THE NATURE OF THE BIBLE

It is usual to refer to the official listing of biblical books as the canon, and we may say that Judaism, the Catholic Church, and Protestants have different biblical canons. If you buy an English translation of the Bible it may come in one of three forms. The New Testament section will be identical in all cases, but the much longer section or sections that precede it may differ. First, in most Bibles produced for the use of Protestants, there is only one such section, called ‘Old Testament’. But some, second, will also contain the ‘Apocrypha’ between the two Testaments. And third, in Bibles produced for Catholics, there is no Apocrypha section but most of the books that Protestants call the Apocrypha are to be found integrated within the Old Testament; they are referred to technically as the ‘deuterocanonical’ books (meaning that in theory they have a somewhat lower status than the other books), but in practice they are treated as equally belonging to the Old Testament. Protestants, however, regard the Apocrypha as definitely less authoritative than the Old and New Testaments, and some (especially Calvinists) reject the Apocrypha altogether, while others (especially Lutherans and Anglicans) treat them as important, though not as so important as the canonical books. (See the chart on pp. 28-9 for the details of all this.)

Thus ‘the nature of the Bible’ is a more complicated matter than it looks. Furthermore, in Judaism only the books which Protestants call the Old Testament are regarded as sacred: neither the Apocrypha nor (of course) the New Testament is accorded any scriptural status. But there is also a problem about what the books accepted in Judaism should be called. In ancient times they were known simply as ‘the books’, or sometimes ‘the holy books’. Nowadays they are sometimes known by the titles of the three big sections into which Jewish Bibles are divided: the Law (the Pentateuch or books of Moses, Genesis-Deuteronomy); the Prophets (the remaining historical books-Joshua, Judges Samuel, Kings plus the books of prophets such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos); and the Writings (everything else, including Psalms, Proverbs, Ruth, and a number of other books). In Hebrew these titles are Torah, Neviim, and Ketuvim, and the initial letters are sometimes made into the acronym Tanakh or Tenakh. But in English-speaking culture Jews tend generally to speak of the books simply as ‘the Bible’, and in Israel people who teach biblical studies in universities are usually called Professors ‘of Bible’.