2 - Fourfold Genesis: The Bible between Literature and Authority

Summary

Odd One Out

DOES THE BIBLE BELONG HERE? Is it a literary work? It isn't even a “work” at all, but a collection, an anthology, a positive library— Carolingian catalogues listed it as “bibliotheca,” and its modern name derives from an ancient Greek plural. Each of the sixty-six constituent books—Old Testament thirty-nine, New Testament twenty-seven—has its own genesis. So far from being the single voice of God, as people once believed, the Bible is now taken, not just by secular minds, to be the work of many human hands, authors, part-authors, redactors, working from multiple sources, leaving problems of coherence and consistency that make the Homeric situation look positively simple. For example, the Pentateuch is made up of four constituents; the story of Jacob and Esau is said to be “stitched together” (that metaphor from accounts of Homer’s epics) from three documents; there are late additions to 2 Samuel; Isaiah has at least three distinct strands; the last speaker in Job is thought to be an insertion; the book of Numbers is made up of sources with long and complex histories of their own; the Psalms are an anthology spanning seven centuries; there were once three versions of Mark's gospel; a further source lies behind Matthew and Luke, with possible links to the discovered gospel of Thomas.

Duplications are evident. There are two Creations in Genesis; the making of Man and Woman happens twice; light is created and only later the light-giving heavenly bodies; money that Joseph puts back in his brothers’ sacks as they leave Egypt is discovered twice; David is twice presented to Saul; there are two reports in close sequence of the miracle of the loaves and fishes (Matthew 14 and 15). None of these texts show authorial awareness of their own reduplications. Uncertainty in the dating of the Hebrew Bible texts is measured not just in centuries but in whole civilizations. Not surprisingly, there is “widespread disagreement about practically every biblical book's unity, authorship and historicity.”

The arguments surrounding them are based on scholarly conjecture, stylistic intuition, hypothetical reconstruction—necessarily, for want of documents.