Who Made The Holy Bible The History Fun Facts
1) In 382 AD, Pope Saint Damasus presided over the Council of Rome that determined the Canon the official list of Sacred Scripture. He chose the Scriptures which he divinely considered genuine, ordered and divinely revealed.
2) Between 397 and 467 AD St. Jerome, aided by the Holy Spirit, translated holy Scripture for thirty years in a cave in Bethlehem. It was called the Latin Vulgate.
3) When St. Jerome had finished his works he presented it to Pope Saint Siricius who called it the Bible which means a collection of books.
4) In 200 AD Tertullian, a prolific early Christian writer, gave the term New Testament to the New Testament of the Holy Bible. Tertullian is also the oldest extant Latin writer to use the term trinitas or Trinity.
5) Archbishop Stephen Langton and Cardinal Hugo De Caro are both credited for creating Chapters and Verses in the Holy Bible.
When Was The New Testament Compiled
To compile intimates an intentional time and place in which various documents or fragments are united into one. The New Testament nor the Old came about this way. Rather, the books of the New Testament were received by the Church as Gods Word by numerous quantitative and qualitative factors.1 Chapter one of the Westminster Confession of Faith summarizes those factors in its article 5 :
We may be moved and induced by the testimony of the church to a high and reverent esteem of the Holy Scripture. And the heavenliness of the matter, the efficacy of the doctrine, the majesty of the style, the consent of all the parts, the scope of the whole , the full discovery it makes of the only way of mans salvation, the many other incomparable excellencies, and the entire perfection thereof, are arguments whereby it doth abundantly evidence itself to be the Word of God: yet notwithstanding, our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth and divine authority thereof, is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit bearing witness by and with the Word in our hearts.
The Cambridge Revisions Of 1629 And 1638
The original 1611 editions of the King James Version contained errors, as seen in the He and She Bibles, as well as many others. Some of the errors were due to the desire to maintain a consistent appearance of the text in columns, and led to inconsistent use of contractions, spellings, and other issues. Careless printing also led to errors, including the infamous omission of the word not in an edition which became known as the Wicked Bible, which exhorted its readers Thou shalt commit adultery. By the 1620s there were over 1,500 errors of printing in editions of the Authorized Version, and an attempt was made in two revisions at Cambridge to correct them in 1629 and again in 1638.
The Cambridge editions addressed the inaccuracies induced by poor quality control, attempted to standardize the spelling to match that of the English of the time, and made more than 200 changes to the text provided by the original translators. The Cambridge revisions were not new translations, but revisions to the existing 1611 translations, and mainly inserted marginal notes, many of which had come from the Geneva Bible, into the main text of the work. Thus the main text of the Authorized Version was changed without additional reference to the source data provided by the original manuscripts, in an attempt to render the work in the vernacular of the people who were not educated in the ancient languages of Latin and Greek.
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Who Wrote The Bible: The New Testament
Wikimedia CommonsA depiction of Jesus delivering the Sermon on the Mount.
Finally, the question of who wrote the Bible turns to the texts dealing with Jesus and beyond.
In the second century B.C. with the Greeks still in power, Jerusalem was run by fully Hellenized kings who considered it their mission to erase Jewish identity with full assimilation.
To that end, King Antiochus Epiphanes had a Greek gymnasium built across the street from the Second Temple and made it a legal requirement for Jerusalems men to visit it at least once. The thought of stripping nude in a public place blew the minds of Jerusalems faithful Jews, and they rose in bloody revolt to stop it.
In time, Hellenistic rule fell apart in the area and was replaced by the Romans. It was during this time, early in the first century A.D., that one of the Jews from Nazareth inspired a new religion, one that saw itself as a continuation of Jewish tradition, but with scriptures of its own:
Wikimedia CommonsPaul the Apostle
While the writings attributed to John actually do show some congruity between who wrote the Bible according to tradition and who wrote the Bible according to historical evidence, the question of Biblical authorship remains thorny, complex, and contested.
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When Was The First Complete Bible Published
Well, that is a hard one. Naturally, the Bible developed with Hebrew Scriptures and the Scriptures after Jesus Christ on through to the death of the Apostle John. The Old Covenant text in Hebrew was already being recorded on skins four hundred years before our Lord Jesus incarnate birth. Jesus knew the Bible as the lectionary was read in his local synagogue. The Gospel of Mark was well-circulated in the early years after Jesus ascension. The letters of Paul and Peter, Luke and Acts by Luke, and the other letters were copied and disseminated amongst the local Christian communities in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth .
But we can say that there was the first work published that we know of that contained the Old and New Testaments . This Bible, the Codex Sinaiticus , was published around 350 AD.5 Until that discovery by Dr. Constantin von Tischendorf in 1844, the Codex Vaticanus was the only surviving Bible from the early Church. We must remember, however, that though those documents survived, that doesnt mean there were not earlier editions. For example, I do not believe that I have the first Bible I used in the pastoral ministry. I used it up. So, too, we have what has remained and what has been found. If you are ever in London, go to the British Museum and you will see the full New Testament at its earliest publication, with much of the Old Testament. But how about the Bible in English?
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The Translators Did Not Use Original Source Documents But Rather Handwritten Copies Of Them
The translators who produced the original edition of the King James Version had access to some, but by no means all, original source documents to be used as the basis of their new translation. Instead they relied on all previously completed English translations, including some which they had been specifically instructed to ignore, and on printed copies of the Bible in the original languages then available, as well as translations and commentaries written in Spanish, Italian, German, French, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Syrian, and Chaldee. The polyglot of languages led to numerous stories in the Bible undergoing alteration from the originals.
The main source text was the Bishops Bible, which was itself by admission of the Archbishop of Canterbury who commissioned it, Matthew Parker, an inadequately scholarly translation. The translators also relied on the Geneva Bible, which had been heavily influenced by Calvinism. The translators of the King James Version introduced a number of verses which were not contained in either of the previous English translations, nor in the reproductions of the source documents on which they relied, as evidenced by later discoveries of ancient manuscripts. Later translations which omit these verses because they appear to have been written by the King James Version translators, rather than by the ancient writers of the original manuscripts, led to dissension among Bible scholars and defenders of the King James Bible.
Who Decided Which Books To Include In The Bible
In his best-selling novel, “The Da Vinci Code,” Dan Brown wrote that the Bible was assembled during the famous Council of Nicea in 325 C.E., when Emperor Constantine and church authorities purportedly banned problematic books that didn’t conform to their secret agenda.
Except that’s not how it really went. “The Da Vinci Code” was fiction, but Brown wasn’t the first to credit the Council of Nicea with deciding which books to include in the Bible. Voltaire, writing in the 18th century, repeated a centuries-old myth that the Bible was canonized in Nicea by placing all of the known books on a table, saying a prayer and seeing which illegitimate texts fell to the floor.
In truth, there was no single church authority or council that convened to rubber stamp the biblical canon , not at Nicea or anywhere else in antiquity, explains Jason Combs, an assistant professor at Brigham Young University specializing in ancient Christianity.
“Dan Brown did us all a disservice,” says Combs. “We don’t have evidence that any group of Christians got together and said, ‘Let’s hash this out once and for all.'”
What evidence scholars do have in the form of theological treatises, letters and church histories that have survived for millennia points to a much longer process of canonization. From the first through the fourth centuries and beyond, different church leaders and theologians made arguments about which books belonged in the canon, often casting their opponents as heretics.
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Who Was Jesus Did He Really Exist
Most scholars agree that Jesus, a first-century religious leader and preacher, existed historically. He was born in c4 BC and died reportedly crucified on the orders of the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate in cAD 3033. Then, for around 40 years, news of his teachings was spread by word of mouth until, from around AD 70, four written accounts of his life emerged that changed everything.
The gospels, or good news, of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are critically important to the Christian faith. It is their descriptions of the life of Jesus Christ that have made him arguably the most influential figure in human history.
We cant be sure when the gospels were written, says Barton, and we know little about the authors. But the guess is that Mark came first, in the 70s, followed by Matthew and Luke in the 80s and 90s, and John in the 90s or early in the second century.
In general, Matthew, Mark and Luke tell the same story with variations, and hence are called the synoptic gospels, whereas John has a very different style, as well as telling a markedly different version of the story of Jesus. Matthew and Luke seem to be attempts to improve on Mark, by adding more stories and sayings from sources now lost. John is a different conceptualisation of the story of Jesus, portraying a more obviously divine figure.
Scriptures Authors: Human And Divine
Just as we humans participate in Gods ongoing creation through procreation, we also had a part in creating the Scriptures. God and his people have always worked side by side. God chose Mary to bear Jesus. The prophets brought Gods message to Israel. Jesus sent the Apostles on a mission to preach the Gospel to the whole world. The message that God wants conveyed is contained in the Scriptures, but the way in which it is conveyed was left up to the specific authors.
Therefore, it is very true to say that God is the author of the Scriptures, but it is also true that the human authors are the authors of the various books of the Bible. For example, St. Paul is the author of the First Letter to the Corinthians. God is also its author. Each Gospel has a different flavor based on the personality and goals of its human author.
The Bible is the written account of the human experience with God. Many parts of the Bible are oral tradition that was written down. Most people were illiterate and relied much more on their memories to pass on traditions and stories. Oral tradition was the norm long before writing and reading was popular.
Different books have different histories. For example, Genesis likely involved many sources passed down over hundreds of years. Pauls first letter to the Corinthians has one human author and was written within 30 years of Jesus death and resurrection.
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What Belongs In The Bible
There was no Bible as we know it for the first 350 years of Christianity. Jesus did not give his Apostles a list of the books of the Bible before he ascended into heaven. Rather, the early leaders of the Church, guided by the Holy Spirit, discerned which books belonged in the Bible. This process took centuries.
Some criteria for determining the canon of Scripture were as follows:
- Special relation to God, i.e., inspiration
- This means that, guided by the Holy Spirit, the leaders of the early Church discerned that these books were inspired by God
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Christian Use And Development Of Biblical Chronology
The early Church Father Eusebius , attempting to place Christ in the chronology, put his birth in AM 5199, and this became the accepted date for the Western Church. As the year AM 6000 approached there was increasing fear that the end of the world was nigh, until the Venerable Bede made his own calculations and found that Christ’s birth took place in AM 3592, allowing several more centuries to the end of time.
switched the point of focus from Christ’s birth to the Apostolic Council of Acts 15, which he placed in the year AM 4000, believing this marked the moment when the Mosaic Law was abolished and the new age of grace began. This was widely accepted among European Protestants, but in the English-speaking world, Archbishop James Ussher calculated a date of 4004 BCE for creation he was not the first to reach this result, but his chronology was so detailed that his dates were incorporated into the margins of English Bibles for the next two hundred years. This popular 4,000 year theological timespan, which ends with the birth of Jesus, differs from the 4,000 timespan later proposed for the Masoretic text alone, which ends with the Temple rededication in 164 BCE.
How Was The Bible Assembled
If over 40 authors, living on three different continents, with generations of time between the first writing and the last word, wrote the 66 books of the Bible, then how did these books become recognized as God’s words and be placed together into one book? This assembly has been known as “canonization.” Canonization is the identification of writings that were authoritative for the Church because God inspired them. Those writings that were both authoritative and inspired were recognized as God’s Word and as such assembled into one book, the Bible.
Contrary to modern arguments, the canonization of the Bible did not occur when a church or government determined what books were “in” and what books were “out.” Yes, it’s true that the rise of Constantine was a huge boost for Christianity’s legality in the ancient world, but this event did not all of a sudden make the Bible authoritative or complete. The acceptance of the books of the Bible as being both authoritative and inspired by God occurred as the books were written, understood, and received as God’s Word.
Though these writings were considered authoritative relatively quickly, the oldest document with the full list of New Testament writings is Athanasius’s list from 367 A.D. We have to remember, however, that one couldn’t simply email Bible books to others in this day. It took time for books to circulate, to be accepted widely by church leaders, and to be pulled together into one 66-book library.
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