Michael Satlow - How the Bible Became HolyIn this sweeping narrative, Michael Satlow tells the fascinating story of how an ancient collection of obscure Israelite writings became the founding texts of both Judaism and Christianity, considered holy by followers of each faith. Drawing on cutting-edge historical and archeological research, he traces the story of how, when, and why Jews and Christians gradually granted authority to texts that had long lay dormant in a dusty temple archive. The Bible, Satlow maintains, was not the consecrated book it is now until quite late in its history.
He describes how elite scribes in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C.E. began the process that led to the creation of several of our biblical texts. It was not until these were translated into Greek in Egypt in the second century B.C.E., however, that some Jews began to see them as culturally authoritative, comparable to Homer’s works in contemporary Greek society. Then, in the first century B.C.E. in Israel, political machinations resulted in the Sadducees assigning legal power to the writings. We see how the world Jesus was born into was largely biblically illiterate and how he knew very little about the texts upon which his apostles would base his spiritual leadership.
Interview with Michael SatlowThe title of your new book, How the Bible Became Holy, implies that the Bible wasn't perceived as holy—in other words, authoritative—from the outset. Is that right?
Yes. The standard perspective has long been that the biblical texts become authoritative, more or less, at their moment of composition. This prevailing view is based primarily on the Bible's own strong claims to authority. My own research into the subject, however, points to different and more complex conclusions.
For starters, we need to think more expansively about what it means to say that the Bible was "authoritative." The texts that ultimately became part of the Bible were understood by different readers in very different ways. I label the three main kinds of authority that various readers gave to the texts as normative, literary, and oracular.
In the biblical context, normative authority is taking or justifying an action because "the Bible says we should do it," such as when we apply the commandment "Love your neighbor as yourself" in our interactions with others.
Literary authority is the common phenomenon of authors using earlier texts as models for new ones.
In ancient Israel, there was a professional class of scribes. While they mainly performed the mundane work of bureaucrats, they also formed a kind of literati, a professional class who read each other's works and wrote for one another. As part of their training, scribes regularly copied and modified earlier texts. Thus, many of the biblical texts began as scribal exercises, not as the normatively authoritative law codes they claimed to be. Exodus 20-23, for example, which contains what scholars call the Covenant Code, was originally written as a scribal exercise. Later scribes drew and improvised on that text as part of their own training—and this became the core of the Book of Deuteronomy. Few outside of the scribal elite would have even known these texts existed!
The third kind of authority, oracular authority, is the idea that the text contains a message from the Divine realm, usually about the future. Throughout antiquity, this was the primary sense in which the Bible was perceived to be "holy." When, for example, Hosea prophesied the destruction of Israel's Northern Kingdom in the eighth century B.C.E., he turned out to be right, and his book was therefore preserved. Most prophesies that turned out to be wrong were rejected, although a few sneaked by.
How do we know that the Jewish people did not initially perceive the Hebrew Bible as holy in the normative sense?
Simply, most Israelites and their immediate descendants (they begin to call themselves Jews after the fifth century B.C.E.) could not read. The literacy rate was exceedingly low throughout antiquity. This does not necessarily mean that the people did not know of these scribal texts or did not hear them recited by others, but even if they knew the biblical stories, it would not have been because the stories were in the Bible; the people would have learned them solely orally. They would not have heard these texts recited at the Temple, which performed its sacrifices in silence; synagogues did not exist in the land of Israel before the first century C.E. And it is improbable that people in antiquity, who gave authority to established custom—doing what their family and village had always done—would have undone their traditions based upon an oral tradition that also appeared in a text they couldn't even read. More specifically, little evidence exists from all of antiquity that Jews consulted texts for their normative behavior. In fact, the Bible is replete with countless examples of precisely the opposite—people ignoring biblical rules.
Furthermore, we possess a significant number of legal papyri written by Jews in Egypt in the second century B.C.E. to first century C.E., and not one demonstrates awareness of a distinctive Jewish law, even though by that time other writings show they had begun to acquire some knowledge of biblical texts. Even by the first century C.E., when synagogues arrived in the land of Israel, knowledge of scripture was spotty and its authority did not yet displace custom. Jesus, for example, had very limited knowledge of scripture.
Did the Jewish leadership ever attempt to give normative authority to some biblical texts?
Yes, but their efforts largely failed. Two examples:
In the seventh century B.C.E., Josiah, the king of Judah, instituted a policy of religious reforms that he based on his discovery of an older text that had been found during renovations of the Jerusalem Temple. Notably, this text was the core of Deuteronomy, which up to then had been buried away in the Temple unknown and unread. The biblical account is biased-it's all too clear that its author wished to promulgate Josiah's call for centralizing religious worship around the Temple and eliminating images of deities ("idols")-but even the subjective author had to admit that Josiah's reforms quickly failed, cast off even by his own son.
Fast forward 200 years or so to Ezra the scribe, who returned to Jerusalem from Babylonia in the middle of the fifth century C.E. A functionary of the Persians, who had recently conquered Babylonia, he arrived in Jerusalem armed with a copy of something resembling part of our Torah (scholars debate exactly what) and attempted to use its authority to dissolve the intermarriages he opposed. The Book of Ezra makes clear that Ezra's efforts went nowhere.
What changed so that the Torah began to have normative authority?
This accepted way of doing things was upset in the second century B.C.E. with the Maccabean revolt, which led to the establishment of the Maccabees and their descendants, the Hasmoneans, as priests and then also as kings of Judea. The Hasmoneans, who coalesced into a group known as the Sadducees, did not trust the Pharisees, the older, established aristocracy that controlled the Temple ritual. The Sadducees used texts to argue against custom and prove that the Pharisees risked provoking God's anger by not following protocols of ritual purity in the Temple.
The Sadducees were largely victorious in this power struggle, and as a result they began to disseminate the idea that the Torah had normative authority. By the first century C.E., synagogues began to appear in Sadducean Jerusalem, and from there spread to other parts of Judea and Galilee. In the synagogues Jews began to hear these texts for the first time.
About a century after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 C.E., the Pharisees and Sadducees melded together into the group that called themselves the rabbis. For the rabbis, little was more important than Torah, by which they meant God's full revelation, both written and unwritten. A Torah scroll was not thought of as containing text to be readily read and consulted, but as an object so holy it had to be made practically inaccessible. We see their influence today in the reverent way we treat Torah scrolls, which are not simply pulled out to read at leisure. A Torah scroll is more important as a sacred object than it is as a text. When someone wishes to consult the Torah for content, s/he will pull out a printed book, not the Torah itself.
In time, over succeeding centuries, the Bible, along with rabbinic literature, became increasingly authoritative among Jews. However, multiple similar versions of it were circulating, and when dealing with normative authority, even small differences could be significant. It took until in the 11th century C.E. for Jews to finally agree on the exact version of the Bible we have today.
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How well did Jesus know his Bible?Imagine Jesus as a boy. Growing up with his brothers and sisters in a Jewish home in the sleepy town of Nazareth, in lower Galilee, he almost certainly would have been circumcised, followed Jewish dietary rules (kashrut), and observed the Jewish Sabbath and festivals. He would have grown up speaking Aramaic and might have learned a trade from his father. He would have been sent to a Jewish school where he learned to read Jewish Scripture, which he also heard recited in synagogues. Or maybe not.
Most scholars have long believed that Jesus knew Jewish Scripture well. It is not an unreasonable belief. The Gospels—especially the so-called “synoptic” Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke—frequently depict Jesus citing Scripture to his followers in order to teach them moral lessons and to stoke eschatological expectations. Additionally, it is widely thought that almost all Jewish boys in Palestine were well acquainted with Scripture. If they were, wouldn’t Jesus be as well? And wouldn’t he have had to have received training to learn both Hebrew and how to read?
Both of these arguments, though, are shaky. The Gospels, written at least several decades after Jesus’ death by people who did not know him, are notoriously poor historical sources. Recent scholarship has also moved away from assuming widespread literacy among Jews in antiquity. Most probably neither knew Hebrew nor how to read. If they knew Scripture at all, it would have been through popular stories; the teaching of an itinerant preacher; maybe an Aramaic translation of an ad hoc reading in a synagogue, if synagogues were even present at this time in Galilee—we have no evidence that they were.
So let us imagine instead a scripturally-challenged Jesus. He might have picked up bits and pieces of Scripture, which he may occasionally preached on—something along the lines of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7), which even if true shows only low level familiarity with the Ten Commandments. For such a Jesus—like the one depicted in the Gospel of John or in the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas—Scripture was not only almost unknown but also largely irrelevant.
Instead of Scripture, what Jesus knew, and fought about, were traditional Jewish customs and stories. He did not need to turn to Scripture to know these. He knew the dietary rules and Sabbath observance because that is how he was raised. His fights with the Pharisees were not about how to interpret Scripture but about proper Jewish customary practice. Even to the extent that he was seen or saw himself as a messianic figure, such a view was not molded by deep familiarity with Scripture, but by societal expectations. John the Baptist was, after all, but one of many messianic figures roaming the Palestinian country-side at the turn of the era.
Yet this is not quite the Jesus that the canonical Gospels present, and that is largely due to a fundamental debate that shook early Christian circles: to what extent should Christians consider themselves to be the heirs of the promise of Jewish Scripture? We know, of course, who won this debate—Christians followed Paul in assigning authority to Jewish Scripture, soon to be called the “Old Testament.” For many years, however, this outcome was far from certain. Out of many possible depictions of Jesus, the Gospels that depicted a Scripture-citing Jesus were selected for the canon to conform to the winning idea. The others were shunted aside.
In many respects, Jesus was typical for a Jew of his social standing, time, and place. Like the vast majority of his community, he assumed that it was tradition—actual communal practice—rather than a text that bore religious authority. In creating a Scripture-citing Jesus, though, the Gospels’ authors shifted that focus, ultimately raising for Christians the importance and authority of the Jewish Bible. Within the Christian and Western context, this was the seed of the idea of the primacy of all text, not just that of the Bible—a seed that would fully blossom during the Reformation and whose fruit very much remains with us today.
Topic: how other religions treat their scriptures