The First Bible Teachers: Did You Know?

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Clement of Alexandria (ca. 160-215) began the monumental project that would culminate in the Middle Ages—to place all of Western culture on a biblical foundation. Robert Wilken calculates there are between seven and eight biblical citations on every page of Clement's writings, which contain, in all, some 1,500 references to the Old Testament and 3,000 to the New Testament. His writings are "suffused with [the Bible's] language, its forms of expressions, its images and metaphors, its stories. Its heroes become his heroes, and its history his history." This is all the more remarkable, adds Wilken, given that for Clement the Bible was "an alien book, written in a plain and unadorned style, a product of Jewish culture, quite unlike the artful and polished works of Greek literature."

Origenal sins

Though Origen is hands down the most influential figure in the early history of Biblical interpretation (p. 18), he was condemned at Constantinople in 553 by an ecumenical council and was regularly viewed as a heretic throughout much of Christian History. Among the teachings that contributed to this judgment were his Christological formulations that led Arius to deny the eternal existence of the Son, his belief in the preexistence of human souls, and his affirmation of the genuine possibility of a universal salvation of all creatures. In addition, he was viewed as the source of numerous heresies that, while not directly connected to his thought, were affirmed by those who claimed to be his followers.

How could 72 translators be wrong?

Until the writings of the apostles were gathered into a canonical collection in about the third century A.D., the only Bible the early church knew was the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible made by Hellenistic Jews. Ptolemy Philadelphus (285-246 B.C.) is supposed to have commissioned the great undertaking to introduce a copy of Hebrew Law into his renowned library at Alexandria. According to Jewish tradition, 72 scholars gathered in 72 individual cells, each assigned to translate a full copy of the Bible. Emerging to compare their renderings, they discovered that each version was nearly identical. Until Jerome created his Vulgate translation between 383 and 405, the Septuagint continued as the church's authoritative Old Testament. The Vulgate united the entire Bible under a common linguistic banner for the first time. The Septuagint remains the canonical Hebrew Bible text for the Eastern Orthodox Church.

Not just role playing

We owe the word "Trinity" to the African theologian and apologist Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullian (ca. 160 - ca. 225). Tertullian used the word for the concept that appears everywhere in the Bible but is never explicitly named. He coined it in an argument with a teacher who promoted modalism—the view that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not distinct persons but mere appearances (modes) or roles played by a single God.

Classically trained

Early Christianity's intellectual leaders were all classical scholars. Their schooling was in Homer, Virgil, Isocrates, Cicero, Euripides, Herodotus, Plutarch, Thucydides, and other Greek and Latin masters of philosophy, rhetoric, drama, and history. They valued effective use of words, and when they interpreted the Bible, they did so using the tools of their classical education (p. 40).

No "dark ages" here

Early Christians took a very different attitude towards the body of the classical learning that preceded their rise to cultural dominance than did early Muslims, who spoke of the centuries leading up to Mohammed as al-Jahiliyyaha, "the time of ignorance."

Dreamy rebuke

Jerome (ca. 342 - 420) was a master of classical learning—his age's best Latin writer, some have said. His passion for scholarship took him to the empire's intellectual centers, where he devoured the works of the pagan thinkers. Though it troubled him, he preferred the cultured style of Cicero and other rhetoricians to the plain, sometimes clumsy style of the Bible. But in Antioch, he had a feverish dream in which Christ scourged him and accused him, "You are a Ciceronian, and not a Christian." Jerome vowed not to study pagan books again, though whether he kept the vow is unclear. He did spend the years 374-377 fasting and studying in the desert east of Antioch.

Eight for the ages

In 1295 Pope Boniface VIII named the first four Latin Doctors of the Church (that is, its formative thinkers): Ambrose (Pastoral Doctor), Jerome (Doctor of Biblical Science), Augustine (Doctor of Grace), and Gregory the Great (Doctor of Hymnology). In 1568 Pius V named four Doctors of the Church in the East, rounding out the Eight Ecumenical Doctors of the Roman Catholic Church: Basil the Great (Doctor of Monasticism), Gregory Nazianzen (Doctor of Theologies), John Chrysostom (Doctor of Preachers), and Athanasius (Doctor of Orthodoxy).

‘Jesus Is Inescapable’: ‘Bible 101’ Authors On Why Scripture Is Here To Stay

The Bible may be the best-selling book of all time, but it’s certainly not the easiest to understand.

As a collection of 66 books, written by dozens of authors in at least two distinct languages, God’s Word is a complicated text, to say the least—and one that can be used for almost any purpose. It has been bastardized to enforce chattel slavery, held aloft as a political photo prop, and even commodified as a product for “patriots.” But two Christian scholars hope their new book will remind both the faithful and irreligious of the Bible’s purpose and how it should not be used.

Dr. Edward D. Gravely, a Southern Baptist elder and one of the coauthors of Bible 101, specializes in Koine Greek and the New Testament. Gravely is a professor in Christian studies at Charleston Southern University along with coauthor Dr. Peter Link, who teaches biblical Hebrew and the Old Testament there.

Their new book, Bible 101: From Genesis and Psalms to the Gospels and Revelation, Your Guide to the Old and New Testaments, joins an arena of handbooks and study guides claiming to break the Bible down into layman’s terms for easier engagement. Contrary to what one might expect for such a feat, Bible 101 is not a whopper of a text. Like other books in the “Adams 101” subject-specific series (a Simon & Schuster imprint), Bible 101 is only 288 pages and smaller than an iPad mini.

Reporter Nicola A. Menzie spoke with Link and Gravely about their guiding principles in getting down to the key components of Scripture, their thoughts about taking the Bible out of context for various causes, and more. The transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

A lot of books out there claim to make the Bible easier to understand. What makes Bible 101 different from, or even complementary to, these other books?

Link: I think the starting point is simply that in Bible 101, we not only take you to all of the Bible and provide not only organization to what you’re doing, but we really do, I think, a good job of getting to the heart of the matter. And really kind of drawing your attention to this is what the text is interested in; this is what the Book as a whole is interested in. So it’s not a commentary. You’re not going to be caught [up] in millions of questions. But it is directly describing, ’Here’s the heartbeat, the main thrust of the text. And it gets to it, I think, rather efficiently.

Gravely: I agree. Honestly, when the project was first pitched to me, I would have described the level of succinctness of this book as shocking. You know, it’s “Here’s 24 chapters; each chapter needs to be about 1,000 words. Do the New Testament. Go.” … So those are the moments where you think, Okay, I’ve got a lot of very important decisions to make about what to put on this page. I think—this is gonna sound weird as an academic—the book is better for being shorter, because the editors were very rigid about their format. … So we would constantly say, “Okay, you’re over the word count. What are you going to cut?” I actually think that made the project much better.

Link: We felt challenged to not only speak to people who already knew what we knew—academics—but also to speak beyond just people who are already in our theological tribe. So if we could figure out how to communicate what the Bible says the way the Bible says it and only focus on those things that are most essential, then different groups could interact with the Scriptures. … There’s no doubt when you read the book [that] it is a thoroughly evangelical Christian perspective; it’s a conservative perspective. … We were proud about that. But we also want to be able to speak to those who don’t start at those same points or don’t even know that those differences exist.

In your book, you talk about how the New Testament authors and Jesus himself believed the Tanakh, or Old Testament, to be God’s Word. Why is that important?

Link: We want to take the Bible on its own terms. And the Bible itself takes the Bible pretty seriously. One of the things I’ve always said is that the writers of the Bible are also its greatest readers. So when you sit down and you read how a prophet is understanding the Torah, that’s not just a random fact; that’s not just a random idea. The Bible itself depends upon that, right? So all we’re saying is, if you take what the authors really care about, as you can see by what they’ve written, then here’s what they put front and center. That’s what we tried to do—make that front and center. We also don’t want to be dishonest and deny the fact that we’re doing this as evangelical conservative Christian scholars. We are that. But we’re also challenging ourselves to say, “Is the language we’re using … understandable to other people?” I sure hope so. That’s kind of been the goal.

Gravely: We have a wide variety of students here at Charleston Southern University. My approach in beginning a New Testament survey class is to always sort of try to help them understand that lots of people who don’t share our views, they still do gravitate to the Bible and to the New Testament. …

Image: Edits by CT / Photo by Rhett Marley

Dr. Edward D. Gravely

I think people have an instinct that we need to know … something about Jesus, and they do a little bit of poking around. If they look at reputable scholars of any stripe, they will very quickly realize that if the New Testament does not tell us about the real Jesus, then nothing does. The New Testament is the only game in town. I know there are critical scholars who will argue that the New Testament doesn’t say true things about Jesus; that’s not my point.

My point is just simply to point out that if the New Testament doesn’t tell us about Jesus, then we don’t know anything about Jesus. … It’s the only book around that even purports to be written by the people who actually knew Jesus. Scholars take that kind of appellation seriously. … Even if you’re an Orthodox Jew or a Muslim, the world is so Jesus-soaked that knowing that has got to be important.

As experts in your fields and leaders in your church, you must get all kinds of questions and comments about the Bible. What are some common misconceptions about the Bible that irritate you?

Link: I think because people don’t actually spend as much time reading the Bible, particularly in large chunks as they should, they start off and come to certain concepts rather quickly, such as the Old Testament is a book about a God of wrath and the New Testament is a book about a God of love. Well, you might want to read the Old Testament a little bit more closely. Because you’re going to see that the very ideas the New Testament uses about a God of love are directly coming from what Moses and the prophets said. So, … that I’ve got two different books that have no correlation—I think that’s where most people start off [with] the Bible. That’s the standard language they have.

There are popular Bible apps where people get their daily verse, and while it may not exactly be proof-texting, it still lacks the full context. What are your thoughts on that?

Link: Short statements may get concepts right and may, for a moment, capture a glimpse of something. But if it doesn’t draw you into wrestling with the larger text itself, then there’s something missing and lacking in that. That’s really our goal. Can we encourage people—whether it’s through Bible 101, through our teaching, or through our work at the church—to draw in closer to the Bible? That’s what strengthens anyone’s life: to recognize that this Book really does address the most basic needs about what it means to be human. …

If we can persuade people just to get into the Word, read biblical books on a whole-book level, and really try to ask “What does this mean as a whole?” I think that’s when you begin to have great conversations across multiple traditions and multiple perspectives. The goal is not necessarily to come to the same conclusion but to grow deeper into the biblical world itself. That’s one of my great hopes about not just Bible 101 but pretty much everything that I try to do.

There are dozens of versions of the Bible based on different translation choices, as well as study Bibles tailored to men, women, military members, etc. There are also so-called “patriot Bibles,” which include copies of America’s founding documents. What are your thoughts on Bibles like that?

Image: Edits by CT / Photo by Rhett Marley

Dr. Peter Link

Link: The unavoidable reality of the consolidation of the Scriptures is that it has been read for a long time, and it’s read within communities. When you pass on the Bible from one generation to another, you’re always passing on the Bible and your understanding of it. That understanding can be good, but it will always have weak spots to it. This is why returning to the Scriptures is so essential. So I would say to somebody, if they have never had an ability to interact with the Bible before they got such a study Bible, go for it. But the mission is to not confuse the study notes or my lecture notes—or even Bible 101—with the Bible itself. Commentary on the Bible is not the Bible. Commentary is necessary. If you encounter the Bible and don’t want to talk about what it says, you probably haven’t encountered the Bible. …

The [patriot] Bible you referenced—I’ve actually seen it. I would argue that it probably confuses people who want to kind of conflate what I would call manmade documents [with] a divinely inspired document, which is the Scriptures. That being said, pastorally, I’m not going to come to somebody and say, “You’ve got to put that thing down.” I’m gonna say, “Well, let’s talk about what this means.” When you do it up close, when you actually do life together reading the Bible, you can make those kinds of moments real and the application real. You can actually help people focus on the biblical text in a way that I think is more organic and coherent and useful.

While not everyone believes the Bible to be divinely inspired, it remains a powerful symbol even in secular society. Why do you think that is?

Link: In the conversation that we’ve had in the West, the Bible has been the central conversation partner… and other things have come with it. But it’s really the Bible’s ability to penetrate through cultures and conversations and generations that I think is why it’s still going to be used, no matter who’s in charge, in what[ever] situation you’re in. Once a society encounters the Scriptures, it will leave an indelible mark.

Gravely: Jesus is inescapable. I think people have a well-earned sense that I need to know something about Jesus. And if I need to know something about Jesus, the Bible is where I go. There’s nowhere else to go. I think that’s even if their search for Jesus is not authentic, … not faith-based. If it’s just curious or it could be political, it could be a power move. Regardless of the motive, the Bible is where you go, and I think that’s why the Bible is ever-present and certainly not going anywhere anytime soon.

Nicola A. Menzie is a religion reporter who has written for Religion News Service, CBS News, Vibe.Com, and other publications. She is also managing editor at faithfullymagazine.Com.

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From Hebrew Bible To Christian Bible: Jews, Christians And The Word Of God

In his teaching, Jesus often quoted the Jewish Scriptures; after his death, his followers turned to them for clues to the meaning of his life and message. Biblical scholar Mark Hamilton discusses the history of these ancient texts and their significance for early Christians and their Jewish contemporaries.

Mark Hamilton is currently writing a PhD dissertation at Harvard University called 'The Body Royal: Kingship and Masculinity in Ancient Israel.' His article "The Past as Destiny" will appear in the October issue of the Harvard Theological Review

The Origins of the Hebrew Bible and Its Components

The sacred books that make up the anthology modern scholars call the Hebrew Bible - and Christians call the Old Testament - developed over roughly a millennium; the oldest texts appear to come from the eleventh or tenth centuries BCE. War songs such as Exodus 15 and Judges 5 are very archaic Hebrew and celebrate Israelite victories from the time preceding the Israelite monarchy under David and Solomon. However, most of the other biblical texts are somewhat later. And they are edited works, collections of various sources intricately and artistically woven together.

The five books of Pentateuch (Genesis-Deuteronomy), for example, traditionally are ascribed to Moses. But by the eighteenth century, many European scholars noticed problems with that assumption. Not only does Deuteronomy end with an account of Moses' death (a tough assignment for any writer to describe his or her own demise), but the entire Pentateuch shows anomalies of style that are hard to explain if only one author is involved.

By the nineteenth century, most scholars agreed that the Pentateuch consisted of four sources woven together. This notion of four sources came to be known as the Documentary Hypothesis, and, in various forms, it has been the prevailing theory for the past two hundred years. Israel thus created four independent strains of literature about its own origins, all drawing on oral tradition in varying degrees, and each developed over time. They were combined together to form our Pentateuch sometime in the sixth century BCE.

By this time, many of the other biblical books were coming together. Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings form what scholars call a "Deuteronomistic History" (because the work's theology is heavily influenced by Deuteronomy), a history of the Israelite states over a five-hundred-year period. This work contains much of historical value, but it also operates on the basis of a historical and theological theory: i.E., that God has given Israel its land, that Israel periodically sins, suffers punishment, repents, and then is rescued from foreign invasion. This cycle of sin and redemption shapes the work's way of writing history and gives it a powerful religious dimension, so that even when the sources behind the biblical books are "secular" accounts in which God is far in the background, the theology of the overall work places history in the service of theology. The last edition of the Deuteronomistic History, the one in our Bible, comes from the sixth century BCE, the time of the Babylonian Exile. In this context, it offers an explanation for Israel's poor condition and implicitly a reason to hope for the future.

Another section of the Hebrew Bible consists of the prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the twelve "minor," i.E., brief, prophets). Here again, it's important to understand how these developed. In the book of Isaiah, from which Jesus quotes, the original Isaiah of Jerusalem lived in the eighth century BCE in Jerusalem, and much of Isa 6-10 clearly reflects the political and social events of his time. Another part of the book, however, comes from a prophet who lived two hundred years later: Isaiah 40-55, famous in the New Testament (early Christians thought the suffering servant of Isaiah 53 was Jesus) and prominent in Handel's Messiah, speaks of the Persian king Cyrus the Great (d. 530 BCE), and so the text must come from that time. Other parts of the book of Isaiah are even later, and the entire book was carefully edited together, perhaps by the fifth or fourth century BCE. The extraordinary poetry of the book offers the reader hope in a God who controls historical events and seeks to return his people Israel to their own land.

In addition to the prophets, the Hebrew Bible contains what Jews often call the "Writings," or the Hagiographa, hymns and philosophical discourses, love poems and charming tales. These include Psalms, Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes (or Qoheleth), Song of Songs, Esther, Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Chronicles. These books were the last completed and the last to be received as Scripture, although parts of them may be very ancient indeed. The books of Psalms, for instance, contains many hymns from Israelite temple worship from the monarchic period, i.E., before the Babylonian Exile in the sixth century BCE; songs such as Psalm 29 may be borrowed from the Canaanites, while Psalm 104 closely resembles Egyptian hymns. In its current form, the 150 psalms fall into five "books," modeled on the five books of the Pentateuch.

Proverbs also has many old parts, including one apparently translated from the second-millennium BCE Egyptian text the "Instructions of Amenemope" (Proverbs 22). The remaining books in this part of the Bible are somewhat later: the latest is probably Daniel, which comes from the mid-second century.

From Many Books to the One Book

How did these various pieces come to be regarded as Scripture by Jewish and, later, Christian communities? There were no committees that sat down to decree what was or was not a holy book. To some degree, the process of Scripture-making, or canonization as it is often called (from the Greek word kanon, a "measuring rod"), involved a process, no longer completely understood, by which the Jewish community decided which works reflected most clearly its vision of God. The antiquity, real or imagined, of many of the books was clearly a factor, and this is why Psalms was eventually attributed to David, and Proverbs, Song of Songs, and Ecclesiastes (along with, by some people, Wisdom of Solomon in the Apocrypha) to Solomon. However, mere age was not enough. There had to be some way in which the Jewish community could identify its own religious experiences in the sacred books.

This occurred, at least in part, through an elaborate process of biblical interpretation. Simply reading a text involves interpretation. Interpretative choices are made even in picking up today's newspaper; one must know the literary conventions that distinguish a news report, for example, from an op-ed piece. The challenge becomes much more intense when one reads highly artistic texts from a different time and place, such as the Bible.

The earliest examples of interpretation we have appear in the Bible itself. Zechariah reinterprets Ezekiel, Jeremiah often refers to Hosea and Micah, and Chronicles substantially rewrites Kings. These reinterpretations are in themselves evidence that the older books were already becoming authoritative, canonical, even as the younger ones were still being written.

But some of the oldest extensive reinterpretations of our Bible come from the third or second centuries BCE. For example, the book of Jubilees is a rewriting of Genesis, now arranged in 50-year periods ending in a year of jubilee, or a time for forgiveness of debts. A related work is the Genesis Apocryphon, also a rewriting of Genesis. Ezekiel the Tragedian wrote a play in Greek based on the life of Moses. And the Essenes, the sect that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls, composed commentaries (peshers) on various biblical books: fragments of those on Habakkuk, Hosea, and Psalms survive. From the first century BCE or so, come additional psalms attributed to David and the Letter of Aristeas (about the miraculous translating of the Bible into Greek), among others. And during the life of Jesus himself, Philo of Alexandria wrote extensive allegorical commentaries on the Pentateuch, all with a view toward making the Bible respectable to philosophers influenced by Plato.

Despite their great variety of outlook and interests, all of these works shared certain common views. They all believed the author of the Bible was God, that it was therefore a perfect book, that it had strong moral agendas and that it was abidingly relevant. Interpretation had to show how it was relevant to changing situations. They also thought the Bible to be cryptic, a puzzle requiring piecing together. The mental gymnastics required to make the old texts ever new is one of the great contributions of this era to the history of Judaism and Christianity, and therefore Western civilization itself.

An example of interpretation: Genesis 11

Genesis 11 is the story of how humans soon after the Flood built a city centered around a tower "with its top in the heavens." The purpose of the Tower of Babel was to allow its builders to "make a name" for themselves. God, in a pique of anger, alters the builders' languages so that they cannot understand each other. In its original form, the story is an explanation of why not everyone speaks Hebrew, as well as a comment on the huge temple-towers (ziggurats) of Mesopotamian cities.

For later interpreters, however, this story cried out for explanation. Why was God afraid of these people? How high was the tower? Who led the construction, and did anyone voice objections? What did the builders expect to do when they reached the heavens? What moral lessons should one learn from the story?

To answer these questions and others, Jubilees 10 says that the builders worked for 43 years (50 years of the Jubilee period minus the mystical number seven) and built a structure one and a half miles high! Their purpose was to enter into heaven itself. Pseudo-Philo's Biblical Antiquities (first century CE) adds a story about Abraham, a model of courage, refusing to cooperate with the builders and so being thrown into a fiery furnace, much like the three young men in Daniel 3. God sends an earthquake to destroy the furnace, and then he changes both the builders' languages and their appearance, so that no one can recognize even his or her own brother. Other traditions think that the builders of the tower were either giants (Pseudo-Eupolemus), or were humans led by the mighty hunter and city-builder Nimrod mentioned in Genesis 10 (Josephus). Each interpreter imaginatively builds on some chance word or phrase in the biblical text to try to answer reasonable questions about it. Meanwhile, the first-century philosopher and biblical interpreter writes an entire book on this chapter, which he interprets as an allegory about human morality: the builders represent greed and venality.

The Book and the Once and Coming Messiah

Like their Jewish predecessors and Jewish contemporaries, early Christians believed that the Hebrew Bible was God's book, and therefore a book that should cast light on current events and moral conundrums. For Christians, of course, the most important issue was the true import of Jesus and the story of his life, death, and resurrection. Since they believed him to be the messiah ("anointed one"), God's savior and the harbinger of a new and perfect age, they sought to find mention of him in the Hebrew Bible itself. This is why so much of the story of Jesus in the gospels quotes the Bible.

This move was not without precedent. The Dead Sea community also believed that the prophets had predicted their movement and their leader, the Teacher of Righteousness, as well as the political events of their time. They go so far as to claim that the prophets did not know what they were saying, but God, the true author of the text, used them to speak of the (to them) distant future.

Christians, however, had a different set of questions than the Dead Sea sect, and so they found different texts to cite. Any texts that refer to a time of a future deliverance, or the coming of a future king, were fair game. So the suffering servant of Isaiah 53 becomes the suffering Jesus of the gospels. And Luke's quotation from Isaiah 61 becomes a reference to Jesus's ministry of healing and reconciliation. Yet in every case, as far as we can tell, the Christian reading comes after the fact. That is, they first believed in Jesus and then tried to find his life in Scripture. They then could shape their telling of stories about his life to fit the scriptures. This process may seem very circular, but given their assumptions -- namely, that Jesus is central to God's plan, that God spoke through prophets who might not understand their own words, and that the Bible was a cryptic puzzle needing solving -- this belief in prophecy and fulfillment is not incomprehensible. So Luke can have Jesus say, "Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your presence!" Jesus saw himself as the deliverer that the prophets had foreseen long before. When his followers drew the same conclusion, they could then retain the ancient Scriptures, transforming them into something new, a Christian Bible.

Bible Etymology

The English word "Bible" is from the Greek phrase ta biblia, "the books," an expression Hellenistic Jews used to describe their sacred books several centuries before the time of Jesus. Christians adopted the phrase "Old Testament" to refer to these sacred books they shared with Jews.

Jews called the same books Miqra, "Scripture," or the Tanakh, an acronym for the three divisions of the Hebrew Bible: Torah ("instructions" or less accurately "the law"), Neviim ("prophets"), and Kethuvim ("writings," including Psalms, Proverbs, and several other books). Modern scholars often use the term "Hebrew Bible" to avoid the confessional terms Old Testament and Tanakh.

As for the New Testament, its current twenty-seven book form derives from the fourth century CE, even though the constituent parts come from the first century. Christians did not agree on the exact extent of the New Testament for several centuries.

For Further Reading

Brueggemann, Walter. Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997).

Charlesworth, James H., ed. The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. (2 vols.; Garden City: Doubleday, 1985).

Kugel, James. The Bible as It Was. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).

Idem. In Potiphar's House: The Interpretive Life of Biblical Texts. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).

Leiman, Sid. The Canonization of Hebrew Scripture. (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1976).

Levenson, Jon. Sinai and Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible. (San Francisco: HarperSan Francisco, 1985).

Noth, Martin. A History of Pentateuchal Traditions. (1948; trans. By Bernhard Anderson; Atlanta: Scholars, 1981).

Vermes, Geza, ed. The Dead Sea Scrolls in English. (3d ed.; New York: Penguin, 1987).

The First Bible Teachers: Did You Know?