The Bible we know today has been evolving since the tenth century BCE
The Making of the Bible: From the First Fragments to Sacred Scripture
KONRAD SCHMID and JENS SCHRÖTER
(HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 448 PP, £28.95)
Tablet bookshop price £26.05 • Tel 020 7799 4064
The word Bible is in origin a plural: “the books”, ta biblia in Greek. That provides the constant theme of this excellent textbook on the Bible’s origins and development – a textbook that has the potential to appeal to a much wider readership than students and academics. Schmid and Schröter, respectively professors of Old and New Testament in Zurich and Berlin, set out to tell the story of how the many books in the two Testaments came to be written and collected, and how they were then “canonised” to make the single volume Bible we know today. They emphasise not only the plurality of the books but also the vagueness of the canon, with fuzzy edges persisting even to our own times. Christians disagree about many things, but often feel that at least they agree on the contents of the Bible. But this is far from true: the Bible is a contested space, not at all the ground of Christian unity.