The Bible: A Medieval Invention?

In 324 CE, the Emperor Constantine placed an order for fifty Bibles. He couldn’t order them from the local bookstore. Such an order was a big deal.

Constantine placed his order with Eusebius, the bishop of Caesarea in Palestine, who had a large library and scriptorium. Eusebius was proud of the imperial commission and preserved the letter in his Life of Constantine. The emperor’s order begins: “I have thought it expedient to instruct your Prudence to order fifty copies of the sacred scriptures (theiōn graphōn, “divine writings,” plural).”

Constantine authorizes Eusebius to draw on the empire’s resources in fulfilling this order and he can draw on imperial officials for resources. Fifty parchment manuscripts is a very large order. For the emperor the order was urgent, but it would have taken time to kill and dress the fifty to sixty sheep or goats for each codex (a total of two thousand five hundred to three thousand sheep), and many scribes to prepare skins for parchment, mix the ink, arrange the work, copy the manuscripts, bind them, and pack them up. This work is not done in a day, a week, or even a year.

Interestingly, the emperor refers in his letter to these copies as “divine writings” (theiōn graphon), while Eusebius in his introduction to this section of his Life of Constantine had referred to them as “God-inspired Words” (theopneustōn logiōn). In the first two centuries, logia (“words, sayings, or oracles”) was the common term for oral sayings of Jesus, as distinguished from written sayings. The correspondence between Constantine and Eusebius shows that they had no common way to refer to what we call the Bible. Terminology was still in flux and remained so for centuries.

For the early followers of Jesus Anointed and the authors of the eventual New Testament, “Scripture” was the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew holy writings. Being Jews, these early followers maintained the term used by Greek-speaking Jews. Their term, hai graphai (plural) is a common Greek word meaning “the Writings,” it is not a specialized, religious, or technical term. It refers to Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings, the threefold division of Israel’s Sacred Writings. When Jesus challenges the disciples on the road to Emmaus to understand that the Messiah must suffer, the narrator remarks, “Then, starting with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted for them every passage of the writings (en pasais tais graphais) that referred to himself” (Luke 24:27). On the other hand, “the writing” (hē graphē, singular) referred to a single verse. When Jesus reads from Isaiah in the Synagogue in Nazareth, he says, “Today this writing [verse] (hē graphē) has been fulfilled as you listen” (Luke 4:21). This common usage between Jews and the followers of Jesus marks a collection of writings as central to their religious experience, in contrast with the practice of the other Greco-Roman polytheistic religions, in which cultic practice played the central role.

Another usage among some Greek-speaking Jews was ta biblia (plural), “the books,” “the scrolls,” or “the writings.” Like hai graphai, ta biblia refers to the Septuagint. While ta biblia does not appear in the New Testament, it is widespread from the second century. John Chrysostom’s use of the phrase ta biblia to refer to both the “Old Testament” and the “New Testament” in this combined sense around 386 is the first such extant use of this term.

In late Latin, the neuter plural biblia (books) was gradually understood as a feminine singular noun (book). This understanding then passed into the European vernaculars as La Bible in French, and Die Bibel in German, both keeping the feminine gender, and in English, “the Bible,” which is a transliteration of the Latin biblia.

A grammatical shift from plural to singular has had a profound effect. A collection of books became a book, even the book. Thus “The Bible” is a medieval Christian creation. The grammatical shift from plural to singular was the first step toward the transmogrification of a collection of writings into a single thing, THE BIBLE. On this basis, medieval theologians elaborated the unitary view of scripture. The Bible has a unitary and single meaning, and a unitary and single author— God. Any contradictions were only apparent, problems to be solved. In this unified Bible, the Jewish and Hebraic character of ta biblia as a collection of many writings disappears into the Old Testament, subordinated in a new Christian scripture. The saying attributed to Augustine and endlessly repeated by medieval theologians makes the point. “The New Testament is hidden in the Old, and the Old is made manifest in the New.” Luther went so far as say that Christ was the sole topic of scripture.

Modern historical critical scholarship went to war with the unitary view of the Bible. The deconstruction of the unitary view of the Bible is the first step toward a historical understanding of the Writings’ parts.

‍