A River for the Lamb and the Elephant

The second-century church father Papias is reported by Eusebius to have said, “I do not believe that things out of books are as beneficial to me as things from a living and enduring voice.” We moderns and postmoderns are shocked to read this, for we think that written texts are more reliable than oral communication. But our ancient and medieval forefathers disagreed. As Plato quotes  Socrates in his Phaedrus,

For those who learn to use [written texts] it will result in forgetfulness, for they will no longer need to use their memory[.] You have discovered a medication not to increase memory but to increase dependence on being reminded. Thus you offer to your students only the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom. For they will read much, but not be taught; they will appear to be knowledgeable, but on the whole they will be ignorant. 

The problem, said Socrates and Plato, is what Brent Sandy has called decontextualization. As Plato put it, “[Y]ou might think [written words] spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing.”

A speaker, on the other hand, answers questions about what he has just said. He uses different tones, volume, and body language to emphasize and provide context. But a written text provides little of this. This is why all but two of Plato’s twenty-seven writings were dialogues. It is why Socrates and Epictetus wrote nothing when they surely could have. And it is also why Jesus wrote nothing and the early church was in no rush to get a written Bible into print. As Yale historian Bruce Gordon writes in his magnificent new book on the global history of the Bible:

Throughout most of its history, the Bible has been read by only a few. Most people encountered it in oral and visual forms—they heard it, talked about it, prayed with it, or saw it in worship; its stories were told in paintings and drawings both crude and exquisite.

In its first thousand years as the Hebrew Bible and then the next fifteen hundred years as the Christian Bible, it was more heard than read. It was an oral text more than a written text because people trusted the heard word more than the written word.

Gordon relates the story told by the church father Augustine of Hippo of a congregation in North Africa that had protested vociferously when a new Latin translation of the Bible was read aloud at Sunday worship. They were incensed because they heard “a very different rendering from . . . what had been chanted for so many generations in the church” (my emphasis). Apparently just a few words were different, but those words clashed with what they had memorized from hearing it repeatedly in their lifetimes.

So too in England. “Long before the first translation of the Gospels into Anglo-Saxon in the tenth century,” Gordon observes, “the Bible circulated among the people as an oral text that they likely knew by heart and could sing and recite.”

For most Christians in the church’s first fifteen hundred years, the Bible was received not through reading but through hearing and seeing. They heard and saw it enacted in the liturgies of the church. Nicholas of Andida wrote in the eleventh century of the worship at Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, that its holy rites “signify all the manifestations that accompanied [Christ’s] entire saving life among us in the flesh: his conception, his birth and his life in the first thirty years, the activity of the forerunner, and his public appearance at his baptism.” 

As Gordon puts it, it was the liturgies that brought the Bible to most Christians in most of history. “In mind and body, they participated in the biblical story” by hearing and observing and playing their roles in the liturgy. In these church rites “the faithful were healed, their sins forgiven, and their inheritance of the kingdom of heaven assured.” Believers at these services were not “passive spectators” but “actors in the divine drama” that reenacted creation and redemption in their midst.

The physical Bible in these liturgies became an icon, a window into heaven, and at times a talisman. It was held aloft and kissed, regarded as a symbol of the presence of the Holy Spirit and Christ. Litigants at early church councils swore on the Gospel book, and its physical presence was required to confirm the decisions of the councils. By the fifth century “the Bible as book had become an incarnation of the divine, its physical presence in the world.” In Coptic Egypt, in the lands of the Syriac monasteries, in the churches of Ethiopia, and in western Europe in these first fifteen centuries, “Bibles were regarded sacramentally, like the body of Christ in the bread and wine.”

Despite the relative paucity of physical Bibles in the first millennium and a half of the church, but perhaps because of the priority of hearing over reading, the Bible was and continues to be, in Gordon’s words, “the most influential book in the world.” It remains the foundation of the faith of almost a third of the world’s population. And because of the spread of Christianity to every continent, it is “the most global of all books.”

The key to its appeal to so many for so long has been the Bible’s capacity to speak to every kind of person at every stage in the spiritual journey. Gordon highlights the famous depiction by Gregory the Great (Pope from 590 to 604) of the Bible’s protean power: “[The Bible] is, as it were, a kind of river, if I may so liken it, which is both shallow and deep, wherein both the lamb may find a footing, and the elephant float at large.”

Gordon’s elegantly written tome is full of surprises, particularly about the Reformation. Protestants have told themselves that their reformers rescued the Bible from oblivion after its disappearance in the Middle Ages. Gordon contends that this is a great “mistruth.”

True, few in the medieval world ever touched a Bible, and even fewer read it. Yet the Bible was everywhere: heard and seen in worship, performed on temporary stages erected in village squares, recounted in song, shown in pictures on church walls. It was in medicine, colloquial speech, and roadside chapels and crosses.

For most medievals, “the Bible was spoken and performed.”  Chaucer’s men and women in his Canterbury Tales “quote scripture from memory, not from books they took with them on pilgrimage.” In this mostly illiterate world, “the Bible was simply known.”

Another myth about the Reformation is that it restored biblical preaching after its absence. Gordon counters that “from the thirteenth century, preaching flourished in the medieval world in the form of scholastic sermons in which the biblical text was broken down systematically and interpreted in parts.”

A third myth was that there was no vernacular Bible in the Middle Ages. Gordon points out that before Luther wrote his “September [New] testament of 1522,” there had already appeared seventy German vernacular translations, and seventeen were complete in one volume. So Luther was “something of a Johnny-come-lately.”

And Germany was not alone. In the Middle Ages there were vernacular translations in French, Italian, Czech, Dutch, and Spanish. “By the end of the Middle Ages, vernacular Bibles had never before been so widely owned and read,” Gordon writes. And while there were these Bibles in print, Christians still preferred hearing to reading: the Bible “was read generally aloud and shared in community, not only in homes but in workplaces.” As a result, “the Bible suffused everyday life in the Middle Ages.”

Another misunderstanding dating back to the Reformation has been its rallying cry of sola scriptura or the “Bible alone” as final authority. Gordon, who is a Protestant, points out that while the Catholic Church held the Council of Trent as a counter-reformation to Protestants, Trent “unequivocally declared the centrality of the Bible for the church.” And Luther, who most prominently championed sola scriptura, practiced what is sometimes called prima scriptura or the interpretation of the Bible by reference to the great fathers and councils of the first-millennium church. Luther insisted that every believer needs to understand the biblical text for himself, yet also “believed its truths had to be interpreted and communicated by [the reformers] and the clergy.”

Another myth Gordon delightfully debunks is the supposed conflict between the Bible and the great scientists of the Age of Reason. Gordon shows that Galileo was loyal to both the Church and its Bible and agreed with his opponent Cardinal Bellarmine that the intent of the Bible is to teach us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go. Gordon demonstrates that the question for Newton and most scientists of the era was not whether to side with the Bible or science but how the two relate. Newton, for example, was convinced of the two books of revelation—nature and science—and that each points to the other.

Gordon does not shrink from showing how the Bible has been used for evil. The sixteenth-century Complutensian Polyglot Bible printed in Spain promoted antisemitism by saying in its preface that its Latin text represents Christ on the cross, while its Hebrew and Greek are the two thieves crucified, representing the obstinate Jews and schismatic Greeks. “The polyglot was prepared in Spain less than a decade after the expulsion of Jews from Iberia, leaving no doubt as to which thief was saved and which condemned,” he explains. He also details the common European interpretation of the Noah story that Africans were the descendants of Ham who was cursed for viewing his father’s nakedness, though the connection between dark skin and Ham is nowhere in the Bible.

Gordon’s last chapters on the Bible in missions, China, Africa, and global Pentecostalism intriguingly expose the problem when missionaries and translators so insisted “on the primacy of the written text [that it] put them at odds with cultures that were primarily oral.” The nineteenth-century (Anglican) Church Missionary Society, for example, flattened the wide diversity of Igbo languages in Nigeria into a standardized form that was the language of no one. An Igbo critic complained “it is not a living language and has no soul.” Baptist and Presbyterian missionaries in China translated the Bible into classical Chinese that no one spoke—and therefore few read.

But the faith of the Bible spread in the Global South nonetheless. One reason was that most Africans and Chinese refused to accept Enlightenment presuppositions. Gordon notes that Africans refuse “the rationalistic worldview that reduces our world to the natural. They still believe in the supernatural.” This provides optimism and challenges materialism. Pentecostals, he points out, “do not see themselves as ‘interpreting’ the Bible so much as listening to God.” 

Just as Gordon wisely notes that every new Bible translation “holds something back” and so obscures, so does Gordon. He unfailingly refers to Israel as Palestine, a politicized term rejected by the majority of the area’s inhabitants and belying the fact that before 1967 most Palestinians thought of themselves as Jordanians. He also claims Jesus’s primary tongue was Aramaic, a trope originated by Germans who wanted to de-Judaize Jesus. Yet Luke says in Acts that Jesus spoke Hebrew to Paul and that Paul spoke to a large crowd in the temple in Hebrew (Acts 26.14; 22.2), and scholars such as Schmuel Safrai insist that “Hebrew was the dominant spoken and written language in the whole land of Israel in the time of Jesus.”

Gordon has a marvelous chapter on the King James Bible, which he says remains “the most widely read Bible all around the globe” and is a work of “mesmerizing beauty . . . a work of art.” Yet while he rightly says it was produced by “the greatest biblical scholars of their age,” he mentions (Anglican) Bishop Lancelot Andrewes as merely one its supporters. In fact, Andrewes was responsible for the KJV’s Pentateuch and most of its historical books—Genesis to 2 Kings. The beauty of its diction in creation and fall, Abraham and Isaac, exodus, David’s laments for Saul and Jonathan and Absalom, Elijah and the still small voice—all were his.

He also strangely denigrates another Anglican, Thomas Cranmer, by isolating his quote “I forbid to reason” from the liturgy he produced that has been hailed ever since as brilliant with beauty and reason. And Jonathan Edwards, rightly famous for his sermons on hell, never said “the entire world would be saved.”

Gordon rehearses modernist criticisms of the Bible by African-Americans and Africans. He claims “the relationship between enslaved and their masters is never questioned” in the Bible, cites liberation theologian (and president of Zimbabwe) Canaan Banana’s declaration that the third world needs to rewrite the Bible for the sake of socialism, and relates James Cone’s proclamation that the Bible is insufficient for the liberation of the oppressed.

Gordon would have provided more balance to these modernist (and ironically, European) criticisms of the Bible’s supposedly simplistic acceptance of slavery if he had noted for readers that the Exodus narrative was always read by African-American slaves as an implicit repudiation of slavery and that Paul exhorted slaveowner Philemon to treat his slave Onesimus “no longer as a slave but as more than a slave, as a beloved brother.” This volume would have benefitted from including the voices of post-Enlightenment African theologians like Ghana’s Kwame Bediako and The Gambia’s Lamin Sanneh who have argued that most African Christians see Jesus not as liberator from sociopolitical oppression (categories imposed on the Bible by the western Enlightenment) but as healer, master of initiation, and ancestor who mediates participation in a spiritual world of freedom and honor.

Yet despite these missteps and misplaced emphases, it must be said that Gordon has given us the best and most enjoyable history of the Bible yet produced.

Image by puhimec and licensed via Adobe Stock.