Jaroslav Pellikan is Sterling Professor Emeritus of History at Yale, recent winner of the Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Human Sciences, and past president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Pellikan's many books include the five-volume “The Christian Tradition.” He has received the Thomas Jefferson Medal of the National Endowment for the Humanities and an honorary degree from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and 41 (wow!) other honorary degrees – testament to the recognition he has received for his more than fifty years as a prominent biblical historian and scholar.

No book has been as widely read, as pored over, or has been the subject of more commentary and controversy, or as influential for our religious beliefs, culture, and language than has the Bible. Many people of faith believe it to be divinely inspired. Yet the Bible was written by many authors over a long time period and shaped in its “current iterations” by people of different faiths. How did this happen? Pelikan provides a fascinating study of how the Bible evolved from its earliest form as oral tradition to its modern existence in several “different configurations” and a multitude of languages and translations for many audiences. Beginning with the earliest Hebrew texts and following the New Testament’s appearance in Greek and then the earliest translation into Latin, Pelikan traces the development of the Jewish bible (the Tanakh, or OT for Christians) and the Christian Bible. He masterfully explores the canonization (Jewish, Catholic, Protestant) of different Bibles and why certain books were adopted by different religions and sects. In so doing he points out the many lost opportunities for Christians and Jews to share knowledge. He says, “The more we understand that parallelism, the more profound are the affinities and the more tragic the mutual ignorance and misunderstanding.” Instead mutual antagonism ruled the day for very many centuries and only recently is this being corrected.

Jaroslav Pellikan points out that the earliest Scriptures were written for the ear, as Scripture was read to illiterate masses. Once writing became available, the “construction” of the Greek Septuagint (or LXX) of the Tanakh and the Latin Vulgate had especially important roles, but they ordered, told, and interpreted the early stories very differently. As for the “Peoples of the Book” (Jews, Christians, Muslims) only the Qur’an exists today in its original Arabic. In the original texts Hebrew did not possess either vowels or punctuation marks or even word divisions. (For a simple English example, THLRDSMSHPRD, is to be read as “The LORD is my shepherd.”) The addition by Massoretes (several centuries after the earliest texts) of “vowel points” to Hebrew made reading it far easier. Also, the Tanakh had many other written texts to aid in understanding it – Mishnah, Talmud, Gemara, Midrash, and the Targums, as well as Halakhah, Haggadah, Haskalah, and Kabbalah (and this list is only partial).

The biggest effect on Biblical diversity was the printing press. Martin Luther said in 1524, “it was not without purpose that God caused his Scriptures to be set down in these two languages alone – the Old Testament in Hebrew, the New in Greek.” But he provided many versions of German translations! To say there have been many and varied translations is an understatement - in Ch 11 (A Message for the Whole Human Race), Pellikan says “We are awash in a sea of Bibles.” Ch 11 and 12 (The Strange New World Within the Bible) summarize what this means for us today. These two chapters stand apart from Jaroslav Pellikan's history. They alone make this book worth reading. I give it a strong recommendation.