Reviewed by Mark Oppenheimer
Sunday, May 22, 2005

WHOSE BIBLE IS IT?

A History of the Scriptures Through the Ages

By Jaroslav Pelikan. Viking. 274 pp. $24.95

WHY THE JEWS REJECTED JESUS

The Turning Point in Western History

By David Klinghoffer. Doubleday, 247 pp. $24.95

AFTER THE APPLE

Women in the Bible -- Timeless Stories of Love,

Lust, and Longing

By Naomi Harris Rosenblatt. Miramax. 264 pp. $23.95

Many authors who write about the Bible are so tendentious that their books are worthless; other writers are thoughtful and well-meaning but nonetheless argue as much from faith as from evidence. Which is why any syllabus of religion reading should begin with a book that teaches humility, reminding us how difficult it is even for the faithful to get at God's words. After all, God is perfect, but translators and scribes are not. One such book is Whose Bible Is It ?, a new history of how the Bible was written, redacted and translated into its present editions, written by the esteemed church historian Jaroslav Pelikan.

The book is far from perfect, but fortunately Pelikan is at his best where most readers will be at their worst: in antiquity. He begins with lucid, succinct explanations of the Hebrew Bible's translation into its first Greek edition, known as the Septuagint, then into Jerome's Latin version, the Vulgate. A fluent reader of Hebrew, Greek and Latin (and, for what it's worth, German, Italian, French, Russian, Slavonic and Czech), Pelikan is good at unsettling our notions of what the Bible really says. By the end of the 4th century, there were competing Hebrew, Latin and Greek versions of every major book of the Bible, and almost nobody could read them all and compare. Few Greeks would know, as Pelikan does, that what they read as "They have pierced my hands and feet," a line from the 22nd psalm that Jesus cries on the cross in the New Testament, was originally rendered by Hebrew scribes as "Like lions [they maul] my hands and feet" -- which, lacking the "piercing," seems much less like an Old Testament foreshadowing of the crucifixion.

But as Pelikan moves beyond antiquity, what promised to be a handy history of Bible translations becomes less thorough and more eccentric. He spends too little time, for example, on the numerous Bible translations published during the Reformation and the Renaissance, and he pays almost no attention to the 20th-century English versions of the Bible. Many of these are not new translations but editions of a standard translation annotated for particular niche audiences; the Christian publishing house Zondervan offers, for example, a Mom's Devotional Bible , a Recovery Devotional Bible , a Sports Devotional Bible and dozens more like them. While Pelikan may find these editions tangential to a narrative focused on figures like Luther, Gutenberg and Calvin, they are immediately relevant to many Christians' experience of the Bible today.

Pelikan essays some pet scholarly theories, and many readers may not realize when he is moving from a recitation of acknowledged fact to an assertion of opinion. It is by no means obvious, for example, that the Babylonian Talmud -- the systematic compendium of Jewish law and teachings completed around the year 600 -- is some sort of analogue to the New Testament, just because they are both extensions of the Old Testament. This is Pelikan's most original point, one he repeats several times -- for example, "According to Judaism, the written Torah is made complete and fulfilled in the oral Torah, so that the Talmud is in many ways the Jewish counterpart to the New Testament." He is at his queerest in noting that New Testament expositor Martin Luther King Jr. marched for civil rights alongside a "scion of the Talmud," Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel -- a great Jewish teacher, to be sure, but not known as a Talmudist, except in the sense that all rabbis are "scions of the Talmud."

Pelikan's juxtaposition is appealing -- look at the variety of wonders the Old Testament has made possible! -- but ultimately silly. The Talmud can be contemptuous of Christianity, and its main purpose is to adumbrate rules for living that -- it so happens -- Christians dismiss as legalistic, outmoded and unnecessary. Pelikan's commitment to this pairing surely derives from his well-meaning ecumenism: He is rightly lauded for his promotion of religious tolerance and his opposition to anti-Semitism, and this book concludes with a charge to read the Old and New Testaments and "to interpret them and reinterpret them over and over again -- and ever more studiously to do so together." Whose Bible Is It? will surely aid in that project. But it would be a more bracing, intellectually gratifying read if Pelikan were a tad less earnest -- and if he were franker, with himself and with us, about his agenda.

What Pelikan does for the history of Bible, David Klinghoffer has done better for the history of Jews' resistance to Christianity. Why the Jews Rejected Jesus is an ambitious survey of a big topic, but Klinghoffer's frank conviction lends his material urgency and narrative verve; it's fun to read the words of someone so sure that he's right. An observant and politically conservative Jew, Klinghoffer is not one to wear his learning lightly; his column in the Jewish weekly the Forward is by turns smart and annoying, and he is never caught in the embarrassing position of giving his opponents the benefit of the doubt. But perhaps that makes him the perfect man to write a book on a topic so difficult. Given the influence of Mel Gibson, the medieval but still lingering "blood libel" that Jews use the blood of Christian infants to bake their Passover matzahs, and the notorious fraud known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion that purported to expose a sinister Jewish cabal, Klinghoffer has decided that the Jews need to re-learn the ancient art of the disputation, the debate between Christianity and Judaism.

Roman emperors used to force Jews to debate Christians in public, as a kind of sport. Klinghoffer also takes obvious pleasure in the mere unsheathing of his sword, but he has other, more pressing goals. He is tired of Jews who don't know their history and so say things like, "Jews have never proselytized." He is disappointed in Jews' ignorance of their own scripture, which Christians have for millennia twisted to what he considers heretical ends. And he is fed up with Jews ("Reform Jews," one can almost hear him hiss) ill-equipped to refute the apologia of Christian evangelists.

Klinghoffer is a lively historian, and he's much fairer than his right-wing journalism would lead one to expect. His book is at once a primer on scripture, a vivid picture of the ancient and medieval dialogue between Jews and Christians, and a theological explication of why Christians' messianic claims have made so little sense to Jews. The most salient reason Jews didn't believe Jesus was the messiah, Klinghoffer persuasively argues, is that the Hebrew Bible, in books like Ezekiel, makes it quite clear what the reign of the messiah will look like -- and Jesus has accomplished nothing of the kind. There has been no ingathering of the exiles, no eternal peace, no rebuilding of the Temple -- none of the things the messiah was supposed to bring. And no interpretive trickery by Christians can get around that fact.

Klinghoffer's principal appeal is not to the intellect but the gut. He has the courage to say what many Jews silently believe: This whole Christian thing just doesn't make much sense. It doesn't feel like the messiah has come; it's unlikely God would ever become human; and, above all, we like our religion and see no good reason to abandon it. The book's major weakness, though, is that in summing up all the reasons that Jews reject Jesus, Klinghoffer fails to include the most important reasons of all: simple and profound faith, emotions like loyalty, love, nostalgia and guilt, and cherished cultural traditions like Passover Seders and latkes at Hanukkah time. Klinghoffer's intellectual pugnacity leads him to miss these far homelier reasons that Jews don't choose apostasy.

And these affective Jews, as we could call them, are the ones most likely to enjoy Naomi Harris Rosenblatt's After the Apple . Rosenblatt's common-sense explications of Bible stories involving women are not meant for scholars or amateur disputationists, but they may be just the thing for spiritually curious women (or men) seeking role models or inspiration. It's never a bad time to re-visit Sarah's jealousy of Hagar, Ruth's loyalty to Naomi or Esther's resourcefulness in facing the genocidal Haman. Moreover, Rosenblatt, a Washington-based psychotherapist, avidly looks for contemporary lessons in these old stories. Although her therapeutic style can rob the Bible of its grandeur and mystery -- Sarah is "a role model for women . . . fortunate to live more than a third of their lives after childbearing age" -- she speaks to a kind of religious person more common than the rationalist readers that Pelikan and Klinghoffer seem to be after. Rosenblatt writes for people who want comfort and guidance from God. She is telling us that the Hebrew Bible is a joy to read. She's assuring us of something Pelikan and Klinghoffer surely believe but never come right out and say: The reason we translate the Bible -- and the reason we fight over it -- is that its wisdom persists. ·

Mark Oppenheimer is the author of "Thirteen and a Day: The Bar and Bat Mitzvah Across America."