share of what is called the Old Testament, and people read them far more than they read the Law or the Prophets.

Israel had no scrolls in every home. We hold the Law, the Prophets and the teachings of Jesus in our own hands, in our own language, and so we are all the more responsible. Because all of these are now bound together, we must understand every book rightly. If we did not have them all in one book, we would not be studying the Law at all. We would not need to show how the Law has been made out to be a villain, or answer those who teach that Jesus stood against it. So we must know the history. We must know which books God intended people to read and learn from, and which books entered the Christian canon only because the Septuagint existed and the Jews accepted it. Then we go to the Torah, to the Nevi’im and to the teachings of Jesus. They align perfectly, because they are all from God. Everything else stands out against them, and everything else is measured by them.