WHOSE BIBLE IS IT? A History of the Scriptures Through the Ages.  By Jaroslav Pelikan.  Viking.  274 pages. $24.95.

The Scriptures, collections of narratives sacred to Judaism, Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, both connect and separate these faith traditions. Though much is shared between them, the Bibles of each are distinct.

What Christianity calls the Old Testament is known within Judaism as the Tanakh: the Torah (Five Books of Moses), the Nevi'im (Prophets) and Kethuvim (Writings). In Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, the deuterocanonical writings commonly known as the Apocrypha appear between the Tanakh, or Old Testament, and the New Testament. Protestant Bibles include the Old and New Testament but not the books of the Apocrypha.

Other books written in the early Christian and Jewish communities were not chosen to be included in the biblical canon: alternate and infancy gospels, poetic writings in the style of Psalms or Proverbs, apocalyptic literature and histories. Some of these were discovered circa 1946-47, sealed away in caves in the Qumran region of the Judean desert.

Other books and authors we know only through references to them in the writings of the early church fathers. The process by which certain texts were selected as canonical sparked a heated debate not settled until late in the fourth century A.D., only to be reawakened in the years of the Reformation.

Tradition has it that in the third century B.C., King Ptolemy Philadelphus of Egypt directed 72 scholars, six from each of the 12 tribes of Israel, to translate the Jewish scriptures into Greek. Each scholar, working independently of the others, miraculously produced identical results. The resultant Greek translation, called the Septuagint, was considered divinely inspired.

The story of the Septuagint introduces the problematic nature of translation of Scriptures from one language into another, one that continues today.

This became crucial in the formative years of Christianity, following Paul's famous mission to the Gentiles. By the third century, few Christian leaders were proficient in Hebrew, precluding referral back to the original text of the Tanakh.

The languages into which Bibles of the times were translated followed the changes in world civilizations through history. Jerome, at the cusp of the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., produced the Latin translation known as the Vulgate. The Vulgate, source of the Latin Mass practiced by the Roman Catholic Church until the Second Vatican Council in our own times, stood for 1,000 years as the definitive Bible of Europe.

In the time of the Renaissance and Reformation, Jerome's Vulgate received its most critical challenges. For Luther and Calvin, the church had accumulated far too much non-biblical tradition and interpretation through liturgical use and exegesis. The Reformation was, in many ways, a call to return to "the Bible only." With the advent of the printing press, translations into German and English by men such as Luther and Tyndale were distributed among the people and read in their own language. This led the way to, arguably, the most influential translation of all: the Authorized Version of 1611, commonly known as the King James Version.

Today, vast arrays of contemporary translations of the Bible are available in nearly every language known. A renewed interest in the ancient world of early Christianity and Judaism also has made available new translations of alternative scriptures, midrash and Apocrypha.

With "Whose Bible Is It?", Jaroslav Pelikan presents a scholarly yet conversational tour of the labyrinthine history of the most labored-over and influential text in Western Civilization. Brief forays into the use of Scripture in music, in particular massively popular perennial performances such as Handel's "Messiah," as well as the influences of various Scriptures on art and literature give the book a well-rounded flavor.

Pelikan ultimately demonstrates that no simple answer exists for the question of "Whose Bible Is It?"