Bible sources
In the last year I have re-read the Bible 2½-times - once with the Old Testament Deuterocanonicals (also called the Old Testament Apocrypha), and once without - plus the Koran once. It was my third reading of the Koran since high school, and my fourteenth or fifteenth reading of the Bible (only my third or fourth time reading the Apocrypha). The first two times I read the Koran I didn’t like it because there is no story to it. It is just a list of quotations divided into chapters, with no narrative story-telling. I resented that, because I am conservative enough still to be looking for stories to make sense. I had a female Muslim acquaintance in high school in Guelph and I have always regretted that I told her directly that I resented the Koran for lacking any historical narrative. Oh, well, it can’t be helped now. This time, however, I quite enjoyed it. It was a new translation (2004) from the Oxford University Press, and I thought there was a lot of wisdom in it.
I was motivated to start systematically re-reading the Bible while I was sitting in a neighborhood Japanese Presbyterian Church last Christmas Eve, December 24, 2009. Although I had periodically picked up my Bible over the years to re-read sections of it I had not gone through it entirely for several years, and I began to worry “What if I die soon without having a chance to read it again?” So I did. Twice. And I’m currently working on it again, but in another translation I haven’t read yet. When I say “systematically” what I mean is that I open it at page 1 and close it at the end, around page 1,800. It’s the only proper way to read anything and boast, “I read it.”
The OT Apocrypha gives us a sense of what Judaism was like shortly before the time of Christ. The connections between Judaism and Christian moral teachings in the NT are very clear. A lot of Christian moral teachings are not original at all - well, maybe the Sermon on the Mount, but that’s about it. I’m not just talking about the Golden Rule, which is well known to pre-date Jesus’ lifetime by centuries and to appear in other law codes and scriptures, but many other pronouncements that many church-going Christians might think Jesus invented. Remember, Jesus was Jewish and what we call the Old Testament was his scripture.
When I first read the Bible - a Red Letter KJV, in high school - it took me a year. I only read a couple pages a day. (But I did it consistently). Since university I have been able to comfortably read it through in three months each time, although in Divinity School I knew a student who said that he could read it cover-to-cover in just three days - which he claimed to have done several times during my time there. I habitually read the Good News Bible. It’s easy on the eye - and the pictures are cute. This year, simultaneous with my Bible reading I read two Charles Dickens novels - David Copperfield and Hard Times - and I can confidently say that reading Dickens is much more difficult than reading the Bible in English. I am swearing off Dickens for the foreseeable future.
Since high school I knew that the Bible was a collection of different material by different writers writing at different times, and that
what we know as the canonical scriptures was the result of negotiations at various early Church councils. But it wasn’t until 1984, when I was in university, that I understood the extent of the selection/exclusion of documents that make up our Bible. I saw (and bought) Willis Barnstone’s The Other Bible, in which he collected many (but not all) sacred writings that did not make it into our
canon: the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Christian Apocrypha, the Jewish Psuedopigrypha, the Gnostic Gospels and other Nag Hammadi writings, Patrician Epistles by Ireneas, Origen, Turtullian, Athanasius, Eusebius and Clement, and certain Kabbalah writings. All together they amount to a book longer than the canonical Bible itself. I was impressed by
that.
So, similar to any anthology, the Bible is selective. Because it is selective we can assert that it is not a complete collection. Biblical writers - especially Old Testament writers - often refer to other books that they used as sources. One of them is The Book of the Wars of the Lord, mentioned as the source of an ancient poem quoted in the book of Numbers (21:14). The Book of the Wars of the Lord is not preserved in the Bible, nor has it yet been found by archaeologists or any other scholar. Similarly, the Apostle Paul refers to several letters he wrote to the Church in Corinth, but only two of them are preserved in the New Testament. And, I think I would be very interested in reading The Lord’s Book of Living Creatures (Is. 34:16). So, it turns out, the Bible has sources, only some of which were incorporated into its books. Likewise, only some of the sacred writings of ancient Israel, early Judaism, and even early Christianity were included in what became the Bible, the canonical scriptures deemed to have a special authority.
So there are two kinds of sacred writings not included in our Judeo-Christian scriptures. First are those writings (see my list) that are mentioned in the Bible but are now lost. I would be very interested to see some of them. So would most Bible scholars. Second are those writings we possess - what Barnstone included in his 1984 book - deliberately excluded from the canon but still extant for study. (In total there are something like thirty known Christian Gospels. I have read about ten of them.)
Perhaps the most exciting and coveted lost book is the so-called “Q,” a written source of Jesus’ sayings that many Bible scholars conjecture preceded the canonical gospels and was used as a source by the authors of Matthew and Luke - which is what “Q” means, standing for “quelle” or “source” in German.
We can make educated guesses about why some writings - the lost and the extant - were omitted. Some were probably considered heretical by religious leaders as they formed their canons, and others may not have had a proper pedigree. Those non-canonical writings that have survived shed important light on the background books of the Bible. But about those sources mentioned by name in the Old Testament that are lost we can say nothing - except, perhaps, that they would be interesting to study.
In the last few years I have read several books on the history of writing and book manufacture, the history of the library, and the history of the destruction of libraries and of book theft. So, during this year’s Bible reading project I paid special attention to every mention of ancient Israelite books that no longer exist. Here is my list:
Lost Books of the Bible
1. The Book of the Covenant Exodus24:7 - it is supposed to pre-date the stone tablets of Moses’ 10 Commandments
2. The Book of the Lord’s Battles Numbers 21:14, this sounds very interesting.
3. The Rights and Duties of the King 1 Samuel 10:25
4. The Book of Jashar 2 Samuel 1:17
5. The History of the Kings of Judah 1 Kings 14:29
6. The History of Solomon 1 Kings 11:41
7. The History of the Kings of Israel 1 Kings 14:19
8. The Laws Governing Kingship 2 Kings 11:12
9. The Book of the Kings of Israel 1 Chronicles 9:1
10. The History of the Kings of Judah and Israel 1 Chronicles 16:11 - are The History of the Kings of Judah, and The History of the Kings of Israel two separate books, and this combined one is a third, or is this
identical with the two earlier books put together?
11. Records of the Prophets Samuel, Nathan and Gad 1 Chronicles 29:29
12. The Commentary on the Book of Kings 2 Chronicles 24:27
13. The History of Jehu Son of Hanani 2 Chronicles 20:34, part of The Book of the Kings of Israel
14. The History of Nathan the Prophet 2 Chronicles 9:29
15. The Prophecy of Ahijah of Shiloh 2 Chronicles 9:29
16. The Visions of Idda the Prophet 2 Chronicles 9:29
17. The History of Shemaiah the Prophet 2 Chronicles 12:15
18. The History if Iddo the Prophet 2 Chronicles 12:15
19. The Collection of Laments 2 Chronicles 35:25
20. The Vision of the Prophet Isaiah Son of Amoz 2 Chronicles 32:32 - is this the same as the OT book of Isaiah? Maybe, maybe not.
21. The History of the Prophets 2 Chronicles 33:19
22. The Lord’s Book of Living Creatures Isaiah 34:16, this sounds really interesting.
23. The Book of Truth Daniel 10:20, this sounds really interesting, too.
24. The Records of the Kings of Persia and Media Nehemiah 12:23 , Esther 2:23, Esther 10:2
25. The Chronicles of the High Priest John 1 Maccabees 16:24
26. The History of the Kings of Israel and Judah Esdras 1:33 - is this the same as The History of the Kings of Judah and Israel, or is it a separate book? Is it just a matter of reversed names?
27. The Chronicles of the Kings 1 Esdras 1:42
28. Nehemiah's Library 2 Maccabees 2:13-15