No one in Paul’s period would have ever seen a ‘Bible.’ Individual texts or discrete collections (such as Psalms, or Proverbs, or various prophets) were bound together as separate scrolls. The scriptural texts in themselves, further, were unstable: Qumran’s library of twenty-one Isaiah manuscripts, for example, preserves over 1,000 individual textual variants. Other books, non canonical now but authoritative for different Jewish communities then, recast, updated, or expanded the earlier biblical stories. (Jubilees, an extremely important apocryphon from the second century B.C.E., retells in accents peculiar to itself the older stories from Genesis and Exodus; other important traditions, associated with the figure of Enoch, retail visions of fallen angels, of an apocalyptic Jerusalem, and of the coming judgment of a heavenly ‘Son of Man.’) Finally, significant differences and textual variations measure the distance between Hebrew texts and Hellenistic-period Greek versions. Our modern ideas of ‘book’ or of ‘canon’ or of ‘𝘵𝘩𝘦 Bible’ simply do not capture this fluid aspect of ancient textuality
Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle’ (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 8-9.
I usually prefer to use the term “biblical text” instead of “Bible” or “the Bible”. Why? Well, because if you really think about it, there is no such thing and never has been any “Bible”. Even throughout history, from Christianity’s very beginnings, there were always competing versions of texts, competing collections of texts, etc. To this day, different christian denominations use different translations, canons, etc. “Bible” or “the Bible” are theological/liturgical constructs. When believers refer to the biblical text as “the Bible” they are using a religious term that is not and need not be accepted by all. In an ecclesiastical setting, its perfectly fine to refer to the text as “Bible” or “the Bible”, but not in an academic/historical setting. So, just as a matter of being historically accurate, you will notice throughout this blog that I will refer to the Hebrew and Christian scriptures as the “biblical text” not “Bible” or “the Bible”.
