From Publishers Weekly
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
Book Description
No book has been more pored over, has been the subject of more commentary and controversy, or had more influence not only on our religious beliefs but also on our culture and language than the Bible. And certainly no book has been as widely read. But how did the Bible become the book we know it to be? In this superbly written history, Jaroslav Pelikan takes the reader through the good book’s evolution from its earliest incarnation as oral tales to its modern existence in various iterations, translations, and languages. From the earliest Hebrew texts and the Bible’s appearance in Greek, then Latin, Pelikan explores the canonization of different Bibles and why certain books were adopted by certain religions and sects, as well as the development of the printing press, the translation into modern languages, and varying schools of critical scholarship. Both an enduring work of scholarship and a fascinating read, Whose Bible Is It? will be eagerly welcomed by the many fans of Elaine Pagels’s books and Adam Nicolson’s God’s Secretaries.
About the Author
Jaroslav Pelikan is Sterling Professor Emeritus of History at Yale University and past president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His many books include the five- volume The Christian Tradition, Jesus Through the Centuries, and Mary Through the Centuries. He has received the Thomas Jefferson Medal of the National Endowment for the Humanities and an honorary degree from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America as well as forty-one other honorary degrees.
Whose Bible Is It?: A History of the Scripture through the Ages FROM OUR EDITORS
The Barnes & Noble Review
Distinguished religious scholar Jaroslav Pelikan introduces his superbly researched Scriptural history with a clever variation on the old rabbi/priest/minister joke. In this version, a Catholic, a Protestant, and a Jew walk into a store to buy the Bible, only to discover that each of them is looking for a very different book. From this illustrative little anecdote, Pelikan launches into an intriguing study that examines how -- and why -- various Bibles came to be and explores similarities and distinctions among them.
As the "word" of God evolved from a body of oral material to a written record, and as that record underwent multiple translations from Hebrew to Greek to Latin and eventually into myriad other languages, shades of meaning became confused or were lost altogether. Glosses, paraphrases, manuscript marginalia, and errors in transcription all played a part in perpetuating mistakes and variations -- not to mention the persistence of an exclusively Jewish oral Torah and the inclusion/exclusion of specific texts in various versions. Pelikan also describes the impact on biblical scholarship of such important phenomena as the Reformation, the printing press, anti-Semitism, and historical-critical study.
In a real sense, the history of biblical interpretation tells the story of Jewish-Christian relations and the divisions within Christendom. Yet, in answer to the question posed in the title of Pelikan's excellent book, none of us -- neither Christian, Jew, nor unbeliever -- can be said to own the Bible. At best we are "life-renters" of this rich and resonant religious tradition that continues to renew itself through the ages. Anne Markowski
FROM THE PUBLISHER
Jaroslav Pelikan provides a study of how the Bible evolved from its earliest incarnation as oral tradition to its modern existence in several different configurations and a multitude of languages and translations for many audiences. Beginning with the earliest Hebrew texts and following the New Testament's appearance in Greek and then the earliest translation into Latin, Pelikan traces the development of the Jewish and Christian Bibles. Pelikan explores the canonization of different Bibles and why certain books were adopted by different religions and sects, as well as the development of the printing press, the Bible's translation into modern languages, and the varying schools of critical scholarship.
FROM THE CRITICS
James Kugel - The New York Times
Pelikan has an engaging style and a host of telling quotations, from Milton to Oscar Wilde to his own Aunt Vanda. There is nothing pompous here; the book wears its erudition well.
Publishers Weekly
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 2005 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
An accessible history of the Bible, enlivened by a commitment to open Jewish-Christian relations. As Pelikan, a leading historian of Christianity, has done with sacred figures (Jesus Through the Centuries, 1985; Mary Through the Centuries, 1996), so he now treats sacred text. In this short, highly readable volume, he traces the history of the Bible, and of Bible-readers, from antiquity to the present. The chronology is familiar. We read about the translation of the Greek Septuagint and the Latin Vulgate, and the creation of the New Testament. We travel through the Enlightenment, dipping into Albert Schweitzer's scholarly approach to Scripture, and Milton and Bach's poetic and musical renderings of biblical texts. What distinguishes Pelikan's approach is his raison d'etre-revealingly, he writes in the preface that his career has been motivated in part by trying to respond to the Holocaust. His latest effort, then, is as much an essay on Jewish-Christian relations as it is a simple history of an important cultural artifact. He takes great pains to show the similarities between Jewish and Christian ways of reading Scripture, to show that Jews and Christians are worshipping the same God through different canons of sacred text. He suggests, for example, that the Talmud and the New Testament can be considered "alternate" interpretations and responses to the Torah, "so near to each other and yet so far from each other." In the seventh chapter, "The Peoples of the Book," readers first encounter Islam. Pelikan argues that the Qur'an is both very similar to and very different from the Jewish and Christian Bibles. Though the Qur'an is not properly Pelikan's topic, readers may nonetheless wish formore than a tantalizing four pages thereon. The whole would also have benefited from a lengthier treatment of the Bible in America-perhaps a discussion of the myriad niche Bibles available at every bookstore, or of the biblical paraphrases popular for the last 25 years. Engaging and informative for both Jews and Christians, as well as armchair scholars.
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