BOOKS, FAITH, WORLD & MORE

THE BIBLE AS IT OUGHT TO BE
A Review of How the Bible Came to Be

Daniel Hertzler

How the Bible Came to Be. By John W. Miller. Paulist Press, 2004.

John Miller wants to reorganize the Bible. What could be more threatening than this? Some 50 years ago when the Revised Standard Version appeared it caused controversy. Today translations and revisions of translations proliferate. I don’t hear much hubbub over new translations.

Would a rearrangement of the order of the books in the Bible cause a rumpus? Maybe. After all, some of us have memorized this in vacation Bible school: Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1 and 2 Samuel. . . . John Miller would have us follow the order in the Hebrew Bible, which includes Ruth among the "Writings," the third section after the Law and Prophets. (Miller, now retired from teaching at Conrad Grebel College, Waterloo, Ontario, has also written an earlier book on this subject, The Origins of the Bible, Paulist Press, 1994).

What is the point of this campaign to reorganize the Bible? It is to have us understand how the Bible came to be—that the several sections were compiled in connection with renewal movements among the people of God. Miller perceives that the first group of documents included the scrolls of Joshua through Kings, which he refers to as the "Deuteronomistic History." He suggests that this group was brought together during the reigns of Hezekiah and Josiah.

These renewal efforts did not persist, for the kings who followed did not carry them through. Also, according to 2 Kings 23:26-27, Josiah’s father, Manasseh, had been quite the rascal: "The Lord said, ‘I will remove Judah also out of my sight, as I have removed Israel.’" The theology which supported these reforms held that "when obedient, Israel is blessed in miraculous ways; when not, Israel suffers ignominiously" (24).

This theology persisted even after the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem. The last word in 2 Kings is a report that Jehoiachin, the exiled king of Judah, was granted a place at the table in the presence of the king of Babylon and received an allowance for the rest of his life. Was this to imply that another king might appear later?

But there was not to be another king of Judah. So the next revival came without a king, under the leadership of Ezra and Nehemiah. In this development, according to Miller, "They modified and enlarged the older corpus, scroll by scroll and reshaped the collection as a whole, adding a large number of new (or newly edited and enlarged scrolls) at its end (after Kings) and four newly compiled scrolls at its beginning (before Deuteronomy)" (26).

This was to become the Hebrew Bible: the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings. Or the Tanak, an acronym covering Torah, Nevi’im, and Kethuvim. "Just as the scrolls of the Deuteronomistic History . . . may be thought of as the core literature of Israel’s first canon creating period," observes Miller, "Ezra-Nehemiah and Chronicles may be thought of as core documents of Israel’s second canon-forming period" (27).

Miller may be doing some pioneer work here. I have not seen anyone else organize the development of the Hebrew Bible quite this neatly. However, his material is documented extensively, including references to his earlier volume, The Origins of the Bible. Also, in a footnote he reports that "A growing number of scholars favor the idea of a ‘first edition’ of the Deuteronomistic History that was created during reforms of Hezekiah, then subsequently updated with supplements" (156).

In Miller’s outline, the Tanak is seen as presenting a world vision in three acts. Act 1 is the "Origin of the Nations" in Genesis 1-11. Act 2 is "Israel’s origins, rise, and near destruction" covered in Genesis 12 to 2 Kings 25. The third act is "Israel’s restoration and renewal as found in the prophets and writings" (41).

The Hebrew Bible ends with Chronicles and a proclamation of Cyrus that the Lord had designated him to build a temple in Jerusalem and whoever of the Lord’s people wanted to go to Jerusalem should be free to do so. The same statement appears at the beginning of the book of Ezra. These writings were all on scrolls, and although the order in which they were compiled suggested an order for their appearance, it was easy to rearrange the individual scrolls.

A statement from a Babylonian Talmud cited by Miller specifies an order which closes with Chronicles, but the order of the books has varied throughout the years. For example, the Protestant Old Testament ends with Malachi, but the prophecies of Malachi preceded Ezra and Nehemiah. For us it seems appropriate to have Malachi just before the New Testament, but the Jews saw as relevant to the reforms of Ezra and Nehemiah.

The third stage in the biblical compilation as described by Miller is the addition of what we have termed the New Testament to the Hebrew Scriptures. Here the editorial work resulted in the production of codices (books) instead of scrolls. Miller perceives that this compilation was done in the second century and was brought about by a crisis in the Gentile Christian church.

A movement emerged to get rid of the Hebrew Scriptures as a resource for the churches. A Gentile leader named Marcion held that the God of the Hebrew Bible was a different God from the God of the church. He would discard the Hebrew Scriptures and much of the material the early Christians had produced. His Bible would include only the Gospel of Luke and 10 [ten] edited letters of Paul. In his writing "Paul is portrayed as the one true apostle who alone defended ‘true evangelical faith’ against attack and corruption by ‘false apostles’ of the sect of the Jewish Law" (60).

Miller reports that "Marcion was a prophetic visionary and an effective organizer who hoped his views and proposed new Scriptures would be embraced by the elders of the church at Rome and, following that, by Christians everywhere. . . . ‘Scholars conjecture,’ says John Clabeaux, ‘that in numbers alone Marcionites may have nearly surpassed non-Marcionites in the decades of the 160s and the 170s’" (49).

The Christian Bible as we have it, says Miller, is the result of the church’s response to Marcion. The materials which Marcion wanted to use were accepted, but others were also included. The gospel of Luke appeared third in a group of four gospels with Matthew leading off, Matthew which makes repeated connections to the Hebrew Bible. A majority of the early sources follow the Gospels with the Acts and all but one place Paul’s letters after the general letters beginning with James. They included also the pastoral letters, Hebrews and Revelation.

Miller observes that instead of rejecting Luke and 10 letters of Paul the church included but "recontextualized" them. "This suggests that it was in this way primarily (through recontextualizing) that church leaders who created the Bible sought to blunt the force of the Marcionite movement and replace Marcion’s canon and theology wherever it had gained a foothold or was threatening to do so" (62). Miller sees the warning about Paul’s letters at the end of 2 Peter as a clue to their concerns.

How did we get to where we are with the letters of Paul right after Acts? Miller assigns responsibility for this to the Constantianism createdwhen the Gentile church became the official religion of the Roman Empire. He refers to the work of William R. Farmer, who "believes it was Eusebius who did this when preparing the 50 copies of the church’s Scriptures, which Constantine had requested—and for reasons related to the role Constantine was now playing as head of the Gentile church. With Constantine, the Gentile wing of the church had triumphed and Eusebius saw him, like Paul, as its appointed leader through a direct intervention of God" (81).

As the Gentile church turned against the Jews, it became more Marcionite. Miller observes that what had been "the story of a discredited God" it became "the story of a discredited people," the Jews (149).

The order of the books in the Hebrew Bible was also changed. Since these were individual scrolls, they were quite easily rearranged. By the fourth century the church and the synagogue were not in contact with each other, and the order described in the Babylonian Talmud was not available.

What developed was a rearrangement with some books added. Now "the impression was created that the events related in the New Testament narratives were solely what the prophetic books had in mind with their visions of Israel’s (and the world’s) future" (85).

So what do we do now? Since we generally study the Bible in bits and pieces, does it matter in what order the biblical books are organized? Miller perceives it does. He would like to see Christians abandon triumphalism and take their place with Jews as heirs of a definitive world vision going back to Abraham in whom "all of the families of the earth shall be blessed" (Gen. 12:3b). In his chart 17, Miller has revised his three-act drama to include the New Testament witness as part of Act 3 (102).

This does not mean we need to give up any of our core convictions. It is rather that we should not expect to use them to oppress others as the church has done for centuries culminating in the Holocaust.

Those of us in the Anabaptist tradition should understand this, since we have never had the luxury of political power. Miller proposes that "the church’s story as introduced in the church’s Scriptures is about a momentous ‘fulfillment’ or flowering of Israel’s world mission that occurred within the story of fulfillment already begun when Israel (but not its kingdom) was restored and renewed following its Babylonian captivity" (99).

For myself, I have begun to use the expressions Hebrew Bible and Christian Bible in place of Old and New Testaments. I also prefer the ending of the Hebrew Bible with Chronicles instead of Malachi. To do so recognizes Ezra and Nehemiah for their work in the renewal of the tradition.

Recently I was studying Nehemiah 8 and it occurred to me to see this as a fulfillment of the new covenant mentioned in Jeremiah 31:34, which predicts that "they shall all know me." In Nehemiah 8 there is repeated reference to "all the people," and in the end the general response to the reading of the Scriptures is that they decided to observe the feast of booths because this was called for in the Scriptures.

Now I know the writer to the Hebrews quotes Jeremiah 31:33-34 and sees this prophecy fulfilled in Christ. By definition we are with him. I know also that Ezra and Nehemiah sometimes get bad press for campaigning to break up marriages by sending away pagan wives. But I am impressed that their leadership set the Jewish community on a path that would ultimately lead to the birth of Jesus. What could we have done without them?

—Daniel Hertzler, Scottdale, Pennsylvnia, once studied Hebrew under the tutelage of John Miller. It is his responsibility, not John’s, that not so much remains.