Variations In Recent Translations
A number of Bible verses in the King James Version of the New Testament are not found in more recent Bible translations, where these are based on modern critical texts. In the early seventeenth century, the source Greek texts of the New Testament which were used to produce Protestant Bible versions were mainly dependent on manuscripts of the late , and they also contained minor variations which became known as the Textus Receptus. With the subsequent identification of much earlier manuscripts, most modern textual scholars value the evidence of manuscripts which belong to the Alexandrian family as better witnesses to the original text of the biblical authors, without giving it, or any family, automatic preference.
Divisions Of The Bible
The Old Testament has 39 books. The Jews divided these books intothree divisions: the Law, the Prophets, the Writings. Our English Bible dividesthe OT into four main groups:
The 27 books of the New Testament are arranged into four divisions:
Words You Need To Know
Bible
Four hundred years after Christ returned to Heaven, people began to use the Greekword biblia to describe the collection of the sacredwritings. Our word Bible comes from biblia.
Word of God
The Bible claims to be the Word of God over 3,000 times .The authors of NT books often begin a quote taken from the OT with the phrase, Godsaid . And direct quotes of God speaking in the OT are often begunwith Scripture says in the NT . So the NT authorsbelieved the Word of God and Scripture were the same.
Scripture
This word was used by the NT authors to refer to the sacred books of the OT and also to other books of the NT . Christ Himself cited the Bible as final authority many timesand said, ‘Scripture cannot be broken’ .
Prophet
A prophet was a special spokesman for Godhe spoke, by God’s power, the actualwords God gave him.
Apostle
An apostle, as used here, was a man who had seen Christ after His Resurrection , and who was called by Jesus to be His messenger.
Canon
Canon originally referred to a reed, which was used as a measuring rod,much as we use a metre rule or yardstick today for measuring. The complete listof Biblical books is called the canon, meaning the measuring rod, or the authority, for truth.
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The Integrity Of The Manuscript Evidence
As with any ancient book transmitted through a number of handwrittenmanuscripts, the question naturally arises as to how confident can we be that wehave anything resembling the autograph. Let us nowlook at what evidences we have for the integrity of the New Testamentmanuscripts. Let us look at the number of manuscripts and how close they date to the autographs of the Bible as compared with other ancient writings of similar age.
How Did We Get The Bible
The universe and all in it screams, ‘There is a God!’ , but theuniverse cannot tell us how it was made, its history, how we should live our lives,or about when its Creator came to Earth.
For that, God has given us His Word, the Bible. Because of the Word of God, we knowthat God created all things in six normal-length days, that it was originally a’very good’ place, and that the first man, Adam, disobeyed the Creator, thus corruptingthe entire creation . We know that Jesus Christ came to Earth to save His people from their sins, died, was buried, androse again on the third day, according to the Scriptures .
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The Argument That The Bible Has Changed Has To Go In The Garbage Instantly
When local shepherds discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls in Israel in 1946, archaeologists began investigations and confirmed that these ancient scrolls of paper were Bible manuscripts.
are documents of the OT that had been hidden in jars in the desert, where its dry, where theyre preserved, for two thousand years, Metaxas said. We dont have to guess whether the monks changed it or not, lets just read it. Its letter for letter the same as it is today.
The argument that the Bible has changed has to go in the garbage, instantly. 100 years ago people could make arguments, but now we have archaeological evidence that keeps coming up. They had no evidence that 3,000 years ago there actually was a king in Israel named David now they have archaeological evidence, he said, referring to the discovery of King Davids palace in 2005.
These manuscripts contain material now considered to be part of the Hebrew Bible. Every book is represented among the Dead Sea Scrolls, except the book of Esther. These are the oldest known copies of biblical works, according to The Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library.
King James Only Movement
The King James Only movement advocates the belief that the King James Version is superior to all other English translations of the Bible. Most adherents of the movement believe that the Textus Receptus is very close, if not identical, to the original autographs, thereby making it the ideal Greek source for the translation. They argue that manuscripts such as the Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, on which most modern English translations are based, are corrupted New Testament texts. One of them, Perry Demopoulos, was a director of the translation of the King James Bible into Russian. In 2010 the Russian translation of the KJV of the New Testament was released in Kyiv, Ukraine. In 2017, the first complete edition of a Russian King James Bible was released. In 2017, a Faroese translation of the King James Bible was released as well.
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Stories You Didn’t Learn In Sunday School
Many of the New Testament texts familiar to Christians today were being used authoritatively already in the second century, but different congregations preferred some texts over others and included some texts that don’t appear in the New Testament. Here are a few:
The Gospel of Peter: Only a fragment of this text was recovered in 1886 in Egypt, but it includes the only narrative account of the resurrected Jesus leaving his tomb. According to Peter’s version, two giant angels descended to the tomb and escorted the resurrected Jesus out, who was also suddenly gigantic. But the oddest note was that the three figures were followed by a floating cross that could talk.
“And they heard a voice from the heavens, saying, ‘Thou hast preached to them that sleep.’ And a response was heard from the cross, ‘Yea.'”
The Gospel of Mary: Combs says that some apocryphal texts reflected theological and doctrinal debates going on within the early church, such as the role of women. In the Gospel of Mary , is not only referred to as one of Jesus’s disciples, but perhaps his favorite one. In this text, after Jesus is resurrected, he relays esoteric teachings to Mary, who then tells the other disciples. Peter asks why they should listen to a woman, to which another disciple Levi responds:
“If the Savior made her worthy, who are you then, for your part, to cast her aside? Surely the Savior knows her full well. That is why he has loved her more than us.”
Who Wrote The Bible: The First Five Books
Wikimedia CommonsMoses, as painted by Rembrandt.
According to both Jewish and Christian Dogma, the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy were all written by Moses in about 1,300 B.C. There are a few issues with this, however, such as the lack of evidence that Moses ever existed and the fact that the end of Deuteronomy describes the author dying and being buried.
Scholars have developed their own take on who wrote the Bibles first five books, mainly by using internal clues and writing style. Just as English speakers can roughly date a book that uses a lot of thees and thous, Bible scholars can contrast the styles of these early books to create profiles of the different authors.
In each case, these writers are talked about as if they were a single person, but each author could just as easily be an entire school of people writing in a single style. These biblical authors include:
Wikimedia CommonsA depiction of the destruction of Jerusalem under Babylonian rule.
Wikimedia CommonsKing Josiah
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Can Canonical Works Contain Errors
There are doctrinal and historical inconsistencies with a number of the Apocryphal books. E. J. Young notes:
There are no marks in these books which would attest a divine origin. . . . both Judith and Tobit contain historical, chronological, and geographical errors. The books justify falsehood and deception and make salvation to depend upon works of merit. . . . Ecclesiasticus and the Wisdom of Solomon inculcate a morality based upon expediency. Wisdom teaches the creation of the world out of preexistent matter . Ecclesiasticus teaches that the giving of alms makes atonement for sin . In Baruch it is said that God hears the prayers of the dead , and in I Maccabees there are historical and geographical errors .
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.
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How Did The Bible Get That Name
It is interesting that the Bible never refers to itself as “the Bible.” So when did people start calling these sacred writings by the word Bible? Again, the Bible is not really a book, but a collection of books. Yet, even the New Testament writers seemed to understand that the things being written about Jesus were to be considered part of Scripture.
In II Peter 3:16, Peter addressed the writings of Paul, He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures
So even then there was something unique about the words being written, that these were the words of God, and that the words of God were subject to being tampered with and manipulated. The collection of these writings, including the New Testament, were first called the Bible somewhere around the fourth century in the writings of John Chrysostom. Chrysostom first refers to the Old and New Testament together as ta biblia , the Latin form of biblos. It was also around this time that these collections of writings began to be put together in a certain order, and this collection of letters and writings started shaping into the one-volume book that we are familiar with today.
How The Books Of The New Testament Were Determined
The early church accepted the New Testament books almost as soon as they were written. Its already been mentioned that the writers were friends of Jesus or his immediate followers, men to whom Jesus had entrusted the leadership of the early church. The Gospel writers Matthew and John were some of Jesus’ closest followers. Mark and Luke were companions of the apostles, having access to the apostles’ account of Jesus’ life.
The other New Testament writers had immediate access to Jesus as well: James and Jude were half-brothers of Jesus who initially did not believe in him. Peter was one of the 12 apostles. Paul started out as a violent opponent of Christianity and a member of the religious ruling class, but he became an ardent follower of Jesus, convinced that Jesus rose from the dead.
The reports in the New Testament books lined up with what thousands of eyewitnesses had seen for themselves.
When other books were written hundreds of years later, it wasn’t difficult for the church to spot them as forgeries. For example, the Gospel of Judas was written by the Gnostic sect, around 130-170 A.D., long after Judas’ death. The Gospel of Thomas, written around 140 A.D., is another example of a counterfeit writing erroneously bearing an apostles’ name. These and other Gnostic gospels conflicted with the known teachings of Jesus and the Old Testament, and often contained numerous historical and geographical errors.7
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These Guidelines Helped Unify The Church
These guidelines helped unify the church and the NT, then a few different events in the 4th century made it all official.
In 367 , Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria, wrote an Easter letter that contained all 27 books of our present New Testament. In 393 the Synod of Hippo affirmed our current New Testament, and in 397 the Council of Carthage published the same list, according to the BibleStudyTools.com article.
Hyperspeed From John To James
I can see you starting to fade. Wake up. Stay with me. Were going to make the jump to lightspeed and fly through the next 700 years of Bible history. Ready? Punch it, Chewie!
For the vast majority of the Middle Ages, Jeromes Vulgate translation was the chief Bible engaged by followers of Jesus. But big changes began to occur in the late 1300s when a philosopher named John Wycliffe undertook a translation of Jeromes Vulgate into English. The motivation was similar to Jeromesto put the words of God into a language common men and women could understand. While portions had been translated before him, Wycliffes Bible was the first full text in the English language.
At this point in history, and since the first followers of Jesus, there had only been one hurchthe Catholic church . While the common man suffered through the Middle Ages, the Church grew rich and powerful. Wycliffe, along with getting the Bible into a common language, began to question the state of privilege, wealth and power afforded to the clergy and the Church. He argued that Scripture was the only authoritative guide to the truth about God. This put him into the bad graces of Church leadership, including the Pope.
Apparently, God did just that. Within four years of his death, four English translations of the Bible had been published in England at the kings behest. Each one was based on Tyndales work.
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