by Rev. Canon Don Beatty                                     next session (2) -->

Session 1
THE BIBLE, WHERE IT CAME FROM AND HOW WE USE IT

The Bible is not one book, but a whole library of books, written by many authors over several centuries. It contains some 66 books.

The common thread throughout the sixty-six books is to record humankind's search for God and of God leading his people.

The earliest writings were the psalms, some written about 1000 BC. Most of the Old Testament was written or compiled between the fourth and eighth century B.C.

The people had a highly-developed oral tradition, with good memories. They passed on the folk stories from generation to generation, by story tellers.

Genesis chapters 1-11 is prehistory. For the Jewish people, Abraham(approximately 2100 B.C.) (Gen. 12) is the founder of their race and the beginning of history.

Some historical dates for information:
Moses 1500 B.C.
David 1000 B.C.
First Temple period Solomon 950 B.C.
The Northern Kingdom was destroyed and 10 tribes disappear from history 722 B.C.
The Southern Kingdom taken into exile in Babylon 586 B.C.
First Temple destroyed 586 B.C.
First group returns to Jerusalem 538 B.C.
Second group under Ezra returns and rebuilds the temple and walls of Jerusalem.
Second Temple period. 458 B.C.
Destruction of Second Temple by Rome 70 A.D.

Today, the wailing, or western wall is the only part of the second temple still in existence. Temple Mount is also the site of two Moslem mosques including the Dome on the Rock. This is the most holy site for Jews and the second most for Moslems. Any attempts to rebuild the temple today would lead to a tragic holy war, which would probably destroy the middle east.

The first eleven chapters of Genesis are prehistory. They are mythological stories told to illustrate some profound truth about God's creation. Please note, myth does not mean it is untrue. Myths are stories told to illustrate some profound truths, but are not necessarily true stories. There are two accounts of creation in Genesis 1:1-2:3 and 2:4-25. Read these chapters sometime.

Adam is a generic term meaning mankind. Eve is the Hebrew word for womanhood. Adam (mankind) and Eve (Womanhood) became aware that there was a power greater than themselves and this becomes the story of creation.

What is this story telling us? First and foremost, we see that God created the entire universe and people were meant to live in a special relationship with him. However, God created us with free will. We fell from this grace through our disobedience represented by eating the fruit of good and evil. (It was not necessarily an apple.) Thus, we were cast out of the garden. The Bible records our search to reestablish this special relationship with God, and of God leading his people back to Himself. Jesus becomes the final and ultimate revelation of God, establishing for us a new and final relationship with him.

The Jews were God's chosen people, and their purpose was to prepare the world for the coming of the Messiah. Judaism was and is a messianic religion. When the Messiah did come, most of the Jews missed it. Remember that the early Church was almost exclusively Jewish for the first twenty years. Paul was the great missionary to the Gentiles.

The Old Testament contains three separate collections of writings, called the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings. The Canon closed the Old Testament books in 95 AD at the Jewish council of Jamnia. Canon is from the Greek for measuring stick. It came to mean the standard, the rule, the authority by which something is judged.

The Law, also called the Torah, (meaning law) or the Pentateuch (meaning five) is the first five books of the Old Testament. This is the most important part of scripture for the Hebrew people. They are also referred to as the Books of Moses, but not written by him. Actually, scholars have identified four or more authors who had their hand in compiling these books, and an unknown number of editors and copyists.

The Prophets includes Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the twelve lesser prophets, and Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings.

The Writings includes the great books of poetry, The Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Esther, Song of Solomon, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, and 1 and 2 Chronicles.

The oldest scroll in our possession today comes from the 2nd C. BC. It is most of Isaiah and was found with the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947. This was the greatest archeological discovery for biblical scholars in this past century.

The Old Testament was written mostly in Hebrew, although some was in Aramaic. Hebrew was written without vowel signs and some of our transliterations are rather questionable. (Yahweh, written YHWH in Hebrew, is probably a closer pronunciation of God than is Jehovah!) The Hebrews would never pronounce the name of God, so, they used the vowel pointings for >Adonai' or Lord, when they came to a word for God. This transliterated into Jehovah in English. Yahweh is probably closer to the original Hebrew.

A Greek Old Testament was written in the 3rd C. BC to accommodate the Greek speaking people, which was most of western civilization. After Alexander the Great conquered the civilized world, in the third century, Greek became the language of communication and commerce. The Greek translation of Old Testament scripture was called the Septuagint. It is referred to as the LXX is writing.

The Septuagint eventually included the seven books not included in the Hebrew Old Testament, called the Apocrypha. Thus, these books are not part of the Jewish canon of scripture. They are also called the Deuterocanonical books. They are found in many modern translations and were written mostly in the 2nd and 3rd century B.C. and contain much of the history of that era.

By the New Testament era, Greek continued to be the common language of most people in the Roman Empire. Thus, all the books in the New Testament were written in Greek. The authors of the New Testament were all Jewish except Luke who wrote his Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles.

The earliest writings were some epistles, especially Paul's letters. They date from about 49 AD. to 69 AD. The Epistle to the Galatians is probably the earliest and was written about 49 AD. Also the Epistle of James could have appeared about this time and the Thessalonians very soon thereafter (51-52 AD)

Mark is the oldest, or first, gospel written between 50 and 60 AD. Matthew between 65 and 85 AD. Luke and Acts probably about 70 to 96 AD. Hebrews, not written by Paul, appeared around 65 to 70 AD., Jude 70 AD., John's Gospel between 90 and 100 AD, the Book of Revelation 95 to 105 AD. Pastoral epistles of John between 80 and 100 AD. All dating is approximate and subject to much debate. I tend to accept the earlier dates for most New Testament writings. The epistles of Peter are unknown and could have been written between 60 and 70 AD in Rome. (See Appendix >A')

The Gospels relate the life of Jesus, told in a Jewish style of Biography. They are centered around his passion and death. The Easter story is a kind of epilogue. His two-year ministry was a sort of prologue. The birth stories are probably a later edition. This does not make them untrue!

The synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke follow the same story line. John is quite different. Matthew is the most Jewish with great reliance on the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies. Mark is the shortest and has a kind of rapid fire approach. Luke is the most compassionate, containing some of the best loved parables like >the Prodigal son' and >the Good Samaritan'. There was a common source which Matthew and Luke seemed to have used and not found in Mark. Scholars call this >Q'. It contains several sayings of Jesus. (Note, Burton Mack's, the Lost Gospel, in the Bibliography)

The oldest fragment from the New Testament we possess today would date from the 2nd century AD. containing a few words from the Gospel of John 18:31-33, and verses 37 and 38 on the reverse side.

The Book of Acts is a history of the early church. Chapters 1 - 10 are about Peter and his leadership of the church in and around Jerusalem. Chapters 11 to the end are centered on Paul and look at the missionary Church as the church expanded throughout the Roman Empire.

The Book of Revelation is written in an apocryphal style, and is quite different from the rest of the New Testament. It must be understood in terms of the first century church. It was primarily a >tract for hard times' helping the readers cope with the persecution that they had to endure. It was not meant to be a prophetic book about church history. It is the most quoted and least understood book in the whole of scripture.

There were many other documents in circulation in the early church. We see evidence of the letters of Clement, the gospels of Peter and Thomas, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Didache or the teaching of the twelve and many others.

Gradually, the Church drew the collection of writings together sorting out what testified most surely to Jesus Christ, his life, his influence, and his authority and what was in common usage at the time. The rule of thumb was, the writings must be by those who walked with Jesus, or those who walked with those who walked with Jesus. By the fourth century the church had reached a general agreement and the canon of scripture was closed, including only those books which met these criteria. It is the same bible we have today. The church accepted the Old Testament canon from Judaism which did not include the Apocrypha. Although many Bibles throughout the ages included the Apocrypha as part of the contents. It does not have the same authority as the Old and New Testaments.

The two oldest full manuscripts we possess were written about this time. The Codex Sinaiticus and the Codex Vaticanus. They date from 350 AD and contain most of the Old and New Testaments together with the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas.

We have some twenty manuscripts or parts thereof of the New Testament from the first five centuries.

Near the end of the fourth century the Emperor Theodosius imposed Christianity as the only state religion of the Roman Empire and ordered fifty copies of the Old and New Testament to be copied for the churches in Constantinople. This was the first time we see the Old and New Testament together in one book. It corresponds with our present day Bible.

In 382 AD. Jerome translated the Bible into Latin, called the Vulgate. You can visit his cell when you go to the Holy land! Latin had become the language of the western part of the empire, and the word >vulgate' means in the common tongue of the people. Jerome went to Palestine and studied there for twenty years before he made this translation. He examined all of the manuscripts he could find. The Vulgate Bible became the official Bible of the western church and some early English translations are based on this text. (The Psalms in the BCP are a direct translation from the Vulgate)

Fortunately scriptures were under the protection of the monasteries and survived the middle ages and the destruction of Roman civilization.

The first English Anglo Saxon translations were the work of the Venerable Bede in 735 AD. Unfortunately, none of his manuscripts have survived.

For many years the Church authorities were afraid to allow the common people to have access to the Bible. They might misunderstand and misuse these readings. There were secret copies in circulation but these were very expensive. There was of course, no printing presses at this time, so everything had to be copied by hand.

The first English Bible was written by John Wycliffe late in the fourteenth century. The common people no longer understood Latin. English was a relatively new and developing language. His translation was completed in 1384. This was before the advent of the printing press so everything was copied by hand and was very expensive. The Lollards, the poor preachers went about the countryside reading the Bible to small groups of people, in their own language. This was exciting and thrilling for many people had never had an opportunity to hear the scripture before. Here were the stories of the Bible told in their own tongue. It was also quite illegal. Many Lollards suffered imprisonment or worse for their work!

The authorities tried to suppress this Bible and in 1408, an edict was passed forbidding the English translations. In 1428, Wycliffe's body was dug up and burned as a heretic. He had died in 1385!

By the end of the fifteenth century the printing press had been invented, and this event, as much as anything else led to the popularity of the reform movement. Pamphlets and scriptures could be printed and circulated somewhat widely. The growing middle class was able to read and wanted more say in their affairs.

In 1526 the first truly English translation of the New Testament based on the Greek manuscripts was written by Tyndale. He had to have it printed on the continent and smuggled into England.

Coverdale in 1535 gave us the first complete Bible of both the Old and New Testament in English. In 1538 the King of England ordered every church to have Coverdale's large print Bible. The people gathered in the churches by the hour to listen to the bible being read in their own language. It was like the Lollards of a century earlier, only now it was legal and took place in the parish church.

In 1568 the Bishop's Bible replaced Coverdale's as the authorized version, and in 1611 the King James Version was written and became, after much opposition, the authorized Bible for the Church of England. It held sway for the next three hundred and fifty years.

In 1610 The Rheims-Douai version was completed and became the only authorized version for the English speaking Roman Catholic Church.

There are some 500 different English versions of scripture today. Some more popular ones include: English Revised in 1881; American Standard in 1901; Revised Standard in 1947; New Jerusalem (Roman Catholic) 1966; New English Version 1970; New American Bible (also Roman Catholic) 1970; New International Version, 1978; Contemporary English Version, 1985 and the New Revised Standard Version in 1990.

The NIV was the first major attempt to balance the literal translation of the text with a dynamic style of writing. This was the best edition of scripture until the NRSV appeared in 1990.

TEV (The Good News Bible) is an easy version for young people and uses inclusive language where it is supported by the text.

The NRSV is the common translation now in use in most churches. It too uses inclusive language where the text supports it. It is the most recent and probably the best translation for now. It is the one I would recommend for study purposes. (See the HarperCollins Study Bible) although I would prefer the study notes from the NIV Study Bible.

Although I believe that all scripture in God breathed, or inspired, it is written by human hands, must to be read, studied and understood in terms of the people for whom it was written. Using different translations can help shed light on some text. An understanding of the people for whom it was written is most helpful in seeing the meaning and purpose.

In the Anglican Church we believe scriptures, that is the Old and New Testaments contain all things necessary for our salvation. See articles 6 and 7 BCP. Page 700

We need to interpret and search out the meaning behind the words. We do not check our mind at the door in church! Reason is important in the development of Anglicanism. There are good commentaries and study Bibles available to help us better understand his Holy Word.

God may use scripture to speak to us in a very personal and direct way. This will not be part of the interpretation of the Word, but a personal message for us. (Eg. Isaiah 52:11)