Eminent Old Testament scholar John Barton's prize-winning A History of the Bible: The Books and Its Faiths (Allen Lane, 2019) 640pp is being serialised on Radio 4 and was lively enough to keep me awake.
Barton takes what might be called a classical liberal / historical-critical approach which was dominant in Oxford in my undergraduate days (where Barton was Prof). Though other places seemed excited by Post Modern or Canonical readings we were still focusing on dating lots of stuff to the post Exilic period!
Readers and hearers might be interested in Dr Martin Davie's reviews. If one were to read Davie's review mischievously, one might say that on Barton's view the Old Testament has no coherent message and both Judaism and Christianity get it wrong! The authoritative essence, if there is one, is always in the eye of the reader / writer.
The episode I heard seemed rather speculative, building much on slender evidence.
For example, we were told that the Ten Commandments were likely late because the Sabbath commands suggests settled agriculture rather than a nomadic desert existence as does the list of your neighbours property that you are not meant to covet. To my mind, that simply does not follow. And even if it did, God and or Moses could have been writing commands that were intended to last for centuries - indeed for ever. If the witness of the Old Testament can be believed at all, the people had long longed for their own land.
Barton claimed that it would be hard to find any Old Testament event which all scholars are agreed is historical, but I think that tells us more about scholars than about the Old Testament!
I was also not convinced that the details of the Old Testament documents found amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls show reliably what Bible manuscripts were known and trusted in wider Judaism. Granted there was some diversity in Judaism, such as it is, the evidence in the DSS suggests to me a relatively complete and settled Old Testament canon.
It would be interesting to see if Barton's book interacts with Roger Beckwith's The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church: and its Background in Early Judaism.
One should expect simplifications and generalisations in a book of this sort, I suppose. but my experience of Anglicanism is not that the books of the Apocrypha are half in and half out of the Bible. They are not canonical but they are read for instruction (Article VI).
Barton's book is no doubt engaging and valuable but Evangelicals will have fundamental differences with it and there will be much to quibble with in the detailed presentation and arguments.
See also:
and Jeremy Marshall
Some further jottings from all the other episodes and discussion: https://www.facebook.com/malloyd/posts/10157438898436573
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