There are some important basic terms that we need to understand:
Autograph - the original texts were written either by the author's own hand or by a scribe under their personal supervision.
Manuscripts - until Gutenberg first printed the Latin bible in 1465, all Bibles were hand copied on to papyrus, parchment and paper.
Translation - usually translated from the original Greek and Hebrew/Aramaic.
The earliest collection of written words of God was the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments thus form the beginning of the biblical canon - Exodus 31.18. We read in Deuteronomy 31.24-26 that Moses wrote additional words that were also to be stored in the Ark of the Covenant - these being the first five books of the Bible. The content of the OT canon continued to grow until the end of the writing process with Malachi around 435BC. After the date of the reign of Artaxerxes there is no further additions to the OT canon.
We have in this intervening period until the emergence of the NT books the books called the Apocrypha which are not accepted as being canonical. The NT canon began with the writing of the apostles - to be an Apostle you had to have me the risen Christ, hence Paul's Damascus road encounter - not just for his conversion but also so that his writings would be canonical. By AD397 the Church in the East and West had agreed on the canon of Scripture.
Old Testament: written in Hebrew and Aramaic, but there are no known autographs of any OT books. The Dead Sea Scrolls date from 200BC-70AD and contain the entire book of Isaiah and portions of every other OT book but Esther.
Geniza Fragments - portions of the OT in Hebrew and Aramaic discovered in 1947 in an old synagogue in Cairo, Egypt, which date from 400AD.
Ben Asher Manuscript - five or six generations of this family made copies of the OT using the Masoretic Hebrew text, from 700-950AD. Two examples of the Masoretic text-type:
Aleppo Codex - contains the complete OT and is dated around 950AD. What is unfortunate is that in 1947 a quarter of this text was destroyed in anti-Jewish riots.
Codex Leningradensis - the complete OT in Hebrew copied by the last member of the Ben Asher family in AD1008.
400BC - the OT began to be translated into Aramaic. This is called the Aramaic Targums - it helped the Jewish people, who began to speak Aramaic from the time of their Babylonian captivity, to read the OT in their own language.
250BC - the OT was translated into Greek - Septuagint or you sometimes see it written as LXX (Roman numeral for 70) because it is believed that 70 to 72 translators worked on the translation. This was the translation used by the early church and copies of it exist from 100AD.
As you know our Bible is made up of 66 books, 39 in the OT and 27 in the NT. These 66 books were written over a 1500 year period by more than 40 authors. They are arranged in broad groups:
Legal - Genesis through Deuteronomy, generally accepted to have been authored by Moses. These are called the Torah or the Pentateuch.
Historical - Joshua through Esther - these 12 books trace the historical development, the disobedience, the downfall and the deliverance of the people of God, the nation of Israel.
Poetical Books - Job through Song of Songs (Solomon). Job is a book of poetic laments mainly concerned with suffering and then we have the book of Psalms full of praise, pleas etc and finally the words of Wisdom of Solomon.
Prophetic Books - we call some of the major and the minor prophets - which has to do with the length of the book and not the importance of the author or its content. This takes us from Isaiah through to Malachi. These books address the people of God after the kingdom of Israel has been divided into a northern and southern kingdoms. These books contain God's call, through the prophets, to His people to repent of their sin and to return to Him.
New Testament - written in common Greek. There are over 5,600 early Greek Manuscripts of the NT still in existence today, written on papyrus (earliest) and parchment (later copies). The earliest manuscript which dates most closely to the original autograph is dated 125AD, within 35 years of the original - it is designated p.52 and contains a portion of John 18. The 'p' stands for papyrus.
By AD 200 we have extant copies of the Pauline Epistles and Hebrews, along with a large part of John's gospel. By 225AD we have copies of Luke and John in papyrus and 25 years later we have the four gospels and Acts in a complete papyrus - p45 Chester Beatty biblical papyrus. 350 AD Codex Sinaiticus we have the complete NT as we know it today and it also contains almost all of the OT in Greek - discovered in a monastery at Mt. Sinai. The NT is made up of the following types of books:
Biographical Books - the four gospels. Each gospel was written to a different audience and emphasise different aspects of Jesus' life, ministry, death and resurrection.
Matthew - is a Jewish gospel, concerned with the kingdom of God. Christ is the King and the Teacher in this gospel
Mark - Jesus is the Servant in this gospel. Peter is the eye witness disciple for Mark.
Luke - being a doctor has a lot of healing miracles and conversational Jesus, who is Son of Man.
John - written for a Greek audience and he deals with Jesus as the logos - the Word made flesh.
Historical - Book of Acts which provides us with the story of the spread of the gospel and the birth and growth of the early church.
Doctrinal books - Romans through Jude. The main author being Paul who wrote 13 of those books, with James, John, Peter and Jude being the authors of the rest. These books apply the gospel to the life of individual believers and community of believers.
Prophetic or Apocalyptic - John is given a vision of the end times when Christ will return in glory, judgment and power.
There are four key links in the chain - Revelation/Inspiration; Canonisation; Transmission and Translation.
Inspiration - I want to make it clear that when we speak of inspiration we are not thinking of God taking over someone's mind and the person becoming a human typewriter. God did not bypass the faculties of men to write Scripture. 2 Timothy 3 verses 16-17 tell us that Scripture is inspired. Paul uses a word which literally translated means 'God-breathed' (theopnuestos) when he speaks of inspiration. You cannot speak without breathing and breath means that you are living - hence God-breathed - the Word of God has life and is a living thing. So God breathed out his Word which was written down by human agents.
Canonisation - was the process by which the Church came to recognise, accept and agree upon the 66 books in Scripture. The Church accepted the OT as those books that were accepted by Judaism in the time of Christ - 39 books. When it came to what would be included in the NT the church applied the following criteria:
Apostolic authority - that is, they must have been written either by and apostle themselves, who were eyewitnesses to what they wrote about, or by associates of the apostles.
Conformity to what was called the "rule of faith" - in other words, was the document congruent with the basic Christian tradition that the church recognised as normative.
Third, there was the criterion of whether the document had enjoyed continuous acceptance and usage by the church at large.
Example - the gospel of Thomas was rejected because it did not have apostolic authority, no early church father ever quotes from it. It does not conform to the rule of faith as it contains 114 secret sayings of Jesus - one of which denies salvation to women unless they become male and it fails continuous use because of the lack of manuscript evidence and no quotes from the early church fathers.
Transmission and Translation - the accurate writing down and translation of the bible from the original languages to the languages of today. Take sometime this week and read the preface to your bible and see what was involved in the translation of your bible into English.
In finishing let me make a few practical suggestions to you concerning our use of the Bible:
The Bible was written to be read out loud - not to read as we read - but to be heard and to be read not as a snippet but as a complete book. Jonah was written to be read as a complete story, not just a few verses here and there.
How do you read your bible? Let me use an illustration to get you thinking about how you read your bible. I want you to think about how you eat a cinnamon lozenge or similar sweet? Do you pop it in your mouth and then after a few seconds bite down on it and crunch it to pieces or do you savour every moment of it? Allowing it to dissolve and melt in your mouth? The latter is how you should read the Bible - read - Isaiah 31 v 4 - the word their 'growl' is how we are to read the Word of God. The Hebrew word 'growl' is hagah which is usually translated as 'meditate', as in Psalm 1 verse 2 or Psalm 63 verse 6. The word 'meditate' is a tame word for reading the word of God. Reading the Bible is an active, participatory event. It is not about wolfing down information but about taking time, thinking, ruminating, savouring the words of God. You see we need to regain a 'deep trust in the power of words' (a phrase used by the poet Coleridge) which will bring us into the presence of God and change our lives. Rainer Maria Rilke said this about reading, and I think it is essential for us to apply it our reading of Scripture: the writer requires a reader who "does not always remain bent over his pages; he often leans back and closes his eyes over a line he has been reading again, and its meaning spreads through his blood."
That is the kind of reading we need to cultivate and reclaim when reading the Bible. Reading which enters our souls as food enters our stomachs, spreads through our blood, and becomes holiness, love, wisdom and witness in our lives.
Kafka said this about reading, "If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it?...A book must be like an ice-axe to break the frozen sea within us." Be honest with yourself - don't you need the Word of God to act as an ice-axe to break through the frozen ice of your life? Well that will only happen when you read the Word of God - taking time and purpose to hear and not just biting and crunching it as information.
Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment