After teaching all last week 8 hours a day, I don’t have the energy to write a long post. Or maybe it would be more honest to say that I don’t have that much to say.
But I have r
ead a book many people would enjoy, called The Bible and the People by Lori Anne Ferrell (Yale University Press, 2008). It’s a history of the English Bible since 1066. That may sound deadly dull to some people, but it isn’t. She has traced how the Bible, through a series of changes in format and usage reached masses of people and thereby changed the English-speaking world and far beyond. Did you know, for example, that the first Bibles printed in North American were in Algonquian and German? Neither did I. Printers in the U.S. didn’t get around to English Bibles until the 19th century.
And then there’s the question of exactly what is a Bible. Many of us have had students say to us, “my Bible says” this or that, when what they meant was that the notes in their Bible said something. The apparatuses that surround the biblical text itself have evolved over the centuries based on the assumption that, while the Bible is for everyone, it is not that easy to understand. So we get something as formal and, frankly, dry as the historically-oriented notes in the Oxford Annotated Bible or something as airy as the magazines Revolve and Refuel for teens (think the Bible meets Seventeen). Also, the Bible has often been surrounded by oral interpretations of it, whether in the form of sermons or in the more interesting but harder to control form of artistic re-creations of the biblical stories. Think about medieval mystery plays, for example. Separating text from para-text is none too easy.
Ferrell writes in a very readable, occasionally even breezy style. You can imagine yourself having a pleasant conversation with her in which you’d learn a lot, but nobody would take it all too seriously. Your group could sit in Starbucks or someplace more affordable and enjoy the learning. And then you’d leave and begin to notice things you hadn’t before and wonder just why you had ignored the obvious.
For Bible believers, of whatever sort, the history of the Bible should give us pause. It reminds us to think deeply about what a text is — any text, but especially this Text — and ask how it relates to us and we relate to it. It reminds us that our commentary has weight and therefore we should be careful. Most of all, it reminds us that this book is worth serious consideration, and that you can never know enough about it. So, thanks, Lori Anne Ferrell. I’ll write more when I have more to say!
PS This week many of us will be at the Christian Scholars Conference in Nashville at Lipscomb University. Hope to see some of you there.
Dr. Mark W. Hamilton
Associate Professor of Old Testament and
Associate Dean
ACU Graduate School of Theology
Abilene, TX 79699
Editor, The Transforming Word