On the New Oxford Annotated Bible

I did it. I can’t believe I finally read the Bible cover to cover. I picked this up after having read the Quran during Ramadan, started Genesis in April, and finished Revelation today, staggering the general essays at the back as I went; what I didn’t do was read every word of the annotations and commentary, which I dipped into only when I was curious what some author meant by a passage. The translation here, the New Revised Standard Version, is the gold standard for an academic approach to the text — neither too literalist nor too figurative — and that pays off in the annotations, which contextualize and clarify the harder passages, while the introductory essays before each book are an excellent way to wade into questions of composition, interpretation, and structure before diving in; they prime the pump. The one major absence is that this NRSV is the specifically Protestant canon. The publisher also puts out a version with the Roman Catholic books and the Apocrypha, and for a wider range it’s worth seeking out (it has a red cover, where the Protestant version is a subdued yellow).

I’m not qualified to review the actual contents of the canon — doing so would feel profoundly wrong of me — but I can speak to the structure. It opens with the Torah, the first five books, where Deuteronomy acts as a transition into what scholars call the Deuteronomical History. That history was a high point for me, a wide-ranging epic built around a handful of major characters; the Saul–David cycle, in the two books of Samuel, has the same magisterial shape as the Arthurian legends. I grew especially attached to Elijah, who hears God in the wilderness as silence, and I’ll quote the whole passage (1 Kings 19:11–13) simply for how much I loved it:

He said, “Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.” Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind, and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake, and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire, and after the fire a sound of sheer silence. When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave.

After the Deuteronomical History comes the Chroniclers’ History, a re-examination of the past written after the Babylonian exile and the building of the Second Temple. Second Temple Judaism, as I read it, is markedly different from “First Temple” religion — more priestly, more scribal, less untamed — and although many of the prophets lived in the Second Temple period, their message feels different from what came before, partly because even after the temple was rebuilt, Israel and Judah were never again independent states. Samuel and Kings present a strong, unified kingdom that fragments in two, though it’s clear enough that even the United Kingdom wasn’t especially powerful: Philistia, with its capital at Gath, remained strong, and there was little to be done about Edom and Moab, which allowed for a religious fluidity that Elijah and Elisha attacked, railing against the “high places” and the northern kingdom’s embrace of Phoenician practice. The contrast between the two histories is remarkable, and it’s in contrasting them that we can see more clearly what this early history may have looked like, or at least how it wished to remember itself. The Chroniclers’ History is an exercise in excision: David is the grandson of a Moabite, but Ezra and Nehemiah enforce a politics of purity, and the two worlds are nearly incomparable.

The Hebrew text then turns to the Wisdom literature — Job, Psalms (the largest and perhaps most central book of the Old Testament), Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon. I love Ecclesiastes more than any other book in the Old Testament, and all of these have something to teach us today. The Old Testament then closes with the prophets, by far the most challenging texts in the whole Bible; Isaiah and Jeremiah are the most central, and they take rigorous study — I’m not sure I fully get them, and I’m not sure anyone does — though they matter enormously to the Christian tradition, since much of the Gospels is an experiment in reinterpreting them, especially Isaiah and Micah. Of these, I find Daniel a curious and fascinating text.

The New Testament opens with the four Gospels. Three of them — Matthew, Mark, and Luke — are closely related, the “Synoptic Gospels,” all relying on Mark, with Matthew and Luke also drawing on the source scholars call “Q” alongside their own material; of the three, Luke’s is the most academic, while Mark’s is striking for seeming almost unfinished, more an outline in progress than a finished text, so that Matthew and Luke are needed for a fuller picture. John is a fundamentally different kind of book: it tells the same story, culminating in the resurrection, but downplays Jesus as “fisher of men” and foregrounds him as the light and the embodiment of the Logos itself — there’s something mystical in it, and I’m not sure how to approach it. The Book of Acts, likely also Luke’s, narrates the spread of the early Christian community, beginning with Peter and the apostles in Jerusalem and ending with Paul — who had once persecuted Jewish Christians — at the heart of Rome; between those bookends the apostles criss-cross the eastern Mediterranean, extend the message to Gentiles, build institutions, and spread the faith, with Peter central at first and Paul taking on an overwhelming importance.

The penultimate section is the Epistles, most of them Paul’s letters guiding newly founded churches, and his message reads less as a reflection of Jesus’s teaching in the Gospels than as a development of it. This may be controversial to say, but I’d argue that Christianity as a religion begins not with Jesus but with Paul: there’s continuity with the earlier Jewish tradition in the Gospels, but the Pauline epistles syncretize it with the Greek, so that Christianity is largely Hellenized, and given the numerical weight of believers in the Hellenic eastern Mediterranean, they come to overshadow the “Jewish Christians” who remained in Palestine and Jerusalem. There are a few other epistles, attributed to Peter, John, and James, though more likely written by their disciples under their names. Finally there is Revelation. I’ll be up front: anyone who claims to understand this text is probably lying. John of Patmos says he needed angelic mediation to understand his own vision, and it’s a dense, labyrinthine network of signs that refer to one thing and perhaps also another — Babylon as Rome, or somewhere else; the beast as Nero, or the emperor as a category, or something else entirely. There are echoes of seven upon seven upon seven, the famous “mark of the beast,” the lamb (ostensibly Jesus) with its many eyes, the four horsemen of pestilence and war and famine. What does it all mean? It’s a text the most capable Surrealist would be proud of, and it is powerful. I’m sure it’s mystical, but I won’t make predictions; I don’t think it’s about the future or the end times, nor do I see it as referring exclusively to the persecutions of the early Christians — I take it as something more symbolically universal than that. As to what it means, I can’t say.

The essays at the back are excellent for contextualizing how the Bible has been interpreted, the geography of the text, and its periods, and the annotations were excellent too, though it would take full commentaries to answer all my questions (and most would likely be left as debates rather than answers). This updated NRSV is the gold standard for what a Bible should be, and I can see myself coming back to consult it.