INTRODUCTION 17
of the use of the term, the Bible, or the book, designates a collection or an-
thology of sacred texts.
We can explain how this set of meanings came to be associated with the
word Bible by examining the process of establishing a canon or canons within
Judaism and Christianity. Organized religions usually teach that adherents to
a given religion should observe the tenets of the tradition in a way that is right,
proper, and correct according to a given canon. (Originally a canon was a cane
or reed, a measuring stick, but the term came to be applied to any standard by
which one might determine whether a person's thoughts or actions measure
up to the standard of correctness in the tradition.) Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam are religions of the book, and so their canons are written canons, au-
thoritative books and anthologies. For Judaism and Christianity, their author-
itative books are the Hebrew Bible (or, more exactly, the Tanakh, that is, the
Torah ["law"], Neviim ["prophets"], and Kethuvim ["writings"]) and the
New Testament (or the New Covenant), respectively. The Hebrew Bible was
used in antiquity in Hebrew and in Greek translation. The Greek version
called the Septuagint was completed in Alexandria, Egypt, by bilingual Jewish
translators during the first centuries BCE. A legend emerged that the Septu-
agint was written in a miraculously identical fashion by seventy-two transla-
tors who labored in pairs over a period of seventy-two days. The Septuagint
was the Bible of the early Christian church, which originated, after all, as a
Jewish religious movement. This Greek translation of the scriptures of Ju-
daism contains several texts not included in the Hebrew Bible—for example,
Baruch, 1 Esdras, Judith, 1-4 Maccabees, Sirach, Tobit, and the Wisdom of
Solomon. To this day the inclusion or exclusion of these texts contained in the
Septuagint remains a canonical issue among Protestant, Roman Catholic, and
Orthodox Christians.
The formation of the New Testament as the Christian Bible was a gradual
process that took centuries to complete. Finally, at the Council of Trent in
1545, the Roman Catholic Church acted to recognize its list of biblical, canon-
ical books as final, that is, closed to any additions or subtractions. (Minor
changes from the work of textual critics are quietly incorporated into new
printings of Bible translations.) Many Protestant denominations have never
acted officially to recognize a biblical canon. While there is widespread agree-
ment among Christians concerning what books should be included in the
New Testament, the traditions of the Syrian and Ethiopic churches have
claimed that different sets of texts should be included in the Christian canon.
Today some are proposing the Gospel of Thomas as an authoritative Christian