Lection and Liturgy

We turn from law to history, or from instruction to prophecy, depending on whether you’re a Christian or a Jew. The second major division of the Old Testament in the Christian tradition is a group of historical writings. At this point the contents page of the church’s bible begins to look different from the Jewish one. The Jewish tradition puts what Christians call the historical books in two different categories, with the earlier books classed as Prophets, and some later ones put in the category of Writings. 1 The historical books classed as Prophets are Joshua, Judges, 1 & 2 Samuel (treated by Jews as a single scroll or book) and 1 & 2 Kings (also treated as a single book). These make up what are known in Jewish tradition as the four Former Prophets. 2 This Jewish classification is a good reminder that we are reading history with a message: the books are concerned not simply to relate what happened, but to tell the story of God’s activity with, for and sometim...

This blog series now moves on to the longest section, as much intended for repeated reference as reading immediately. Nonetheless, I hope each post will be interesting enough to read in its own right as it is blogged. Since I am going (with one or two extras here and there) to blog my way through the books of the Bible in their canonical order, you might expect that to begin at the beginning would mean starting with Genesis. However, I want to take a couple of steps back, and begin with another word starting with the same three letters: genre. At this point, though, I need to enter a caveat. I blog these posts on books of the bible not as an expert, but as a fellow reader. I venture to claim a degree of knowledge, and a reasonable depth of study for much of (but not all) the New Testament books. But when it comes to the Old Testament I have no particular expertise. I’m simply another reader sharing something of what I read. My reading always begins by asking what sort of book I’m rea...

 If you were surprised it took a few centuries (as the previous post described) to reach agreement about the contents list of the New Testament, you may be even more surprised by the length of time it has taken for the Old Testament. Christians have never produced a fully-agreed contents list for the Old Testament. Roman Catholics, Orthodox Christians, Anglicans and Protestants disagree about which Old Testament books they should read in public. The seeds of this disagreement lie in the distant past. The early Christians essentially used the books which were in circulation among the synagogues of the diaspora: 1 the Greek-speaking world of the ancient Mediterranean. Greek in the ancient world functioned much like English in today’s world: it was the “global” language of the Graeco-Roman world. The earliest books of the bible to be translated into Greek were the books of Torah: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. The other books followed, wi...

Discussions of which books are Scripture usually uses the language of canon explained in yesterday’s rather long post . So people discuss when the canon was “closed” – which means when the list was finally agreed. Books that made it into the canon are called canonical, those that didn’t are referred to as non-canonical. I will use some of that language in this and the next post, exploring just a little more of the history of how Christians reached agreement (or mainly reached agreement) on which books are scripture. Key to that question is recognising which books the church should read in public worship, take as foundational in discerning God’s truth, and listen to prayerfully to hear God’s wisdom and guidance. In this post I look at the New Testament; in the next one at the Old Testament. The first is about how the early Christians collected their own literature; the second about they appropriated literature they shared in common with early Judaism. The Church's...