Giovanni Maria Vian reconstructs the thousand-year history of the Bible, including dispersed codices, historical forgeries and extraordinary journeys
The book about the Book (the one par excellence) is a very interesting work, and we would like to point it out to you because it is seriously worth it. Let’s talk about «The ways of the Bibles» (Il Mulino, pp. 240, Euro 16) by the historian and journalist Giovanni Maria Vian.
The theme therefore is the Bible, we have revealed it to you. But it is worth making some clarifications. Yes, to simplify things we called it “Book”. But the truth is that the Bible is not a book, but rather a collection of many volumes, in different formats and materials that are at least as old-fashioned as the attics of our grandparents’ country houses. Yet, the Book continues to fascinate, continues to be the subject of study. Wait a minute, another clarification needs to be made. It is a profoundly Western work, but it does not come from the West and it does not come from Europe (or at least, not only). First of all, this is demonstrated by the languages in which it is written. Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic: here we can hypothesize the origin of the sacred text between ancient Babylon and Rome.
And the heterogeneity of the topics covered is also fascinating. They range from jurisprudence to prayer, from wisdom texts to letters addressed to communities of the faithful, up to revelations on the end of the world.
The Bible and the St. Petersburg Codex
Among the most intriguing curiosities that emerged from Vian’s book, those relating to Crown of Aleppo et al Codex of St. Petersburg. Modern critical editions are based precisely on the latter. A manuscript that comes from Galilee, more precisely from the tradition of the Ben Asher, a dynasty of Masorete Jewish scribes from the 10th century in Tiberias, a historic Israeli city located on the western shore of the lake of the same name. What happened in the following centuries is very mysterious. It is known, for example, that in the 14th century the manuscript was located in Damascus, the current capital of Syria. Until, it is assumed between 1863 and 1865, it was purchased by a Karaite (i.e. a follower of the Jewish movement of Karaism) coming from Crimea.
In his decades of travels in the East, Firkovič accumulated thousands of manuscripts, later sold for a huge sum to the imperial library in St. Petersburg. Via Odessa, in 1876, the code enters the capital of the tsars. The exact place of its purchase remains unknown: perhaps Aleppo, perhaps Jerusalem.
The millennial texts of the Bible
The originals of the Bible are lost. This applies to almost all ancient literature. But some thousand-year-old copies have been saved, and their story is the one that Vian reconstructs with precision and with a prose that keeps the reader glued to the page. Twenty-three centuries of Bibles, traveled along often unknown routes, entrusted to men and sometimes to cultured and determined women who sought them, found them, transported them.
For over a millennium, until the mid-nineteenth century, medieval Hebrew biblical manuscripts move between Syria and Egyptnot far from the places where they were written, in particular in Tiberias, in Galilee. Then wars, dispersions and trade take them elsewhere. THEThe Aleppo Codex, a century older than that of St. Petersburg but incomplete, is today in Israel, where it was dismembered after 1958 for profit motives, in still unclear circumstances.
The story of the Dead Sea Scrolls is more complexdiscovered starting in 1947 and acquired by Israel in the first years after the proclamation of the State. The Greek biblical manuscripts, spread over a much larger area, are numerically superior to the Hebrew ones. Some New Testament papyri are only a few decades removed from the original texts.
Because the book is truly worth it
Vian is explicit: there are not all ways. The sacred Scriptures of Jews and Christians have reached everywhere, already in ancient times, translated and transcribed as far away as Ethiopia and the heart of Central Asia. It is impossible to trace a complete route. However, some main guidelines can be recognised, and following them means understanding something essential not only about the Bible, but about the civilization that produced and handed it down.
«The Ways of the Bibles» is a book that knows how to be cultured without being academic, precise without being dry. A work that could only have been written by someone who knows the subject in depth and knows how to tell it at the same time. The history of these texts is also the history of the humanity that has preserved themsought and, sometimes, found. That’s why it’s really worth a look.
