Inventing "The Bible"
Revelation, Theology, Phenomenon, and Text
S. Joel Garver
Christians in every age have confessed their Scriptures as “revelation.” Yet, in the shift from the pre-modern to the modern, the Scriptures transform in several significant and interconnected ways.
First, with the advent of the moveable type printing press, the phenomenology of encounter with the sacred text shifted. The medieval encounter involved hand-written texts in multiple volumes and orders, primarily liturgical in use, heard more than read, and when read, often accompanied by the gloss. With the printed text, a single-volume Bible became a reality, with a standardized order, a fixed object of reading, placed under new forms of scrutiny.
Second, with developments in philosophical outlook, theological categories for explaining the Scriptures also shifted. Earlier ways of relating nature to grace and of understanding revelatio suppose integration between God and creation, supernatural and natural. With emerging modernity, pre-modern integration breaks down or, at the least, various relations are re-configured, so that revelation becomes more an extrinsic super-addition of information into the created order.
Third, alongside and as a result of these other shifts, the Christian Scriptures came to be treated less as a self-manifestation of God, producing their own reception, and always containing an indeterminate surplus of meaning, awaiting four-fold elaboration. Instead, within emerging modernity, the Scriptures became more an object of critical study, largely confined to a literal sense determined by proper exegetical science.
The following remarks explore these shifts and connections, suggesting that they are interrelated, and noting some implications for contemporary readers.
The interconnections and influences that I will trace are not so much matters of rigorous demonstration or entailment. Rather they remain impressionistic, and thus exploratory and tentative. Nonetheless, I hope to urge the plausibility of the several connections I seek to draw.
The Invention of “the Bible”
With this in mind, let’s turn to the first shift, involving the phenomenology of encounter with the biblical text inaugurated by the advent of the printing press. The basic question facing us is this: What is “the Bible”?
The fact is that what we encounter as the Bible — a privately owned, printed bound book, in a single volume, organized in a particular way — is not what most Christians encountered as the Bible until the early modern era. This is not merely a matter of largely oral communication of the content of Scripture as opposed to the Bible as a written text (though that is also an important issue to which I’ll return). Rather, it is a matter of the nature of the Scriptures precisely as a written text.
And this has implications for a host of issues: our ontology of what sort of object the Bible is, the ecclesiological use the Scriptures, our reading practices, hermeneutics, the relation of the individual to the Bible, and so on. I suspect that most Christians today have never really even begun to think through how different their relation to the Bible is from that of earlier, pre-modern generations and, indeed, from that of the original recipients for whom these Scriptures were written and by whom they were received as the Word of God.
To begin quite generally, a book today is a very different sort of thing from a book in the early church or middle ages. The production of a medieval book was an incredibly labor-intensive process, which made for a rather expensive volume. Book production involved the death of animals from whose hides the parchment would be made through a process of curing and scraping. It involved the creation of inks and pens. And it involved the careful copying of texts, often adorned with meaningful illustrations and iconography, all packaged in hand-wrought bindings. The Scriptures, therefore, were quite literally "scriptures" — that is, writings, copied by hand, rather than printed pages.
As a result, a book was an extremely precious commodity and the care and expertise that went especially into liturgical and biblical texts was tremendous, embodying the value and centrality of those texts in the life of the communities that produced and used them. While it is a wonderful thing that we can produce texts cheaply and in massive quantities for wide distribution, it does affect how those texts are handled and valued as cultural artifacts. The notion of the “sacra pagina” (the sacred page) carries different connotations, after all, when that page is not produced and handled as a hand-crafted object deserving extreme care and reverence.
With regard to the Bible in particular, the first thing to realize is that there were no “Bibles” in the middle ages in the sense of a single volume containing the whole of the Scriptures. A complete medieval Bible would have required approximately 95 quires, adding up to around 1520 parchment pages. Binding such a tome together in a single volume would produce an unusable text, too heavy to lift, and easily damaged (though the 12th century did see the production of a handful of three-foot high "display Bibles," typically containing only a section from the Scriptures).
Instead, a complete medieval Bible (or “pandecta”) would typically be divided into nine volumes. And such complete Bibles were, actually, exceedingly rare, though we have records (and, in a few cases, extant copies) of such Bibles dating primarily from the 9th and 12th centuries.
More commonly, books of Scripture were circulated in even smaller volumes containing, for example, the writings of Solomon, thereby allowing for a flexible and open-ended ordering of the books within the Bible (the four Gospels, for instance, appeared in various orders, with John often second). Moreover, the biblical text occurred without the kind of “navigational” apparatus to which we are accustomed: chapters and verses (though chapters predate verses).
And so, while the text was less readily accessible to organized study, it was also not subject in the same way to the kind of dissection into discrete units that are so easily isolated from a larger narrative flow. A medieval “Bible” was more a continuous circulation of texts that repeatedly came together along certain patterns of interpretation, liturgical juxtaposition, typological resonance, and redemptive narrative.
All of these observations, however, direct us to the larger point that it would be quite rare for a medieval school, monastery, or university to own a complete Bible, even if composed of smaller volumes. This is not to say that the complete text of Scripture would have been unavailable to a medieval school or religious community. Rather, it is to say that the way in which the text would have been available was in a form other than that which we would recognize as a “Bible.” The medieval student of the Scriptures would have encountered biblical texts in two primary ways: as liturgical texts and as embedded within commentary.
As a liturgical text, medieval Scriptures would be found in the form of Gospel books, lectionaries, sacramentaries, Psalters, missals, and so on (interestingly, Gospels seem to have outnumbered Psalters in medieval England 3-to-1, assuming the extant texts are representative). As such, a medieval Christian would not encountered the Scriptures except within an already existing hermeneutical context and primarily in an oral form, whether spoken or sung.
With regard to the hermeneutical context, the Scriptures were placed within a doxological fabric of liturgy, prayer, festivals, and practices, juxtaposed against other texts. Thus, for instance, the Paschal Vigil would place narratives of the Flood, the Rea Sea crossing, and so on, alongside one another as mutually interpretative, and against the backdrop of Christian initiation, reaffirmation of baptismal vows, and the death and resurrection of Christ celebrated in the eucharist, as part of the ongoing story of the church.
Moreover, relating to a text primarily by hearing is a different relationship with that text than merely reading it. For one thing, reading is typically a private exercise, while hearing can remain public, God's people listening in common, thereby situating the text in a community of listeners, rather than primarily placing it into the hands and under the eyes of an individual interpreter.
This points further to the differing phenomenologies of reading and hearing. Hearing suggests a posture of attentiveness, a hearkening that is tied to sounds that enter into the mind unwilled and therefore call for reaction and submission, placing the hearer at the text’s disposal. Reading, on the other hand, requires a choice to look, a gaze that places the reader above the text, controlling how that text is divided and appropriated, placing the text at the disposal of the reader.
Besides liturgical texts, the other way in which a medieval Christian would encounter the Bible was as a text embedded within other texts in the form of various commentaries and within the Gloss (glossa ordinaria). As such medieval Christians again did not encounter the biblical text except within an already existing hermeneutical relation, though now primarily in a written form (even if the Gloss was sometimes read aloud in monastic settings).
Medieval commentaries were not designed merely to comment upon the text as an object of study, but rather to inculcate a particular way of reading that functioned more as a spiritual discipline, unfolding the meaning of the text as a site of grace and in a way that confronts and changes the reader in her saving journey.
In the case of the Gloss, there was a combination of marginal and interlinear commentary that marked and surrounded the text itself, physically situating it at the center of a larger textual negotiation. While the interlinear gloss was usually more philological in character, the marginal gloss drew upon centuries of earlier commentaries, assembling snippets of them as an ongoing interpretative tradition. Interestingly, the gloss text itself emerged quickly and was very stable in content while the biblical text it surrounded was often quite variable in its translation from the original languages.
All of these observations about the medieval Bible should be a cause for reflection about how differently modern people experience the sacred text, from the 16th century onward. Moreover, they set the stage for consideration of other changes.
The Meaning of “Revelation”
Second, then, let’s turn to developments in theological outlook, particularly the ways in which Christian thinkers from the pre-modern period into modernity began to shift in their understanding of divine revelation.
This topic is, of course, vast. A thorough treatment would require comparing a variety of medieval discussions with their later scholastic descendents up through the Protestant Reformation, and then following these discussions into the disparate 17th century scholasticisms, both Protestant and Catholic. That task is well beyond the scope of my present remarks.
Still, we may make several general observations, I think, that hold true across an array of diverse contexts, even if there are notable and important exceptions.
Within the medieval period we do not find separate, self-contained discussions de revelatione as we will by the late 16th century, where various systematic treatises provide a theological prolegomena, often under that title (or entitled de revelatione sive vera religione). Certainly authors such as Aquinas, Bonaventure, Eckhart, Scotus and others, were deeply concerned with divine revelation, sacred teaching, divine science, prophecy, inspiration, and so forth. Yet, in general these authors lack distinct treatments of the topic of revelation, instead discussing related topics as they arose in the course of wider issues.
What would later come to fall under the topic of revelation arises for Bonaventure at various places in his writings and receives extended treatment on several occasions through his commentary on Lombard’s Sentences. In a similar way, Thomas Aquinas, while beginning his Summa Theologiae with articles concerning sacred doctrine and divine science, nonetheless reserves other central dimensions of the topic until later and at a variety of junctures, when addressing the Scriptures, faith, modes of prophecy and inspiration, and so forth. (For these authors consult Bonaventure, commentary on the Sentences; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, especially II-II.171-174, De Veritate 12, and commentaries on 1 Corinthians 14 and Isaiah 1 and 6.)
Moreover, Aquinas’ sacred doctrine, as a divine science, does not have an entirely distinct subject matter from the other sciences. He suggests that as the astronomer and physicist both prove some same conclusions from diverse perspectives, so also in sacred doctrine, the subject matter of metaphysics (which includes all that can be known) is still under consideration, but is approached under the light of divine revelation rather than that of natural reason. Thus, as Aquinas notes a bit further on, sacred doctrine extends to everything, even if it goes beyond what is accessible to the light of reason.
Revelation, in this context, is not a super-added deposit of information, but a mode of understanding the one and same created order, but now as connected to its final end in God. God himself then is the ultimate content of revelatio, by whom faith is nourished unto salvation.
With regard to prophetic revelation — what we might think of as the subjective experience of revelation — medieval theologians such as Alexander of Hales, Bonaventure, and Thomas Aquinas all build upon Augustine. While such revelation is for them a supernatural phenomenon, it is not supernatural in the sense of something inserted into or on top of the self-enclosed world of matter. Rather, it is supernatural in the sense that all of the created order, brought into being out of nothing, by nature remains open and directed towards an end beyond its own capacity to attain, and yet to which it ultimately arrive by grace.
Thus in prophecy, a kind of knowledge is manifest in polymorphous ways, though (in Aquinas’ turn of phrase) “mixed with clouds and darkness.” In this knowing, passively received forms of prophetic consciousness allow the prophet to see beyond ordinary ways of seeing, even if in continuity with them, grace taking up and fulfilling nature. Furthermore, this is not a matter of a distant God drawing nearer the creature, for God is always close at hand. Rather, the distance of creaturely consciousness is overcome when the veil of our own darkness is pulled aside.
This process of unveiling is progressive throughout God’s dealings with humanity in sacred history, coming to its greatest manifestation in the person of Jesus Christ in which human prophetic consciousness arrives as its fullest expression in the consciousness of the God-man.
With regard to the Old Testament prophets Aquinas and Bonaventure adduce various examples, but both address the example of Daniel at Belshazzar’s feast, interpreting the writing on the wall. Aquinas explains this as a single act of illumined judgment involving both seeing what is being revealed and affirming it as revelation. That’s to say, Daniel does not first decode the writing and its content and then only subsequently recognize and assent to it as revealed. Rather, this instance of revelation is a single, seamless event, where the revelation itself provides the conditions for its reception.
When such revelation is further proclaimed or committed to writing, medieval authors often conceive of this as a distinct sort of process, subsequent to the revelatory perception itself. Thus, revelation is conceived of as an event of prophetic consciousness undergone, passive in nature, even if God takes up and makes use of existing forms of poetic imagination within the prophet’s own mind and experience. But these authors see revelation in its usus as denuntiatio (that is, it's use or application as announcement or proclamation) as involving the active exercise of the prophet’s own rhetorical abilities, patterns of speech, imagination, and desire.
While I’ve hinted at some of the shifts we encounter in later understandings of revelation, we can, at this point, note several aspects of these shifts in greater detail.
By the time we get to late 16th and into the 17th centuries, we find theologians interpreting the notion of revelation in primarily propositional categories, as a positive deposit that can serve as an object of cognition even apart from faith, and to which faith assents. While the illumination provided in faith’s assent is also included in revelatio by authors such as Saurez, faith begins to take on a character as something extrinsic to the object of revelation itself and which occurs alongside the revelatory event. (For Saurez see his De Fide, though trends present in Saurez already begin to emerge in Cano and Banez; moreover, Saurez should not be singled out as the shifts he represents show up in various ways among other scholastics, including the Reformed, such William Whitaker's 1588 Disputatio de Sacra Scriptura).
Likewise, the propositional object of revelation itself comes more and more to be conceived as extrinsic to nature, a set of revealed facts that ordinarily lie outside the field of vision of rational perception, now laid bare with clarity and offered to the human mind as worthy of belief. As such, the space between prophetic consciousness and written text is pulled more closely together, even if not falling into theories of bare dictation.
It strikes me at this point that there are some suggestive homologies between the two shifts I’ve already outlined: the shift in how Christians encountered the biblical text itself and the shift in theological understanding of revelation.
In particular, consider how the medieval encounter with the Scriptures privileged hearing over reading and placed the text in an interpretive context full of fertile possibilities for elevating literal meaning. In many respects this sort of encounter stands in analogy with medieval understandings of revelation as first a form of prophetic consciousness and only secondarily as propositions and text, and with the elevation of nature by grace involved in the revelatory event.
Furthermore, one suspects that the shift to having a “Bible” as a single printed bound volume, while not causing the theological changes I noted, nonetheless served to reinforce and perpetuate those changes. In terms of the technology itself, it may be the case that already occurring theological modifications prepared the way for the acceptance of the new technology and for what would soon become a standard product of that technology – the modern Bible.
Hermeneutical Transformations
Finally, let’s consider shifts in hermeneutics and the new stance that modern interpreters took towards the biblical text. It is well known that pre-modern interpretation was also pre-critical interpretation, deploying the multilayered apparatus of four-fold exegesis, bringing ever new possibilities out of the text from within established traditions of reading. Thus interpretation functioned as a spiritual discipline directed towards the saving transformation of the interpreter and hearers.
Such hermeneutics presuppose that the Scriptures ultimately manifest an encounter with God himself. Thus there will always be a surplus of meaning in the text that exceeds and overflows its original immediate context or the intentions of the human authors. Indeed, a denial of any fuller meaning to texts (taken in their canonical and liturgical contexts, arranging texts along the pattern of the biblical narrative, and drawing upon typological dimensions) would itself be an implicit denial of the divine character of the Scriptures.
One might even argue further that attempting to isolate a “plain sense” of the text that doesn’t already contain a plenitude and profligacy of meaning is to perpetuate a dichotomy between nature and grace, a “natural” meaning that isn’t already graced.
Pre-critical ways of understanding of the biblical text were not a universally available hermeneutics, transparent to any rational reader who might encounter the text. Rather, right interpretation was rooted in acquired habits of reading, occurring within a diachronic reading tradition made available through the Gloss, and nourished by sacramental and liturgical contexts that privileged particular textual negotiations.
It is worth noting in this connection that the Protestant Reformers did not fundamentally depart from patristic and medieval traditions of understanding Scripture, despite occasional accusations to the contrary.
Rather, as Richard Muller and others have argued, early Protestant interpreters carried such interpretation forward, reforming and re-orienting medieval practices of fourfold interpretation, reining in excesses and rooting the practices more deeply in the “literal” sense of the text (that is, the text taken in its original context of author, grammar, and history) – as the better medieval interpreters had always done in any case.
By the 17th century, however, matters had begun to shift, sometimes dramatically. In authors such as Hobbes and Spinoza – though also more widely – we see a new stance towards the biblical text with the emergence of a “scientific” hermeneutics, deprived of the mediations of an interpretive tradition. In such interpretation, textual meaning became a public matter, universally available through the application of a rational method. (For Hobbes see Leviathan, especially the Introduction and IV.47; Spinoza see A Theologico-Political Treatise, especially VII and XIX.)
At its most basic, such interpretation isolates a determinate, literal textual meaning, produced by history and grammar, treating the text as an inert object of study, apart from the fecundity of pre-modern exegesis. What which is most “clear” and accessible in the text, were clarity is a matter of philosophical perception, becomes a measure of and control upon wider textual meaning, so that only Scripture (in its unmediated textual facticity) interprets Scripture.
Here we see the Protestant principle of Scripture's self-interpretation, now taken from its proper context in the reading practices of the believing community and detached from the rule of faith as witnessed to by the catholic creeds and accumulated patterns of practice. Likewise, the Protestant principle of biblical perspicuity (regarding those matters necessary for salvation) is pushed in a radical direction, extending to the scriptural whole, defining and delimiting its function as canon with public authority.
In Hobbes and Spinoza, a further step is taken in that textual meaning becomes circumscribed by philosophy, so that the meaning of the text must remain “rational,” subjecting the Scriptures, thereby, to the scrutiny of a reason that remains prior to and unconstrained by the biblical text itself.
In these ways the biblical text could be tamed and held captive, disallowing the possibility of new dimensions of meaning that might unfold from the text, already apt for a new context and confronting modernity with the claims of Christ. Moreover, we have the groundwork set for ever more critical interpretations of the text, focused almost exclusively upon re-covering the plain sense of the text within its original historical and linguistic contexts and given the text’s own history as a discrete artifact.
I think we might now see ways in which shifts in technology and theology could easily underwrite the kinds of hermeneutical changes I’ve just outlined.
In terms of the modern text, the printed Scriptures present themselves as a fixed object of study and scrutiny, easily isolated from contexts of liturgy and doxology, from traditional reading practices, and from the Gloss. Moreover, as an object read more than heard, the text presents itself as inert, liable to dissection and subject to rational science.
In terms of theological development, shifts towards regarding revelation as a propositional deposit super-added to natural modes of knowing can tend to downplay the polymorphous character of prophetic consciousness and the role of the prophet in shaping the text. By underplaying the diverse and human character of the text, the biblical text becomes a problem awaiting critical tools to unravel.
Conclusions
I’ve considered three kinds of change with regard to the sacred text – a change in printing technology and thus the phenomenon of Scripture, a change in philosophical categories and thus the concept of revelation, and a change in hermeneutics and thus our stance towards the Scriptures.
Having set out these important shifts, I want to suggest that they are mutually interpretive, but also sequential. Had it not been for the changes in printing technology and the very notion of a “book,” modernity would not have arisen so successfully, particularly with regard to its penchant for systematization and the logical ordering of topics. The setting apart of “revelation” as a foundational theological locus was aided and encouraged by the apparatus of modern printed texts.
Had it not been for the twin shifts in printing technology and in philosophical categories, there would not have been room for the kind of hermeneutical stance towards the Scriptures we see in modernity. The conception of revelation as a positive deposit, super-added to a self-enclosed nature took physical form in the printed, bound, and standardized single-volume Bible, producing the modern object of scrutiny and critical interpretation.
We cannot, of course, undo the technological innovation of the printed book, nor would we want to. Whatever liabilities such a text might offer for Christian faith communities, particularly taken together with theological and hermeneutical changes, the benefits of a widely-available Bible are inestimable.
Nonetheless, Christians face tantalizing questions.
What would a medieval theologian, for instance, have made of the Protestant doctrine of “sola scriptura,” particularly in its later, more privatized incarnations? While I'm convinced that a number of medievals did, in fact, hold to something quite like that doctrine, they did so in a context where it would be far more difficult for it to devolve into an individualistic practice of subjective interpretation.
To what degree has the production of modern printed Bibles been complicit in pushing the Protestant doctrine of Scripture in sometimes-strange directions? For that matter, to what degree has Bible production been complicit in the rise of some of the earlier Roman Catholic notions about “tradition” as a distinct deposit of teachings alongside Scripture?
Looking at the ways that medieval Christians encountered the Bible should also help free us from the illusion that we come to the Scriptures as a “mere text,” discovered in its “plain sense,” as an “object” to be studied and scrutinized or as something that is designed primarily to speak to “me,” the reader.
Rather, those ways of approaching the text, however helpful they may sometimes be, are revealed as themselves historically situated and contingent, embedded within certain reading practices that are not the only (nor perhaps the best) ones available. David Steinmetz, for instance, has argued provocatively for the superiority of pre-critical exegesis. Yet widespread lack of awareness of our own hermeneutical assumptions seems often to sidetrack any progress when Christians find others reading Scripture in a way that is at variance with their own.
It seems to me that Christian faith communities, while not abandoning the modern Bible, would do well to highlight and favor those practices that most embody and sustain pre-modern negotiations of the scriptural text: producing editions of Scripture tied to worship practices, such as psalm books, gospel books, and lectionaries; situating Scripture within its liturgical and sacramental context; favoring christological and typological readings that move beyond mere grammar and history; emphasizing the listening to and hearing of the word alongside individual reading; renewing arts surrounding the production of texts for communal and liturgical use.
In these ways, without neglecting the great benefits of a printed text and its accompanying tools for study, contemporary Christians can learn to value and embrace the Scriptures in continuity with our sisters and brothers who lived before modernity invented "the Bible."
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