The Bible: A Biography, Karen Armstrong, c. 2007

In progress. Personal use only; much taken verbatim from the book for my notes; not for use by others.

Page 81, after the destruction of Jerusalem, things developed quickly: "As events unfolded on earth, even God has to keep studying his own Torah in order to discover its full significance."

Introduction

Chapter 1: Torah

• E: associated with the northern kingdom
• J: associated with the southern kingdom
• E+J 
• exiled to Babylon --> P (probably a priestly school)
• Golah: the community of returning exiles; brought with them nine scrolls
• the beginning of the written Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings
• goyim: foreigners

Chapter 2: Scripture

• Second Temple Period
• Judahites built the second temple on Mount Zion
• the Persians had conquered Babylon; Persia, the largest kingdom up to that time
• Persians sent Ezra, their minister for Jewish affairs to Jerusalem; taught them the Torah; 396 BC
• Ezra shocked; brought a new message to the Jews
• most important part of the Torah spirituality was Ezra himself
• Ezra's reading marks the beginning of classical Jadaism
• by this time, two established categories of scripture: the Torah and the Prophets (Neviim)
• after the exile, another set of texts: the Kethuvim, the Writings; sometimes simply reinterpretation of the older books: thus Chronicles was essentially a commentary on Deuteronomic history of Samuel and Kings
• Writings --> Wisdom; associated with King Solomon, not Moses/Sinai
• three of the Kethuvim were attributed to King Solomon: Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs
• Proverbs: a collection of common-sense aphorisms
• Ecclesiastes: a flagrantly cynical meditation; appeared to undermine the entire Torah tradition
• Song of Songs: an erotic poem with no apparent spiritual content
• Other "Writings/Wisdom": Job - based on an ancient folktale
• by the 2nd century BC, the Wisdom writers coming closer to the Torah
• Ben Sirah: a devout sage living south of Jerusalem plays a major role at this time
• Ben Sirah: Torah, Prophets, and Writings --> prophecy
• this concept made clear in book of Daniel, written in Palestine during the second century BC at a time of political crisis
• Greeks had introduced a diluted version of Athenian classical culture, known as Hellenism
• Seleucid Empire
• Maccabees shook off Seleucid Empire; established Judah as an independent state
• the book of Daniel composed during the Maccabean war;
• at the end of the 2nd century BC, an explosion of apocalyptic piety (p. 43)
• NEED TO COMPLETE THIS CHAPTER

Chapter 3: Gospel
NEED TO START AT BEGINNING OF CHAPTER

• the story of Paul; nice to read this at same time as reading Paul the Apostle: His Life and Legacy in Their Roman Context, J. Albert Harrill, c. 2012; 
• destruction of the second temple, 70 AD; after destruction of first temple, burst of literary energy by the exiles in Babylon
• by the middle of the second century AD, nearly all 27 books of the New Testament had been completed
• Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John --> the canon; but there were other gospels; also, gospels lost, including the gospels of the Ebonites, Nazarenes, and Hebrews
• a gospel know as Q as lost; it was the source for Matthew and Luke
• Marcion, 100 - 165 AD; wanted to sever "new" from "old"
• Irenaeus, 140 - 200 AD, bishop of Lyons, appalled at Marcion's desire to separate; wanted to link: we see the "embryo of the New Testament": Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in order; Acts (history of the early church); epistles by Paul, James, Peter, and John; concluded with two prophetic descriptions of the end: Revelation and the Shepherd of Hermas
• canon not fixed until well into the 4th century: Shepherd of Hermas rejected; Hebrews and epistle of Jude would be added to Irenaeus's list
• "messiah"
• Armstrong says we do not know who wrote the gospels; but they were Jewish Christians, wrote in Greek, lived in the Hellenistic cities of the Roman empire; creative writers; skilled redactors editing earlier material
• Page 69 -- start here - much to finish

Chapter 4: Midrash

• begins with "during the last days of the siege of Jerusalem
• after the destruction of Jerusalem --> Yavneh, coast city, safe haven
• Yavneh: 60 years of remarkable religious synthesis; the Pharisees
• midrash: to investigate, p. 81
• ENTIRE CHAPTER NEEDS TO BE ANNOTATED

Chapter 5: Charity

• before the conversion of Constantine in 312, it seemed unlikely that Christianity would survive, as Christians were subjected to sporadic but intense persecution by the Roman authorities
• apologiae: "rational explanations"

Chapter  6: Lectio Divina  ('sacred study')

• 430: Vandals destroying the western provinces of the Roman Empire; Augustine deeply depressed
• Europe became a pagan wilderness; from the 5th to the 9th centuries, Christian tradition was confined to monasteries
• the monastic ideal had been brought to the West by John Cassian (360 - 435)
• lectio divina ('sacred study') was also central to the Rule of St Benedict of Nursis (480 - 543); Benedictine monks spend at least two hours every day studying the scriptures and the writings of the fathers
• a formative influence in the West was Gregory the Great (540 - 604), a Benedictine monk who was elected Pope
• by the 11th century, Europe started to emerge from the Dark Ages; see the Benedictines of Cluny, near Paris, p. 129
• the first communal, cooperative act of the new Europe, as she crawled out of the Dark Ages, was the First Crusade (1095 - 99)
• Bernard (1090 - 1153), abbot of the Cistercian monastery of Clairvaux in Burgundy (1090 - 1153) (typo?), dominated Pope Eugene II and King Louis VII of France; charismatic in his own was as Abelard; the new Cistercian Order: a reformed branch of the Benedictine monasticism
• the apogee of lectio divina: Bernard's 86 sermons delivered to the monks of Clairvaux between 1135 and 1153;
• Thomas Aquinas (1225 - 1274)
• kabbalists
• Roger Bacon 

Chapter 7: Sola Scriptura ("scripture alone")

• by the 16th century, a complex process was under way in Europe that would irrevocably change the way Western people experienced the world: inventions and innovations
• [14th and 15th centuries: Black Death, the plague; one-third of population of Europe died; the Great Schism -- as many as three pontiffs claimed the See of Peter; Turks captured Constantinople]
• the Renaissance
• Byzantine refugees/Greeks fled to Europe; became tutors
• 1519: Desiderius Erasmus publishes the Greek text of the New Testament; a beautiful Ciceronian Latin that was very different from the Vulgate; invention of the printing press critical; readers particularly attracted to Paul
• reformers: Zwingli (1484 -1531); John Calvin (1509 - 64); Loyola (1491 - 1556)
• 44 (1483 - 1546), re-shaped the Bible; especially drawn to Paul; he privileged John's gospel and the First Epistle of Peter but relegated Hebrews, the epistles of James and Jude, and Revelation to the periphery; same principle to the Old Testament: he discarded the Apocrypha; did accept Genesis because Paul quoted it
• his epiphany: p. 162
• October 31, 1517: the 95 theses
• the Puritans and the New World: Hebron, Salem, Bethlehem, Sion, Judaea
• the Pequots (note similarity to the name of Captain Ahab's ship; then think of Ishmael)

Chapter 8: Modernity

• starting with the late 17th century

•