Whose Bible Is It? : A Short History of the Scriptures

Pelikans's "Whose Bible Is It?" does not truly seek to answer the question posed in the title. Instead, the author, a acclaimed, able, and recently deceased professor at Yale provides a historic overview of Biblical development, particularly as it applies to the Christian era of the past 2000 years. While the author gives attention to the Jewish Biblical tradition, he spends a relatively short part of this extremely short work reviewing the Bible's pre-Christian development. One can well forgive this choice, since biblical origination is a topic requiring a great deal of conjuncture and anthropological analysis, while also being treacherously fraught with political and religious conflict.Pelikan's makes a few mistakes along the road. For example he lumps Orthodox Jewish epexegesis in with the literalism of the Christian analytical tradition, a proposition proved demonstrably false by Maimonidies commentary on the Bible as metaphor and Nachmanidies positions on Genesis, such as positing that a day in the human experience is not the same as creations 7 days which refers to days in the life of G-d. Curiously, Jewish tradition, occupying a position of weakness in the social scheme generally allowed a greater diversity of textual approaches than the far more powerful Christian majority.In the end Pelikan's text includes one overriding weakness; he never tells the reader definitively where he stands. One gets to the end of what seems an overly long introductory essay, only to find an all too brief conclusion that never lets us know this scholars answer to this important question. If he had a deep answer, it seems one he took with him to his grave.

This is a very good analysis of the organization of the modern Bible and the changes its undergone in the past 2000 years. Author Pelikan has organized a concise history book and a good overview of the various religious sects and how they've put their own spirtuality into book format.Jews and Christians, specifically Protestants and Catholics, have argued theolgy for centuries only to agree to disagree on most major topics. The western world has taken the process a step or two further when they translated the original scriptures into their own languages. Guttenberg, the King James Version, American Standard, etc. have all attempted to become definitive translations. Interestingly each succeeeded and failed at the same time. Nearly every Bible translator sets out to do the best their abilities and knowledge will permit, but each must make important decisions on what and what not to include. Since few people read Hebrew and Greek, translations are inevitable, and we all must learn to live with the results. Modern technology has made nearly any Bible currently in print available, so read what suits you.Pelikan treds a path through the variations not formally endorsing any specific one. His knowledge of his topic and his writing style makes this a very good book that Biblical scholars on down to church librarians will want to include in their collections. The book would have been helped had an index been included, but this is but a minor flaw in an otherwise very commendable effort.

Eventho I'm no longer a believer, I purchased and read Pelikan's "Whose Bible Is It?" in order to understand how Scripture, which many still revere as the revealed word of God, was compiled, translated and generally modified thru-out its three millennia life. And I wasn't disappointed. Pelikan does an excellent job of tracing the Bible's long history objectively, eventho he's clearly a believer. I'd rate his book five stars except for the inexcusable omission of an index (altho Amazon's `Search Inside' provides a substitute). I also found amusing his habit of making a strong statement then immediately qualify it.The Bible authors believed that God &al. spoke directly to them - at least that's what their inspirations seemed like - that the words came thru them, not from them. Yet musicians, artists, writers, scientists, mathematicians &al. also report similar inspirations from their unconscious. So why not now attribute the Bible authors' inspirations to the same unconscious source? Given what they knew back then about the world and our mind, it's understandable that they misattributed their inspirations to a supernatural rather than a natural source. But why continue now to perpetuate that illusion? In my book, "Concepts: A ProtoTheist Quest for Science-Minded Skeptics" I explore such questions and propose alternative explanations.

Important and powerful and fundamental book on the history of the scriptures and how Jews, Catholics, and Protestants have canonized, translated (and mis-translated), interpreted (and mis-interpreted) them throughout history and into today. The writing isn’t as accessible to the masses as it could be, but still enjoyable read, mainly because of the subject matter.

Very readable--entertaining at times. Straightforward, historically accurate knowledge-base, drifts along between original meanings of words/phrases in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, English, and sometimes other languages without requiring an in-depth knowledge of these languages. Truly a book for the lay person who is "concerned" about the implications of claiming that the Bible, that we know best, is, or can be the absolute "Word of God." Falls a bit short in some chapters of really delivering the promise of the title--the last chapter is a good example--and does not wrap the book's basic premise, posed in a question form, with definitive resolution. This, of course, was probably his goal--to get the questions asked and parsed and left unresolved due to its fundamental resolvability. Perhaps his focus on any person's (as opposed to mankind's) relationship to God is individual,is the key to understanding the limits of the answer he gives.

Though probably the most read "book" in the western hemisphere, and certainly the most ubiquitous - thanks partly to the Gideons, as the author points out - very few will know the history of the Bible, nor the relationships between the Talmud, the Catholic and Protestant Bibles, and the Qu'ran. In Whose Bible Is It? Jaroslav Pelikan joins the dots, relating the development of the Bible from its Judaist origins, identifying the different types of book to be found there - the Bible is more like a library of books than a book in its own right - revealing the way in which the Old Testament was augmented by the New, and explaining the difficulties involved in translation.First of these is that much of the source material is effectively a string of capital letters without vowels, gaps or punctuation, another that some of the words are untranslatable - nobody, not even the rabbinical scholars maintaining the Judaist oral tradition, knows what they mean. But even where they do, the meaning has been lost through translation and misinterpretation, perhaps for dramatic, perhaps for less innocent, purposes. So, just as Robert Alder, in his translation of Genesis, points out that nowhere in the first book of the Bible is Joseph's coat described as multicoloured (it is "patterned"), so Pelikan reveals that Mary is referred to as a young woman, not a virgin.The chronology of the books is also revealing: the four gospels, for example, post-dated the crucifixion by several decades - over a century in the case of John, the final one to be written. The fact that there are indeed four gospels, and that they are so different, despite the overlaps (well-recorded in JW Rogerson's An Introduction to the Bible), is in itself worthy of note - what grand cosmic plan issues four different versions of its own backstory for its adherents to squabble and puzzle over?In discussing the historical-critical method Pelikan reminds us that, though many of the personalities featured in the Bible, and the events, too, are based on actuality, the Good Book's adherence to historical verisimilitude is notoriously relaxed. The flight from Egypt, for example, would have left a crisis-inducing hole in the Pharaoh's economy. None such is documented by the famously record-retentive Egyptians.Similarly, convention has it that the Christ was born in 7-6 BCE; some commentators have the Augustine census which forms the context for the Nativity occurring in 6 CE (though Pelikan himself writes that no record of this census exists); Herod, the instigator of the "subsequent" massacre of the first-borns, died in 4 BCE. Hmm. Pelikan discusses some of these issues, and points out the resultant difficulties they pose for the faithful, without drawing any conclusions.He does concede that maybe the Creation story, together with those of the Garden and the Flood, should be taken as allegory. But the central assumption throughout is that despite the narrative contradictions there is something more to the Bible than a selectively assembled set of fables about the development of Western values. That this is the Bible's true worth is missed. It is noted that there is a switch from Lord of Hosts (the Hosts being armies, he informs us) in the Old Testament to Prince of Peace in the New. The irony is overlooked that Joshua in the Old is an invading militarist whilst his namesake in the New (known to the Greeks as Jesus) is a healer. The anomalies inherent in the acceptance of concubinage, polygamy and slavery are noted with no more than apparent puzzlement. Same applies to the conundrum of Abraham's near infant sacrifice, so ably satirised in Bob Dylan's Highway 61 and Jenny Diski's After These Things. What possesses a father to terrorise his son in such a manner? What kind of megalomanic, tyrannical, supreme being is it that expects this cruelty to be inflicted? But again these difficulties are mentioned in passing and we move on.So although this book is enlightening in many ways, I was left with a feeling of unfinished business. Don't just write there, defend this ludicrous theology of yours!To be fair, however, Pelikan never purports to be unravelling the inconsistencies of religion. He is chronicling the development of the Bible to its present manifestations, and in that he does very well.So why just four stars? The Structure: at no time did I get a feel for where we were going until the Afterword, at which point I got an inkling we might be near the end. No Index. No Bibliography.

A must for anyone contemplating a journey along the Camino

I'm a layman who's interested in biblical history and theology. I find this book is a great resource for understanding the historical origins of the holy books of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. I'm now a fan of jaroslav pelikan and will be reading more of his books.

Excellent book to read for those who thirst to know about the historical background of the Bible