‘In truth,” writes John Barton at the beginning of “A History of the Bible,” “there are no versions of either Christianity or Judaism that correspond point for point to the contents of the Bible, which is often not what it has been made into and read as.” That is a gentle way of putting it. What he means, as he goes on to show over the next 200 pages, is that the Old and New Testaments (to use the Christian terminology) are a shapeless collection of frequently incompatible writings whose origins and aims are largely unknowable and whose historical claims are woefully untrustworthy.
In the first half of his book Mr. Barton, an Anglican priest and emeritus professor of biblical interpretation at Oxford University, surveys what historical-critical scholars have concluded about the Bible's various parts. In the book's second half, he ably elucidates the process by which biblical books attained their canonical status and the ways in which Jewish and Christian authorities have interpreted them. I kept wondering, though, if Mr. Barton thinks there is any point in actually reading the Bible. I reached the last page and wondered still.
I don't mean to be snide. “A History of the Bible” is a lucidly written distillation of a vast array of scholarship. The problem is that the historical-critical scholarship to which forward-thinking academics and clergymen like Mr. Barton devote so much attention doesn't tell us much of anything about the biblical texts. Time and again he emphasizes how little we know about them. “There is probably not a single episode in the history of Israel as told by the Old Testament on which modern scholars are in agreement,” he writes.
His discussion of the Synoptic Gospels—Matthew, Mark and Luke—leaves the impression that the past two centuries of academic inquiry into the historical origins of Christianity have provided little more than a few points of fragile consensus and an excess of warring opinions. At one point in his discussion of the Synoptics, Mr. Barton comments that “more recently it has come to be thought that the Gospel writers exercised some narrative skill in joining the fragments together, and did not simply write them down in a random way.” How nice that modern academics have at last given their consent to what Christians simply assumed for two millennia.
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