Bible Foundations (1): What is the Bible, and how did we get it?
What is the Bible?
That seems a bit of an odd question, I know. It’s a book, the Christian book, right? The one that Christians read and try to do? Well, yes. But if all it is a book, that’s not a big enough answer. The Bible is the word of God and the word of human writers. Because it is the word of God, it holds a special authority over us. This is not just a collection of helpful advice that Ezekiel or Moses or Paul wrote down for us.
It is, as Peter wrote for us:
19 And we have the prophetic word more fully confirmed, to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts, 20 knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. 21 For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.
(2 Pet. 1:19-21 ESV)
Peter describes the Scriptures as not being from someone’s own interpretation, but it comes from the Holy Spirit. So, when Matthew writes, he uses grammar and a style individual to him, but the words he wrote are what God wanted him to say. We have God’s own words recorded for us. The New Testament writers often quote passages from the Old Testament, introducing them by saying “the Holy Spirit says” (Acts 4:25, Heb 3:7).
The Bible is a collection of 66 books that cover a long time period. There are books written well over a thousand years before Jesus, and those written almost a hundred years after Jesus. Around three quarters of our Bibles are the Old Testament, written before the coming of Jesus. And one quarter is the New Testament, telling of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, and the growth of the early church after this. Some were written in the wilderness, in a time of kings, in a time of exile in Babylon, in first century Judea, or from a Roman prison. Yet they all, consistently, tell the same message, the consistent word of God. There is no way that such a diverse group of books would be internally consistent were they not the word of God himself. God is the same yesterday, today and forever; he doesn’t change, and he faithfully keeps the promises he has made. So it is no surprise that his word in the Bible is also like this.
How did we get the Bible?
This could be a very long answer, so I will try to get to the point quickly. What we call the Old Testament today is the same as all of the Scripture used by the Jewish people. The books are in a different order, but they are the same, word for word. This collection of books, the majority of our Bible, was recognised as the word of God and collected together some centuries before Jesus. It was written mainly in Hebrew, with some short sections in Aramaic like in the second half of Daniel. By Jesus’ time, most people used the Greek translation of the Old Testament, known as the Septuagint. That’s because most didn’t speak Hebrew, and everyone spoke Greek.
When it comes to the New Testament, originally they were individual books. All of them were written in a form of Greek, the language most commonly spoken by everyday people. Matthew wrote his gospel for a group of people, and Paul wrote each letter to a different group of people. Over time, these individual books were collected, and we see this in the archaeological evidence. You start to see the four gospels stuck together, or the letters of Paul stuck together. Many think that some council made a decision as to which books should be in and which ones out. That’s not the case. The church, the wider church, recognised the word of God, the word written by the apostles and their coworkers. Christians recognise the word of God, not through persuasion, but through the Holy Spirit. Unlike what people like Dan Brown in the Da Vinci Code might say, the church did not suppress perfectly good books from the Bible. Books like the Gospel of Peter were omitted because they were written too late, by anonymous authors, and were not recognised by the church.
Originally, the Bible was kept in churches, like the Jews kept their Scripture scrolls in their synagogues. This is because most people didn’t read; they came to hear the word read and explained to them. And books were wildly expensive, as they were all copied by hand. For many generations, people (especially monks and nuns) copied the Bible by hand, word by word, in a process that took years. We have a great many manuscripts today, copies and copies of copies. We can compare these many manuscripts and be very confident that what we have today is what was written so long ago. This process became much faster when the printing press was introduced.
The Bible was then translated into modern languages, especially driven by the Protestant Reformation. The aim was to get ordinary people to be able to read it for themselves. Luther translated it into German, and we can thank a man named William Tyndale for much of the original English translation. This work is still continuing today, through the work of Wycliffe Bible translators and others. Along with this, many missionaries and societies have increased literacy, so more people can read and understand the Bible. The precious word of God should be accessible and able to be read by as many people as possible.