Good News for All

Where did the Bible come from ?

God has many ways of speaking to us: anything from a still, small voice inside, to perhaps some shocking or surprising external event that grabs our attention. A few words from a stranger, something spoken in a sermon, a message on a sign board, something discovered in a book. But it seems God's favourite tool for speaking to us is the Bible. It is his fundamental message to mankind, his revelation of salvation, and contains the words he taught us in the person of Jesus. Because of this you will grow to love it, and to get the best from it you should read it often – every day if possible. Memorising some key parts is also a valuable thing to do.

The Bible is Unique

Bible is more like a library than a book. It is a collection of 66 separate writings by more than 40 different authors who wrote in three different languages over a period of about 1500 years. The writers include both men and women, rich and poor, statesmen, professionals and labourers. Among them were kings and farmers, priests, prophets and shepherds, singers, warriors, and fishermen, poets, tent makers and tax collectors. The subjects they cover include history, law, philosophy, poetry, drama, romance, stories and parables, biography, sociology, oratory, letters, sermons and prophecy. They wrote during war and peace, in cities and wilderness, palaces and prisons.

If so many writers over such a long time span were to write about just one subject, such as medicine, there would be such a lack of agreement and cohesion that it would make no sense. However, the Bible has a message that is astonishing in its coherence and unity. The Bible is composed of writings chosen by Jews and Christians as being the most significant, spiritually influential and enduring treasures of faith and heritage. From start to finish, the message of all of the books of the Bible is God's purpose for humanity, and its focus is Jesus. The Bible describes itself as produced by 'holy men of God who were inspired by the Holy Spirit' and states that consequently all of scripture is useful and important to us. In other words, this is God's book. He is the author, and the men who wrote it were acting less as authors and more like they were his secretaries taking dictation, even if they did not know it.

How the Bible is Structured

In the front of most Bibles you will find an index to the contents which lists each book in order. The Bible is in two parts. The Old Testament was originally written mostly in Hebrew, with some Aramaic, between about 1400BCE and 350BCE. It is mostly about the Jewish people. The New Testament was originally translated into or written in Greek about the middle of the first century CE or soon after. It is mostly about Jesus and the early church. Except for a few very short ones, each of the books is divided into sequentially numbered chapters, and each chapter is subdivided into numbered verses. These divisions were not in the original writing but were made up for convenience in finding things. Someone who mentions John 3:16 is referring to The Gospel of John, chapter 3 and verse 16. Some very big books like Kings and Chronicles were split into two numbered parts, and when more than one letter was written by Paul (who wrote a lot of them) to the same recipients or by the same author other than Paul, those letters got numbered. That is why you will see numerical prefixes for some books, such as 2 Kings, 1 Corinthians or 2 Peter, for example.

The Original Sources

The Bible was originally written mostly in Hebrew and Greek, with some Aramaic. Although none of the original source documents still exist, there are many hundreds of old copies. There are also dozens of complete or near complete copies of ancient Bibles. We have pieces of the New Testament that date from as early as the first half of the 2nd century. There are complete scrolls of Old Testament books from before the time of Jesus, and tens of thousands of Bible quotations from ancient Christian writers, almost enough to assemble a complete New Testament. The time between the original writing and our earliest existing fragment of the Bible is at most 40-60 years. This is amazing, and far better than the manuscript reliability of other ancient manuscripts universally accepted as authentic.

Books as we know them did not exist when the original source documents of the Bible were written. Long ago writing was done in columns on animal skins (called parchment), or on sheets of papyrus (a primitive form of paper). For anything long these pages were stitched together on the long edges and rolled up like paper towel into a scroll. Scrolls could be quite bulky and had to be unrolled to find your place and read. Books as we know them were invented soon after all of the original Bible scrolls had been written, and these scrolls (or copies of them) were copied onto individual small pages and bound on one long edge to make books called codices that were much like those we have today. Books replaced scrolls because with both sides of the material available for use they were easier for authors to plan and add to, cheaper and more compact to produce, transport and store, and more convenient for readers to use since they could be opened quickly and easily at any page.

All of the original writing was done in capital letters. Hebrew and Aramaic only have capitals, and the small letters for Greek were not invented until much later. There were no spaces between words and no punctuation either. Neither Hebrew nor Aramaic had any vowels ‐ just consonants. You were expected to know what the vowels were from your basic knowledge of the spoken language and the context. This still works today surprisingly well, but vowels, spacing and punctuation can be a big help. The lack of these sometimes allows for some ambiguity in meaning.

Printing was not invented until long after the Bible was written. Consequently the original writings were hand copied for circulation and preservation. This was typically done professionally in scriptoriums where one person would read aloud and many scribes would write what they heard into new copies. Though great care was taken it was possible for errors to creep in through spelling, choice among homonyms, accidental duplications or omissions, and other less common reasons. Even after proofing and correcting some mistakes remained, and as a result not all of our copies agree exactly as to content. The differences are mostly small and unimportant, and none of them affect doctine of consequence.

Back to Basics

A science of textual criticism seeks to examine ancient documents in light of the physical and human processes involved to reconstruct the most probable original writing. The vast abundance of biblical material of varying antiquity, including translations and quotations, offers an extensive field for study and investigation. It is often possible to identify branching families of text that can be traced back to common origins. No single ancient Bible is considered completely free of errors, so scholars employ this methodology in an effort to derive a text that is as close as they are able to come to the original, so that it can be used as a basis for translation.

Not every book of the Bible is equally well attested by ancient sources. Much Old Testament material was foolishly and wastefully destroyed in persecutions of the Jews. The Jewish Masoretes produced and carefully conserved an authoritative Hebrew version, the oldest of which dates form about 1000CE. By comparison we have numerous copies of the Greek translation known as the Septuagint, both ancient and modern, which originated mainly in Egypt around 200BCE. The Samaritan Pentateuch offers another (though doctrinally different in certain limited respects) old version of the first five books of the Old Testament. The ancient scrolls discovered at Qumran by the Dead Sea are the oldest documents available and preserve most of the Old Testament. From all of these we can identify slightly differing Babylonian, Egyptian and Judaean variations on a remarkably well preserved core foundation.

As for the New Testament, the Gospels are the best attested, with most of the Pauline epistles also frequently represented, while Revelation is the book with the fewest and most recent copies. Besides dozens of ancient copies of the New Testament and thousands of more recent ones, there are tens of thousands of documents with portions, quotations, and translations. Overall, the Bible is the single best attested ancient document by far, and a great deal of detailed research and scholarship has gone into producing an original language version that is as close as possible to the original writings.