Origin of the Bible

On Sunday Nov 1, 2009 I taught a new Sunday School topic. I've been doing the Case for Christ for so long that I thought I would never get finished with it on my blog. My new topic is a little bit of a follow up to the Case for Christ. One of my favorite parts of the book was talking about the Biblical manuscript evidence. I thought I would do a lesson on the Origin of the Bible to show how we got from the manuscripts that were penned by men such as Moses, Isaiah and Paul to the one volume leather bound book you buy at the bookstore today. There will be a second part to this lesson in a few weeks. I am now on a teaching rotation.




Picture 1: Cave paintings discovered in France.


What do you think is the first thing man wrote on? Most Western Civilization text books will start with cave paintings. We also see ancient inscriptions on canyon walls and on the walls of buildings such as those in Egypt. One of the first breakthroughs in writing technology was the invention of the clay tablet. Clay tablets were portable and better for conveying information. Small clay tablets about the size of the palm of your hand would be molded and then a wedge shaped stick was used to press in symbols and then the tablet was baked to make it permanent. We have discovered tens of thousands of tablets in Mesopotamia and Egypt. This form of writing is called "cuneiform" from the wedge shaped stick used. Sumerian and Akkadian are two famous cuneiform languages. They are not alphabetic though and you have to memorize thousands of symbols to translate the language.




Picture 2: Inscriptions on canyon walls.


















Picture 3: Egyptian hieroglyphics inscribed on buildings.























Picture 4: Cuneiform tablet.


















Picture 5: Papyrus scroll of the book of Isaiah discovered at Qumran on the coast of the Dead Sea.


An aquatic plant called "papyrus" grew in Egypt. They discovered that the reeds of this plant could be pressed into a paper that could then be rolled into a scroll. Papyrus became the dominant medium for writing for about 3000 years up to the second century AD. Most of the Old Testament and the oldest New Testament manuscripts were written on papyrus scrolls. The Old Testament was written in Hebrew and some Aramaic. The Aramaic is because the Jews were held in captivity by the Assyrians, Babylonians and Persians. Approximately 250 BC the Old Testament was translated into Greek because of the dominant influence of the Greek language after Alexander the Great conquerred most of the known world. This Greek translation is called the "Septuagint". The New Testament was also written in Greek. About the second century AD people started using animal skins (parchment) to write on. Also, they started making the pages into leaves that were bound on one side forming a primitive book called a codex. Three of the most famous Biblical manuscripts are parchment codices called the Codex Siniaticus, Codex Alexandrinus and Codex Vaticanus. They are named after where they were found, Mt. Sinai, Alexandria, Egypt and the Vatican respectively. All of these contain the Septuagint (Greek Old Testament) version of the Bible. These manuscripts are considered work horses of Biblical translation because they are complete copies and have been around for a long time. Older manuscripts consisting of papyrus scrolls were discovered in the late 1800s and early 1900s. These are known as the Chester Beaty, John Rylands and Dead Sea Scrolls. The Dead Sea Scrolls gave us a copy of Isaiah 1000 years older than what we previously had and the oldest New Testament manuscript called p52 or the John Rylands papyrus is dated at 117-125 AD and contains a portion of the Gospel of John.


Picture 6: Codex Siniaticus. An example of a parchment codex. Also, the text itself is the Septuagint version of the Old Testament.


In the fourth century the Roman Catholic church was rising to dominance and Latin was the language of the west. The Pope commissioned Jerome to translate the Bible into what is called the Latin Vulgate. This became the dominant version for over 1000 years up through the middle ages. During the protestant reformation the reformers began translating the Bible into the common languages of the people. Martin Luther produced a German translation and John Wycliffe produced the first English translation. The invention of the printing press approximately 1450 AD allowed us to begin producing the Bible in more modern book form. The Gutenberg Bible was the first entire book published on a printing press.

Picture 7: Gutenberg Bible.


Next time I want to discuss the various versions or translations you see today. Do you recognized these acronyms? KJV, NKJV, NIV, NASB, ESV, LB, NLT and the Message