Dan Snow's History Hit - The Bible

Episode Date: August 30, 2020

John Barton joined me on the pod to discuss the history of the Bible. Tracing its dissemination, translation and interpretation in Judaism and Christianity from Antiquity to the rise of modern biblical scholarship, Barton elucidates how meaning has both been drawn from the Bible and imposed upon it.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Welcome everybody to Dan Snow's History. On this episode, we're talking about a little book, a little book you may have come across. It's called The Bible. We're talking to John Barton. He's a priest and Anglican scholar. He was professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture at Oxford University. And this was obviously a subject I approached on trepidation. We're talking about the best-selling, the most famous, the largest, most consequential book ever published. And we had, you know, half an hour, 40 minutes to sort of cover it off, basically. So here's the attempt to do that. It's such a pleasure talking to John. It was amazing talking to someone who studies the Bible both as a believer and as a scholar.

And it was so fascinating talking to him about what we as historians can kind of glean from the Bible as a work of history, as well, of course, talking about its enormous spiritual significance to its community of believers. If you want to go and watch some amazing history shows or access all the back episodes of this podcast, you can do so at History Hit TV.

It's actually the only place in the world you can do that. And a huge number of history documentaries on there now. Please go and check that out. You go to historyhit.tv, use the code POD1, and then you get a month for free, and then a month after that for just one pound euro or dollar. And you can go on there and listen to lots of episodes of The Ancients,

the new runaway smash hit podcast with Tristan Hughes talking about ancient history. A lot of common ground with the Bible. So if you listen to this one, you want more ancient history, go and check out The Ancients with Tristan Hughes and rate that and all that kind of jazz. Thank you as ever for listening to this pod. And here's John Barton. Hello, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you. You're very welcome.

I mean, where do we start on history of the Bible? Jeepers, creepers. I mean, should we, as the historians listening to this podcast, what should they, how should they regard the Bible? How should we think about it as a historical source? Well, I think it's a historical document. You have to think of it as something that grew over a long period of time. So I'm suggesting that it covers eight or nine centuries altogether in its creation. And then you have to think of it as something that's persisted down the ages, one of the few books that's been read absolutely continuously from the beginning down to the present day.

So it's a massive, obviously, cultural icon in Western culture, but it's also a book that has been very much discussed over a very long period of time. But when do we think the earliest books of the Bible were written? Is Genesis the first? Is it chronologically the first as well as being placed at the front? No, it isn't. No, the oldest books in the Bible probably are material about the prophets like Isaiah and Amos in the prophetic section of the Bible, which are probably from about the 8th century BC, so roughly contemporary with Homer, if that's the date

that people often assign to Homer. And I think those are the oldest books in the Bible, and there are some of the historical books like Samuel which might be as old as that too, but Genesis is probably a rather later work. And one of the things you learn from studying the Bible is that the order of the books isn't any guide to how old they are. They differ a lot in date of origin, not according to where they appear in the biblical canon, in the biblical list.

When does the biblical canon settle down into its modern form? Well, as far as the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible is concerned, it's pretty well settled in the first century of our era. So by the time of Jesus, the Hebrew Bible was more or less in the form it is now. The New Testament has pretty well settled down by the end of the second century. It's not till the fourth century you get people ruling on what's in it and saying it's these books and no others. But when they do that, they're referring to what's already a very wide consensus. And certainly by the end of the second century, books of the New Testament are more or less settled into the place they've got now. Two thousand years ago, at the time of Jesus, how settled was the Old, what we might now call the Old Testament?

Yeah, it was pretty settled. There seemed to have been discussion of one or two books as to quite how holy they were, and there were other books that aren't now in the Bible that people gave a lot of authority to, like the books of Enoch, for example, which didn't make it into the final Old Testament. But by and large, 90-95% of what's in the Old Testament now was already accepted as scripture by the time of Jesus. And the New Testament writers quote from almost every book in the Old Testament and from very few others. So we can see from that that it was already a fairly fixed corpus. When you're writing this gigantic history of the Bible, how important are other sources increasing like archaeology?

Are you interested in kind of fixing the historicity of books of the Old Testament by using the new scientific methods of dating or archaeology? The archaeology has been important in many ways in not substantiating the historicity of much of the Old Testament, a lot of which is probably legendary material, but in showing the context out of which it came. And there are cases, there's for example the King Jehu, who's mentioned in the second book of Kings in the Old Testament, who turned up on an Assyrian obelisk doing homage to the Assyrian king, which fits in with what's said of him in Kings. And there are one or two cases like that where archaeology has produced things that, if they don't corroborate, at least show the context

within which the Old Testament came to be. Most striking, of course, in recent years has been the Dead Sea Scrolls, which started to be discovered 70 years ago and have thrown enormous light on the background of the New Testament. Can I ask you more about the Dead Sea Scrolls? Because it's something that everyone's heard of, and I, for one, don't know much about. When you say they throw light on the background of the New Testament, why is that? Do they deal particularly with the

period just before the life of Jesus? Yes. I mean, they come from probably the first century BCE, and then some of them from the time of Jesus? Yes, I mean they come from probably the first century BCE and then some of them from the time of Jesus itself. And what they show is the enormous variety there was in Judaism. So a group of Jewish sectarian Jews, one could call them, who had withdrawn to the Dead Sea to pursue, as they saw it, a sort of purer form of Judaism, a purer kind of life. And a lot of their ideas tie in quite well with some of the ideas in the New Testament. They were very sure that the end of the ages was coming soon. The end of the world, if you like, was coming. And there was going to be a big cosmic battle at the end of time.

And you do find ideas like that underlying some of the New Testament books. you do find ideas like that underlying some of the New Testament books. So that shows us that a kind of thinking was actually already in circulation by the time of Jesus. And that's been an important finding. They were also quite interested in the coming of, as they saw it, two messiahs, a kingly messiah and a priestly messiah who were going to re-establish Israel. And that's part of the background of the thinking of Jesus himself, I think. So they've been important from that point of view.

They also simply do throw light on the varieties of Judaism that were around. We've learned to talk about Judaisms in this period rather than one single monolithic religion. And some of the things that are in the early T-scoles didn't develop much in later Judaism, but did develop in Christianity. Let's just stay with the Old Testament before coming to Jesus for a sec. What can we learn as historians from the... You talk about a lot of it is mythological. What isn't?

What has proved useful to our understanding of the history of the ancient Near East? Well, the historical material in the books of Samuel and Kings, which probably go back to the 8th or 7th centuries BCE, does show us what was going on in Israel at the same time as things happening in Assyria and Babylonia, that's to say what's now Iraq, from which we've got a great deal of historical evidence in terms of tablets inscribed in cuneiform writing. And the Old Testament provides a window on the same general world as that and shows us what was going on in the way of battles and struggles for power in the ancient Near East

at the time. So what we read in the Old Testament, though it may be legendary, nonetheless fits into that general period. And then as we come on to the New Testament, is it very difficult as both a historian and a believer to, do you try and distill the two? I mean, because you both can regard the Bible as a work of man and subject to the kind of compromises and revisions that we all do,

but also as a repository of religious truths. How do you, as a scholar, navigate your way through that? Yes, that's an important question. The New Testament is clearly a human work. It's not something that dropped from heaven. And as a scholar, one treats it as any other historical document in that sense, looking at how it got written, when it got written. But also, of course, what the ideas in it are. And some of the ideas in

the New Testament remain important for Christians. Many of the ideas in it remain important for Christians at any rate. And so one has to do justice to that as well. I don't myself find, as a Christian believer, that I have a great deal of difficulty with this. But I think that's partly because I don't see the New Testament and Christianity as absolutely coterminous. It seems to me that there are ideas in Christianity that aren't very strongly there in the New Testament, like the doctrine of the Trinity. And there are things in the New Testament, like the teaching of Jesus, that don't appear in any of the Christian creeds, for example. And so there's a huge layer of overlap but there's also distinct elements in

the Christian faith and in the New Testament which don't necessarily meet very much together so I find that a helpful way of looking at it. So far as the historical point of view goes I totally espouse a view that says we must study the New Testament as historians and see what the circumstances were that got it put together. And I'm also very interested in the, again, in the order the book's got to be written in. I'm noting that the first letters of St Paul are the earliest works we've got, probably from the 50s, so just 20 years after Jesus's crucifixion. And then the Gospels follow 20 years or so after that. And that can be quite startling.

I think people tend to think that, you know, St Paul had the Gospels to look at, but he hadn't. They didn't exist yet. And that seems to be quite an important insight, that he's talking about a Christianity that isn't yet a religion of the book. There aren't any books yet. Well, it just reinforces Paul's importance as a founder of that religion. Well, and certainly founder is one way of looking at it. He created what Christianity became to a

very great extent. Trinity is fairly important to Christianity. And that's, you're telling me, that's not heavily referenced in the New Testament. No, I mean, I think there's nothing in the New Testament that's incompatible with the doctrine of the Trinity, the idea that Jesus is God, and that God exists in three modes, or however one likes to put it. But there's only one explicit reference to the Trinity in the New Testament, and that's at the end of the Gospel of Matthew, which the majority of scholars suspect is a later insertion in order to get the Trinity into the New Testament. There are plenty of things in the New Testament that suggest that Jesus is much more than just a man.

And that's part of the thinking that leads eventually to the idea that Jesus is God. But there's nothing in the New Testament that spells that out in the later doctrinal form it had. So that I think we're not dealing with a doctrine that's already there enshrined in scripture in any very clear way. Now, that doesn't mean that the church was wrong to develop the doctrine of the Trinity, but it does mean that it can't directly appeal to the New Testament and say, there you are, there it is.

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We might start to question things. Is there something, are there still people in the world, evangelicals, Catholics, maybe I'm doing them down, who would regard what you're doing as dangerous? Yes, there are. There are. One of my critics on Amazon said some time ago, Barton would have been burned at the stake for this that's going a bit far I think at least I hope it is but I think it was probably said ironically rather than as a criticism actually but he I but it is true that when biblical criticism of the modern kind arose which is broadly in the 16th, 17th centuries, it was regarded as dangerous. And there are still more conservative Christians, both Catholic and evangelical, who do regard it as a travesty, as a way of treating the Bible as

a merely human document. And they say it isn't a merely human document. You can't apply the same criteria to it as you do to any other work well modern biblical criticism works precisely on the basis of trying to read the bible as any other book and and my book is meant to be informative not only for believers christian or jewish but also for um anyone who's interested in the Bible as a human product. But that is potentially dynamite for some more conservative believers. I think people have said a lot of things to me on the internet, they've never said I'll be burned at the stake. And frankly, that is one insult I'd rather enjoy receiving.

Yeah, well, I thought, first of all, I thought this person's obviously read the book, which is always good news for an author. And then I thought, well, he's probably exaggerating, but nevertheless, it does suggest that there's something that some people would regard as inflammatory. I'm really reporting in the book on several centuries of detailed academic scholarship and not trying to be inflammatory at all. But if you do take the view that the Bible, as it were, dropped from heaven, then obviously you will find investigating it as a human product contentious. Let's come on to Jesus and the New Testaments now.

Are they ever in conflict? Do they present a range of views about Jesus? Oh, they do, yes. I mean, the biggest and most obvious difference is between St John's Gospel on the one hand and Matthew, Mark and Luke on the other hand. Those other three Gospels often called synoptic because they seem to have a rather similar view of Jesus and they present him very much as the great teacher who gives pithy proverb-like sayings and parables and then of course provokes the authorities and is eventually crucified as we know. Now John's gospel also of course ends with the crucifixion and resurrection and regards Jesus as having been contentious in that sense

but the teaching Jesus gives in St John's gospel is much more about himself and his relation to God the Father and indeed John's Gospel is one of the texts out of which the doctrine of the Trinity eventually develops because Jesus presents himself as on a par with God. Now that's not so true of the Synoptic Gospels so there's a real difference between them and probably for one thing John is somewhat later maybe towards the end of the first century, where the other Gospels are 20 years or so earlier. But that's one very striking difference within the New Testament. The other thing is the difference between Paul and the Gospels, because the Gospels do have Jesus as mainly a moral teacher,

Gospels do have Jesus as mainly a moral teacher, whereas Paul says hardly anything about Jesus as a moral teacher and concentrates on him as the great deliverer who has been sent by God and whose status in the sight of God is important and who sets believers free from the need for minute observation of the law. So there are differences between Paul and the Gospels too. Did they write the Gospels? Is this like people, politicians, publishing their diaries years after the events they described, when they realise there's going to be sort of value in it? I mean, why didn't they write them before? And are these written by genuine apostles of Jesus? The earliest Gospel is Mark, and that wasn't written until about 70. Then, and Mark, we don't know who Mark was. It's not identified in the Gospel itself is Mark and that wasn't written until about 70 then and Mark we don't know who Mark was it's not identified in the gospel itself as Mark that's just a later heading gospel according to Mark and he wouldn't have been an apostle and certainly if he had been he'd

be very old by then and in general the gospels are not by apostles of Jesus, they're by later authors, building probably on mainly oral tradition. We don't know why it didn't occur to anyone to write down what Jesus had done and said earlier than Mark and maybe someone did and that book is lost but if you look at Paul's letters you can see that he isn't referring to any written texts about Jesus but to what people know through oral tradition. And the likelihood is that these oral traditions pass down by word of mouth, and it's not until 30 or 40 years after Jesus that someone has the idea of writing them down into a kind of memoir. And then they did write what are rather like Greek biographies of great people. So the Gospels do belong to a

recognisable genre of literature, but there's no sign that they were written by eyewitnesses. They may rest, of course, ultimately on eyewitness testimony, which have been handed down, but they're not themselves eyewitnesses, only the events they describe. So again, with our historian hats on, hard-nosed historians, albeit deeply human and subjective ones, how much can we learn, how much can we rely on the Gospels about the life of Jesus? Did he exist? Did he do the things that we think he did? Well, I think, I mean, his existence is as well attested as Julius Caesar's, if you like. There's no reason to think he didn't exist. But whether he did exactly the things recorded in the gospels remains unclear for one thing the

gospels often tell stories in a rather different way and of course some people would have doubts about more miraculous things he did as far as his sayings go it is a distinctive body of sayings not quite like anybody else's in the ancient world and the majority of people who've studied the gospels think there's a certainly a an underlying stratum of material that really does go back to jesus there are various criteria for that i mean one is a fairly standard historical criterion if you can't think of why a particular saying would have been made up, then you probably regard it as authentic. I mean, if Jesus says things that nobody in the early church would have wanted him to say, then that saying is probably an authentic saying. That doesn't identify all the authentic sayings of Jesus, but it does give you some kind of handle on where you ought to find a material that almost certainly does go

back to him. So I think there's a lot of genuine material about Jesus in the Gospels, even though there are also probably legendary editions. The fact that there are legendary things, things that aren't true, mythological things, both in the New and Old Testaments, has probably encouraged people like me to lose our faith and become atheists and all that kind of stuff why should people regard the bible as a thing to believe in when when even you one of the great scholars of it is saying well this bit probably didn't happen in the way that it's described well i think it's because uh i mean what i found myself coming down to in the end is that alongside material in the Bible that probably isn't historically authentic,

there is a great deal of wisdom and insight in it, into human nature, and also into the possible relationship of God to human beings. And it seems to me still to be a very profound book, even if parts of it are not historically accurate. And it seems to me still to be a very profound book, even if parts of it are not historically accurate. And because it's a question how far much of it was written in order to be historically accurate. I mean, John's Gospel, for example, says explicitly, this is written that you may believe. Not that you can be sure of every individual detail of history in it. So I think the Bible remains a source of inspiration and insight, even if there are parts of it, quite large parts of it, that are not historical record. And historical records are not the only thing that it's worth reading. I mean, one doesn't

read Shakespeare for a historical record, but one nevertheless gets a lot of insight and understanding through reading him. Very good point. And is it a problem or is it just the nature of humanity and our great texts? We can read what we want into it. And I'm very struck in your book and every time I listen to a sermon today, they're about tolerance, they're about diversity and inclusivity and about social justice and all very laudable and wonderful things that feel very much of the moment but previous generations have managed to read all sorts

of other things into it just to get famously justification for slavery or imperialism or whatever it might be is that is that a problem or is that just yeah is that just the nature of how we we relate to our our canonical texts well you're quite right of course that one of the things that operates when you've got a canonical text is you desperately want it to say the things you already believe and a lot of the history of Jewish and Christian interpretation of the Bible has been finding in the Bible the things people believed already. So the Judeo-Christian tradition of social justice for example is clearly there in the Old Testament prophets for example example, and in the teaching of Jesus. But our enormous emphasis on it is a modern emphasis, where earlier generations were interested perhaps in other things. But of course, the Bible is this enormous compendium of material.

And it is true that to some extent you can find it in anything you're looking for. The trick is to try and find, see if you can identify genuine trajectory of thought going through the thing which is worth affirming and the social justice point is one that i would say is there throughout the bible in fact and um does still apply but certainly um there's no doubt that both in christianity and in and in Judaism finding what you already believe in the Bible has been a very popular activity Well thank you very much for talking to me about it today we obviously can't do justice to your gigantic book

or the book it's based on I'm sure Donald Trump will be your first reader he says the Bible's his favourite book so he'll be eagerly leafing through your pages your book is called? It's called A History of the Bible, The Book and Its Faiths. Well, thank you so much and good luck with it.

Thank you very much. Hi everyone, it's me, Dan Snow. Just a quick request. It's so annoying and I hate it when other podcasts do this, but now I'm doing it and I hate myself. Please, please go onto iTunes, wherever you get your podcasts, and give us a five-star rating and a review. It really helps and basically boosts up the chart,

which is good, and then more people listen, which is nice. So if you could do that, I'd be very grateful. I understand if you don't want to subscribe to my TV channel. I understand if you don't want to buy my calendar, but this is free. Come on, do me a favour. Thanks.