IN CHRISTIANITY † Christianity began as a conventicle in Judaism, with a complete and unquestioned acceptance of what had come to bePage 664 | Top of Articlethe foundation stone of Judaism's serious view of itself as the one true revealed religion, destined to be the religion of all mankind. Through the years the confidence had matured that in the Bible was the complete and all-embracing record of all that men would ever need to know. Here stood revealed the full and complete will of God: all that men were to do and to be had been revealed to them. Their conduct toward one another and toward Him, the way they were to worship Him and regard Him, even their attitudes of mind and will, all had been revealed and was man's for the knowing. No circumstance could ever arise that had not been anticipated, no question for which the certain answer had not been given. Even before the moment of creation it had stood in the mind of God. Subsequently the blueprint for all time had been revealed by God to men through the agency of Moses and the other specially designated and inspired agents. The Bible was not 24 books, as it might superficially seem to be to Jewish eyes, or 29, to those of the Christians. It was fundamentally one book, with God its one author. As the movement eventually to be styled Christianity became separate from the parent, it never lost this confidence in the nature of its inherited Scriptures, which, as the true Israel it regularly conceived itself to be, it easily came to believe were actually primarily its own, not the parent's, "for," as Justin *Martyr phrased it in his Dialogue with Trypho (ch. 29): "we believe them, but you, though you read them, do not catch the spirit that is in them." Gradually, in the course of almost exactly 100 years, a large number of additional chapters, so to speak, were produced. As the years passed, many of these later writings became dear to an ever-increasing body of believers, with the result that by the middle of the fourth century 27 more writings had come to be widely regarded and formally accepted as a part of God's Revelation, of which He was the actual author, having seen fit to reveal His mind through the records which evangelists and apostles had written at His dictation. Through the centuries this view was maintained. It is this which is meant by the statement in the twentieth of the still-authoritative Thirty-Nine Articles that the Bible is "God's word written." In the 18th century Locke was asserting nothing new when he insisted: "It has God for its author, salvation for its end, and truth without any mixture of error for its matter." A century later, an Oxford theologian, Dean Burgon, spelled it out: "The Bible is none other than the voice of Him that sitteth upon the throne. Every book of it, every chapter of it, every word of it, every syllable of it (where are we to stop?), every letter of it, is the direct utterance of the Most High. The Bible is none other than the Word of God, not some part of itmore, some part of it less, but all alike the utterance of Him who sitteth upon the throne, faultless, unerring, supreme" (Inspiration and Interpretation(1861), 89). This view of Scripture, despite two centuries of inquiry during which in the eyes of an increasingly large group it has been discredited or drastically qualified, is still with nuances the verdict of Christianity, Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant alike. The Protestant Reformation did not affectthe matter in the slightest. There was and is no real difference between Catholics and Protestants as to the proper attitude toward the Bible or the basis on which they rest their creeds. The sole difference lay – and still lies – in the fact that to the Catholic (and Orthodox) Scripture is not the sole authoritative and infallible source of belief. Scripture (i.e., Old and New Testament including the deuterocanonical books) and tradition are the source of God's revelation. For the Protestants the Scriptures alone can have such a claim. Both, however, accept the Bible as the authoritative and infallible statement of revealed truth. Actually, Protestant scholars at times wentto greater extremes in their stress upon biblical interpretation than did Catholics. During the years, ecclesiastical infallibility and scriptural infallibility had grown up together. As a result of the Reformation, ecclesiastical infallibility was thrown overboard by Protestants. The infallibility of the Bible was set up as a bulwark against the rejected infallibility of the Church. It is accordingly not surprising that in consequence a literal view of inspiration, like that enunciated by Dean Burgon, resulted. Thus the real and distinctive note in the Christian attitude toward the Old Testament has never been whether the Old Testament is or is not Scripture, to be accepted and prized, for this acceptance has been universal. Rather, the problem has always been how the Old Testament is to be interpreted and used. Beginning, and continuing for many years, as a part of Judaism, sounding the proclamation of Jesus, whom they believed to have been raised from the dead by God and to be with him in heaven soon to return to establish the speedily expected new age, which, like him, they styled the kingdom of God, the Christians' main differences from the rest of orthodox Jewry were their developing views of Jesus himself. Sofar as fundamentals were concerned, they remained orthodox Jews, in their views of the unity of God, of His relation to Israel, of His complete revelation in Scripture. With their basic view of the all-inclusive content of the Divine Revelation in Scripture it was not unnatural that Christians saw prophesied therein their movement and their Christ. As the movement came more and more to be separate from Judaism, the conviction deepened that Judaism, which failed to see in the predictions in the Old Testament the Christian Jesus and the success of the movement resulting from his preaching, was blind to the real content of the Scriptures, which Scriptures they were confident were theirs. The Old Testament, according, for example, to the Epistle of Barnabas, has meaning only when it is understood in terms of the gospel. It was held that God's covenant has always been made with Christians, and the Old Testament has always been misunderstood by the Jews. This in no wise minimized the Old Testament. "All scripture is inspired by God and helpful for teaching," as the author of II Timothy 3:16 was to insist; but it must be rightly understood. Page 665 | Top of Article Much has been written about Paul's rejection of the Mosaic law, but although this is true, it is far from meaning that herejected the Old Testament. It remains Scripture for Paul and of the profoundest value, as his constant citation to establish or buttress this contention or that indicates, but it is no longer letter but spirit, no longer law but a ministry of grace. By the aid of the Spirit he holds, the Old Testament can be interpreted as a spiritual book – the reason others cannot do so is because they have not received the gift of the spirit. They have been blinded by Satan; true understanding of the Old Testament comes only from God. Paul is adept in finding "spiritualmeaning" in the most unlikely texts. He does not view the Old Testament as the Christian's moral guide, for his break with the law, ceremonial and moral alike, was complete. Rather this standard or guide is to be found based on what he calls Jesus'law of love, more exactly, what is worthy of one in Christ. The point often overlooked is that the kind of life which Paul felt worthy of in Christ is precisely the type of life which as a Jew he had been from birth trained to revere, as he had found it revealed in Scripture. The whole insistence in the Epistle of Barnabas is that Christians must avoid a Judaistic conception of the Old Testament. Despite Barnabas' blistering criticism of the literal understanding of passages regarding sacrifices and the food laws, he never thinks of giving up the Old Testament or its divine Creator, as Marcion and most of the Gnostics were subsequently to do. Instead his pages are filled with such words as "Moses received these doctrines concerning food and thus spoke of them in the Spirit; but they [the Jews] received them as merely referring to food, owing to the lust of their flesh" (Epistle of Barnabas 10). His reference to gnosis and his anti-Judaism do not mean that he was either a Gnostic or that he rejected the Old Testament. Gnosis, as he uses the term, is simply deeper insight into the truths of Christianity with the aid of allegorical interpretation of the Old Testament which allowed him to find what he sought to discover. His allegorization constantly does violence to the meaning of the text and resolves historical events into exaggerated fantasy. Nor is Barnabas alone. Justin Martyr indicates the same naive and uncritical attitude toward the Old Testament. That he revered it as inspired Scripture is evident in every page; his devotion to allegorical interpretation, which can find Jesus clearly predicted in the most impossible passages and the cross prefigured not alone throughout the Scriptures – the paschal lamb roasted on a spit (Dialogue with Trypho 40), the extended hands of Moses (ibid. 90), the serpent in the wilderness (First Apology 60), the horn of the unicorn (Dialogue with Trypho 91) – but also in the nautical rig of masts and yardarms, in the plow and tools of the farmer and mechanic, in the more obscure and misty discourses of Plato, or in the nose which juts from the face which enables the prophet to say, "The breath before our face is the Lord Christ" (First Apology 55), reveals vividly, if to a modern age grotesquely, the early Christian confidence that the Old Testament was primarily a Christian book, at least of a sort which must be rightly read to be properly understood. Like Paul, Justin does not deny the historical reality of God's relationship with Israel. What he insists uponis that the earlier covenant looks forward to being superseded. The prophets herald a new covenant with God, and in Christianity with its two predicted advents of Christ – the one already experienced, the other yet to come – their predictions are fully realized. The Alexandrian school, notably *Origen , deeply indebted to Philo, sets forth most thoroughly the principles or purport of Christian allegorization, and with far less of the bizarre overemphasis of a Barnabas or Justin Martyr. For Origen the fulfillment of prophecy is the proof of its unquestioned inspiration. Thus, in the advent of Jesus the inspiration of the prophetic words and the truly spiritual nature of Moses' law come into full light. The purpose of Scripture is to reveal intellectual truths, not to show God's working in history. Actually history often conceals truth. This, Origen sees clearly evidenced in the pages of both Old and New Testaments. In addition – for, like Philo, Origen was in many ways a very practical and down-to-earth man – much of the legislation in both Testaments cannot be literally observed. Such passages must, accordingly, reveal other important, if less obvious, values. But Origen is far more restrained than were some of his predecessors: the passages which are historically true, he is sure, far outnumber those which are composed with purely spiritual significance – that is, which are not historically true. In sum, all Scripture has a spiritual meaning. It should be observed that Origen is a scholar and thinks and writes as such. His protests against what he terms the literal meaning are directed essentially against the superficial and often absurd misinterpretations put upon Scripture by ignorant people who cannot understand metaphors and parables and who thus regularly read poetry as pedestrian prose. The allegorical method of interpreting Scripture, which was the outgrowth of the Christian confidence that their movement and their Christ were of course revealed in the all-inclusive Scriptures, and that it was their task to set forth these facts clearly so that when their Lord returned from heaven he would find faith on the earth, encountered much criticism. Marcion, a devoted if misguided Christian – and in no small degree driven to his rejection of the Old Testament as a Christian book by these absurd excesses of allegorization – insisted on a literal understanding of the Hebrew Scriptures, the better to emphasize their crudity. In his eyes the Old Testament was not a Christian book, and no amount of allegorization could make it such. Jesus was not foreseen in any of the prophecies of the Old Testament, nor did his coming in any sense fulfill them; rather, he had come to destroy both the law and the prophets. Marcion stands alone in this rejection, and many interpreters have denied that he was a Christian in any sense of that word. Others, notably the group of scholars styled the Antiochian school and *Jerome , had a profound respect for the literal meaning of Scripture. Jerome had earlier been an allegorist, as his first biblical commentary clearly shows, butPage 666 | Top of Articlehis contacts with Jewish teachers had been influential in his change of front. It is not too much to say that wherever the influence of the Synagogue is to be seen – as in Dorotheus, head of the catechetical school in Antioch, who painstakingly learned Hebrew – there was a tendency toward a literal understanding of the Old Testament. This was not to deny the deeper meaning of Scripture, which was to them unquestioned. Rather, the deeper meaning was built onto the literal, not flatly opposed to it as Barnabas had fulminated. The most influential of the school of Antioch was Theodore of Mopsuestia. He insisted on the historical reality of biblical revelation. In the prophecies of Christ's coming, allegory is not to be seen, as the Alexandrians had maintained. Rather, the prophets actually foresaw what was to come to pass in Israel and announced it, but in addition they saw – or some of them did – the ultimate coming of Christ. Nor could Alexandria rightly claim Paul's words in Galatians 4 and I Corinthians 10 as its support. Despite Paul's phrase, he was not indulging in allegory. His words were typological. The incident was real, but in addition it typified a deeper truth. The events had taken place; nonetheless they were comparisons and so he could use them as warning examples. Actually Theodore insisted that only four of the Psalms (2, 8, 44, 109) are in any sense to be seen as predictive of Jesus, and that they are not truly messianic but rather give glimpses of the incarnation. Only books containing a prophetic element are to be regarded as canonical; thus Job, Chronicles, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Esther, as well as all the books of the Apocrypha, are to be seen as containing human wisdom alone and are to be rejected from the canon. This exclusion of any of the books of the Hebrew canon was most unusual, and a century later Theodore's writings were burned as heretical – in part because of the views of his pupil Nestorius, for which he was held responsible, and in part because of his exclusion of books universally revered as canonical, quite regardless of the way they were interpreted. As the Christian movement spread into the gentile world, it was but natural that the current Greek version of their inherited Scripture became their Bible. Because of the confidence that Jesus and the Christian movement were to be found in its pages and because of the Christian conviction that the Jewish understanding of the Scriptures was in error regarding what to them was palpably a Christian book, it is not surprising that the Septuagint speedily lost all authority in Jewish eyes and that the second century saw several new Greek translations (Aquila, Symmachus, Theodotion) stemming from Jewish feelings of outrage that their Scripture was being so crassly misused and turned into a weapon against them. One of the most significant achievements by any early Christian scholar, well indicating the universal Christian acceptance of the Old Testament as a part of their inspired Scripture, was the gigantic Hexapla, with the Old Testament standing in six parallel columns (cf. above, Ancient Versions, Greek). Well aware of the fact, as he was, that frequently the Septuagint and the Hebrew diverge, Origen sought to indicate this. Material in the Septuagint but not in the Hebrew was indicated by warning obeli; material in the Hebrew but not in the Greek was indicated by asterisks. In addition to this monumental work by Origen, other recensions of the Septuagint (Hesychian and Lucianic) were subsequently made. Occasionally Christian scholars in the early days had some knowledge of Hebrew and made use of Hebrew texts, although regularly chided by Jewish scholars for employing inferior and corrupted texts; by and large until the 16th century, when knowledge of Greek and Hebrew became a scholarly must, study of the Old Testament was based upon the Greek texts. Although translations of both Testaments into Latin and Syriac were made early, Greek continued to be the usual medium until the fourth century. Gradually Latin became the common Christian tongue, and a standard authoritative Latin version of both Testaments became necessary to bring order out of the chaos which had arisen and of which Augustine remarked: "Whenever in earlier days a Greek manuscript came into any man's hand, provided he fancied that he had any skill at all in both languages, he did not hesitate to translate it." After completing his revision of the Latin text of the New Testament at Rome at the behest of Pope Damasus, Jerome went to Bethlehem and produced a version of the Old Testament. He claimed that it was a new translation into Latin of the Septuagint on the basis of Origen's hexaplaric text, that is, the fifth column of the Hexapla. Whether this was actually a fresh translation, as Jerome claimed, or simply a revision of the Old Latin text, is uncertain, for Jerome's claims are often unreliable. At any rate, he speedily became convinced of the need of a fresh translation of the Old Testament from the Hebrew text. This he made and, except for the Psalms, it is the present Vulgate (cf. above, Ancient Versions, Latin). His translation of the Hebrew Psalter was never likely to oust in popular regard his earlier translation from the Greek (Gallican Psalter). In consequence of his work, Jerome became convinced that only the books in the Hebrew Bible had warrant to be considered part of the Bible. Despite his arguments and insistence, the Roman Church continued to use the Apocrypha, which had been regularly regarded as canonical by Christians to whom the Septuagint was their Bible; the Apocrypha continued to be, as it is today, an unquestioned part of the Bible of the Roman Catholic Church, not collected at the end, but interspersed, as it was in the Septuagint, among the other Old Testament books. Jerome's objections eventually found acceptance in Protestantism. Luther relegated the Apocrypha to the end of the Old Testament. Subsequently British and American churches came to exclude these books, even as a separate collection, from printed editions of the Bible, although in the 20th century they have regained a measured popularity as valuable reading. They are not, and they have not been since the Reformation, a veritable part of the Bible in Protestant eyes (see also *Luther ; *Reformation ; *Protestantism ). For many centuries the basic contention of both Judaism and Christianity maintained that the Bible is totally different from all other books, and in consequence the rules and procedures for studying and appraising other writings do not apply here. The past three centuries have seen the rise and development of a direct challengePage 667 | Top of Articleto this contention, in what is commonly styled Higher Criticism. The source analysis of the first six books of the Old Testament, from Astruc and De Wette to Colenso and Wellhausen, has resulted in far more than just a transfer of authorship from Moses to a host of nameless men at a distinctly later date or dates. It has brought these books into clear view as the record of centuries of achievement and of the long pilgrimage of men and women, constantly confronted with the tasks and problems of life, making their mistakes, achieving new and sounder insights. In short, to many Christians the Old Testament now stands as the longest and best record of man's evolution and the growth of his ideas about himself and his God, and the record of the development of morality, politics, and religion, which have, for better or worse, very definitely molded our own culture and patterns of thought. BIBLIOGRAPHY: A. von Harnack, Bible Reading in the Early Church (1912); H.R. Willoughby (ed.), The Study of the Bible Today and Tomorrow (1947); R.M. Grant, The Bible in the Church… (1948); B. Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (19522); E.G. Kraeling, The Old Testament since the Reformation (1955); I.M. Price, The Ancestry of our English Bible (19563); G. Burkhardt (ed.), Five Essays on the Bible (1960); S.L. Greenslade (ed.), The Cambridge History of the Bible (1963); E.C. Colwell, The Study of the Bible (19642). [Morton S. Enslin]