The Bible

Before we begin to study the material in the Bible, it is important to come to some understanding of what the Bible is. We call it a book, but we also call the sections in it books. In fact, the word Bible comes from a root meaning library. The Bible is a library of books. It includes law, history, poetry, song (although we have lost the music), wise sayings, fantastic revelation, and even fiction. Most people will believe that Jesus did not know the Good Samaritan or the prodigal son and that he made up the parables to make a point. People seem to have a harder time believing that anyone else could do so.

The Bible was not dictated as the Quran (Koran) or provided on golden plates as the Book of Mormon. The Bible is a collection of writings inspired by God, but written by humans. It was also compiled by inspired humans and has been translated by inspired humans. Many of the parts of the Hebrew Testament were passed down by word of mouth for centuries before being written down. Even after being written down, they were transcribed many times. Note that the oldest copies of the Hebrew Testament that we have are the Dead Sea scrolls which were hidden about the time of Jesus. That is more than a thousand years after some of it was first written down. The oldest copies of the New Testament are from several hundred years after the time of Christ and His disciples.

Have you ever searched for just the right word to express something? I am doing that frequently as I write this. It is hard enough to make your own thoughts understood by others. Now suppose you are reading something that someone else wrote and are asked to "put it in your own words." Will it really be the same? It will at best be what you understood, which may not be what the author intended. Add to that the problem if the text you are reading is in a foreign language. Translation from one language to another cannot be word for word since words in one language do not match up exactly with words in another. In Greek, there are several words that translate to the English "love." We use love to refer to several kinds of affection in addition to a physical act! When you translate, you translate to what you think that the author meant. Add further the complexity, if the original language has no punctuation, no spaces between words, and not even vowels. Many of you have seen the example of "GDSNWHR." Assuming it is English and adding back the vowels and spaces, is it "God is now here?" or "God is no where?" or something completely different? ("God's new hour?") The Hebrew Testament was written in ancient Hebrew. The books of the Apocrypha and the New Testament were written in Greek. A little better, but most of the problems of translation remain.

When you translate, you often lose much of the beauty of the poetry. You lose the fact that some of the Psalms are acrostics. (Each stanza starts with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet.) You lose puns. Unless you have a study Bible, you might not know that Jonah translates as "Foolish." You wouldn't know that Jesus is Aramaic for Joshua. That Adam translates to "man" and is a play on the word for dirt. "Adam was created from dirt." But if you have no punctuation, no articles, and no capitalization, how would you know that the original author did not mean "Man(kind) was created from dirt." Or "A particular man was created from dirt." We will look at this question and some of the implications of it in a few weeks when we begin in Genesis.

Another complication: Once a text becomes part of the canon, officially a part of the Bible, it should not be changed. Before that it may be changed. (There was no copyright or even a thought to citing or being true to the original two thousand and more years ago.) The Torah or first five books of the Hebrew Testament appears to have become official about the time of the Babylonian exile. The rest of the Hebrew Testament was made official about a hundred years after Christ.  The New Testament was made official about three hundred of years after Christ.

Let us be a little more specific, hopefully not too much so. Before the Babylonian exile, there were clearly writings that had weight. During the time of Jeremiah, a document was found during a remodeling of the temple that caused the king to tear his clothes because the document (probably a part of Deuteronomy) indicated that they were not following God's rules as they should. During the Babylonian exile, without the crutch of the temple, the priests became less important and the Rabbi or teacher and the Shul became important. It was at this time that the books of the Torah were probably compiled and became official. The rest of the Hebrew Testament was also either compiled or written about this time. For much of the material there were multiple versions. Rather than deciding on a single version, the compilers of our Bible often chose to keep multiple versions. Not just two versions of a story like the creation, but whole books that give a different slant on the same period of time like Chronicles and Kings. This seems to be God's inspiration, because most folks would decide which is "right" and throw the alternative away. Often, especially in the early stories in Genesis, there is a lay version and a priestly version. For example in Noah, the lay version has him bringing two of everything on board. In the priestly version, Noah has to include sufficient of certain animals that he could make the required sacrifices. (Even though the rules for sacrifice were not given until the days of Moses.) Psalms appears to be the compilation of three to five separate song books with considerable overlap. Note that even the heroes of the Bible have serious flaws. That is not the way people usually portray heroes. If you were going to accept a book about a great hero of your faith, would you include information that he was an adulterer and murderer? I think it takes inspiration and faith to do that.

Between the time of the exile and the time of Jesus, it is said that seventy priests in Alexandria, Egypt made independent translations of the Torah into Greek and they were all identical! (Note that at the time of Christ, there were probably more Jews in Alexandria than there were in Jerusalem.) This Torah was put together with the other books that we know as the Hebrew Testament and the books of the Apocrypha to make the Septuagint (sept for the seventy). This is the Bible as Jesus and his disciples probably knew it. Of course, it was not a book as we have. (The book was invented about the time of Christ!) It was a set of scrolls. The reason you have First and Second Chronicles and First and Second Kings is because they were too long to fit on a single scroll. However, all the "minor" prophets fit on a single scroll.

About a hundred years after Christ (possibly sparked by the rise in Christianity), the Jewish leaders got together and decided that the "Age of Prophets" ended four hundred years before Christ and the books of the Apocrypha (partly because they were originally written in Greek and not in Hebrew) were not included in their Canon. Does this mean that they threw out the books of the Apocrypha and the many other writings that might have been considered? Not at all! The Jews have massive amounts of writings that they consider exceedingly important, just not part of the basic Bible. Jews certainly celebrate the defeat of the Macedonians by the Maccabees (Macabees? Maccabim?) and the cleansing of the Temple.

About three hundred years after the death of Christ, Christians got together and chose the books of the Septuagint as the Hebrew Testament. They chose writings that seemed to have been written by disciples and others who had first hand knowledge of Jesus and/or his disciples to make up the New Testament.

When Martin Luther was thrown out of the Catholic Church and forced to form his own Church, he noted that the Jews did not include the Apocrypha and so dropped those books from the Hebrew Testament. (He wanted to make some changes in the New Testament also, but it didn't happen.)

The division of the Bible into chapters were added about 1200AD. Division into verses came along in 1551AD.

And that is a thumbnail sketch of how our Protestant Bible came to be.