It appears that the familiar phrase "People of the Book" may have been coined by Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam. In the Qur'an the term is used self-consciously to distinguish a religious culture in which revelation is handed down orally (Islam) and the two religions in which it is both handed down and authoritatively transmitted in writing (Judaism and Christianity). The Qur'an attaches the phrase primarily to the Jews as a term of opprobrium: "The People of the Book," we are to understand, are those who "demand that thou cause a Book to descend upon them from heaven," for the Qur'an a blasphemous importunity exceeded only by "an even more preposterous demand from Moses: they demanded, 'Show us Allah visibly.' " 1

The Qur'an implicates Christians in the opprobrium both by association:

There is none among the People of the Book but will continue to believe till his death that Jesus died on the cross, and on the Day of Judgment Jesus shall bear witness against them. 2

and directly:

People of the Book! … Indeed, the Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, was but a Messenger of Allah and the fulfillment of glad tidings which He conveyed to Mary and a mercy from him. So … say not: there are three gods. Desist, it will be better for you. 3

As a development from Judaism, Christianity clearly also stressed from the beginning the importance for faith of written revelation, namely the Jewish Scriptures. Soon enough there were, of course, additional writings, the books and epistles of the New Testament, which augmented the scrolls of the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings of the Jewish canon. The first Epistle of Clement (A. D. 95) cites "the Scriptures" in the familiar Jewish way (cap. 28); while the ancient Christian sermon known as Clement II (A. D. 100) affords the first known citation of the words of Jesus as "Scripture" (cap. 3). With respect to the central place of "Scripture," therefore, in the early days of Christianity there would have been little by which an outsider might have distinguished the new sectaries of the Crucified Rabbi from others in the tradition of Jewish reverence for the "Book of Books."

We should perhaps note that this last phrase is not, as sometimes thought, comparative: it refers to the fact that the Bible is, after all, an anthology, a book composed of many books. Our word Bible has its origins in the Septuagint Greek of Daniel 9:2 where ta biblia, "the books," apparently refers to the general body of Jewish "Scriptures" available to the prophet from out of which Daniel is consulting the Book of Jeremiah. Its common synonym in New Testament Greek is the word grapho(s), a collective noun meaning "writings," as when Jesus is quoted by John as saying, "You search the scriptures, because you think that in them you have eternal life, and it is they that testify on my behalf" (John 5:39). This is the term employed also by Saint Paul when he writes to Timothy that "all scripture is inspired by God, and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness" (2 Tim. 3:16; cf. 1 Cor. 1:7) and by Saint Peter when he writes his caution that "no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation" (2 Pet. 1:20).

The sense of a deposit of "writings," a book that contains all "the holy books," is preserved in Saint Jerome's term for his fourth-century translation of the Bible into Latin, the language of the Roman Empire: biblioteca divina means literally the "divine library." Our somewhat narrower notion of the Bible as a single book comes much later, with a shift in Latin usage in the thirteenth century, by which the neuter plural (biblia) came to be regarded as a feminine singular (biblia), an almost unnoticed shift from "the books" to "the Book" in the textual tradition of western Europe. Biblia Sacra, "the Holy Book," is what by the time of Aquinas ta biblia had become; "the Bible," the English equivalent in this singular sense, first appears a century later in the English writings ascribed to John Wyclif, as well as, almost simultaneously, in the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland. For all of these writers, the Bible was preeminently "the Book," or, as Chaucer has it,"oure Book," the foundation text that gives rise to a whole world of books.

Though first intended pejoratively, "People of the Book" in Jewish tradition came to be accepted with pride as a legitimate reference to a cultural and religious identity rooted fundamentally in Torah, the originary book of the Law. The rabbi in Howard Nemerov's poem "Debate with the Rabbi" expresses this traditional affirmation against a skeptical American modernist:

We are the people of the Book, the Rabbi said. Not of the phone book, said I.Ours is a great tradition, said he, And a wonderful history. But history's over, I said. 4

The denigrating voice in Nemerov's poem might easily be that of a "postmodern" literary theorist. But that a negatively intended characterization should be thus transposed into a badge of honor among the denigrated is not-in the history of religion, at least-unusual. Nor is it unusual that the badge should be worn proudly as one means of resisting further denigration: one need only think of Puritans, Methodists, Quakers, and Shakers. In fact, the first of these groups are foremost among those in the Christian tradition who claim the term in question, proud themselves to be in their own way identified as "a People of the Book."

In early Christian experience, the New Testament was added to the whole Jewish "Tanakh" (an acronym for Torah, the Law, Nabiim, the prophets, and Kethubim, the other canonical writings). This larger anthology, which, after Saint Jerome's translation tended more and more to be bound up as a single volume, had for those to whom the Christian missionaries came bearing it all the import of a unified locus of authority: "the Book." "People of the Book" unsurprisingly translates many an early vernacular name for Christian missionaries among African, Asian, and Native American peoples of both hemispheres. The fact that these missionaries regularly put enormous effort into reducing the language of these people to writing so as to provide a written translation of the Bible-an activity that, under such organizations as the Wycliffe Bible Translators and the United Bible Societies, has resulted in at least part of the Christian Bible now being available in 2,100 languages-has lent an identification with the phrase among evangelical Christians in particular almost as strong as pertains among Jews. This identity comprises the Christian converts among evangelized cultures, the more recently evangelized the more naturally so, since for many of them, just as for the English-speaking peoples, the first written texts ever produced in their language have been a portion of the Bible. For all such cultures, the Bible becomes the founding text in their own subsequent national literature.

In Western Christian tradition, especially in the modern evangelical lineage that finds its exemplar in the early Puritans, this sense of the Bible's uniqueness and centrality for Christian identity can at times have the force of exclusionary singularity. John Bunyan's credo is an early representation of this emphasis: "that the holy scriptures, of themselves, without the addition of human inventions, are able to make the man of God perfect in all things."5 The strength of Bunyan's preference for the Bible leads him to eschew other books: "Had I all their aid and assistance at command, I durst not make use of ought thereof, and that for fear lest that Grace, and those Gifts that the Lord hath given me, should be attributed to their wits, rather than the Light of the Word and Spirit of God." 6

To see oneself as part of "the People of the Book" in Bunyan's tradition (for example, in a Baptist or Brethren context) can accordingly involve construing those not of one's own persuasion in this matter as spiritually "pagan," or in a sense ironically obverse to that which it acquires in humanistic tradition after Matthew Arnold, "philistine." That is, such a person might regard the indebtedness of some Christians to many books rather than to just the One Book as evidence of their departure from the "true Israel" of "biblical Christianity."

At the most extreme reach of this impulse is the instinct to sacralize one particular translation. In America one can find chapters of a "King James Bible Church," advertising itself as "independent, literal, fundamental, and premillennial." One thinks of the tale of the midwestern preacher who is reported to have said, "If the King James Bible was good enough for Paul, it is good enough for me." Perhaps the tale is not apocryphal.

From People of the Book: Christian Identity and Literary Culture, by David Lyle Jeffrey, just published by Eerdmans.

Endnotes

1. Al-Nisa 4.6.154; cf. Al-'Imran 3.3.60, 65-116.

2. Al-Nisa 4.6.160-61.

3. Al-Nisa 4.6.172.

4. Howard Nemerov, "Debate with the Rabbi," in The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov (University of Chicago Press, 977), p. 270.

5. John Bunyan, "A Confession of My Faith," in The Whole Works of John Bunyan, ed. G. Offor (London, 1862), Vol. 2, p. 593.

6. John Bunyan, Miscellaneous Works, ed. R. Sharrock (Oxford University Press, 1978), Vol. 3, p. 71.

Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine

September/October 1996, Page 23

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