The History of the Bible: The Book and Its Faiths
JOHN BARTON
(Allen Lane, 640 PP, £25)
Tablet bookshop price £22.50 • Tel 020 7799 4064

It has been known for a while that John Barton was working on a history of the Bible, and the result will not disappoint his admirers. This is a remarkable book.

The principal lesson is the important one, that of how little we know of the history of the Bible, and how, in the end, and to the reader’s surprise, it turns out not to matter. We do not know, for example, how the books reached their present form, or where psalms and other poetry may be said to divide, or how to classify them. “What the Bible says” is something beyond us, in the present state of our grasp of its textual history. We cannot really be confident of the dating of documents of either the Old Testament or the New. We are far from sure about how church order was managed in the New Testament period; and who, for example, might preside at the Eucharist. Nor can we be sure what is the answer to the “Synoptic Problem” (why are Matthew, Mark and Luke so similar and why they are so different?). We do not really know when and why there came to be four gospels. Barton suggests that originally they were seen as “sources” rather than sacred literature, a sort of aide-memoire for performers, stored in the relatively informal format of the codex (which Christians apparently invented, by the way).