How We Got the Bible
Vern Peterman · Jul 20, 2003
Church History, No. 03
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/48262257183432

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

As we go through this church history section here, this is how we got the Bible, is what we're covering today. You have in your handout package there, about half of the slides are shown in miniature form on your handout, and then you've also got some supplemental things that we'll make reference to so that you'll be aware of what those are. The first thing is just to look at, and you have a copy of this, remember here's your cue, You've got that on the first page of your handout.

There are four connections in Revelation between God and us. Those are inspiration, canonization, transmission, and translation. Those are the four connections as God reveals his truth so that it comes to us. Today, as we'll be looking at this, we'll be wanting to look at these last three particularly. Obviously, the inspiration aspect is something that scripture claims for itself, and it is a clear teaching in scripture. But aside from that, as it relates to church history, these last three, canonization, transmission, and translation, are the things we want to particularly focus on.

One word I'm going to use repeatedly, and I want to make sure that it's clear up front, this word canon. It has nothing to do with shooting these metal balls at you, okay? You notice it's got one end and not two. And the reason that that word is used, it means a measuring rod or a measuring stick.

And it carries the idea of, we've got these books. These are the books that are inspired. We didn't inspire them. God did the inspiration. See that? But, what we're doing is recognizing those books that God inspired. That's the idea of the canon. We've got these books that are inspired and others that are not. Others may be inspiring at times, but these books that are in the canon are inspired. Is that the difference? Okay.

Now, as we step through here, of course, we'll be stepping through the church history timeline. And you've got, by the way, all your binders should have a copy of something like this in color, full sheet. And if you don't, I think Nancy has one or two extra sheets, so just make sure you've got that, okay? This was handed out the first week and is in the back of the first week's section.

Okay. To start off with, the Apostles wrote letters and histories. The only exception to that in some degree is the Book of Revelation, because the Book of Revelation is not a history, it's a future. Okay? And in great part is looking ahead, and then it is also a letter, because it's the kind of messages to the seven churches as well. So it's a little bit different category, but it includes elements of these.

Anyway, you can see this is the way a lot of them may well have looked, being written probably originally on papyrus, and we'll go into that in a minute here. They were written on papyrus, most common. We have copies of the New Testament on vellum as well, and that tended to be later and for things that were, okay, we're going to hold on to this for a long time, make sure that it stays. because vellum was more expensive, a little harder to come by, and a little more costly for the average person. There was also stone tablets and pottery sherds. This is for writing small things, you know, like somebody wanted to write a memory verse or something, they would carry them around, because I can't imagine carrying around the whole New Testament on clay tablets, okay?

But we do find examples of it. These are sometimes called ostraca. It's interesting, they also find the New Testament and the Old Testament on things like pieces of metal written on walls, either carved or written on top of it, even written in mosaic. So lots of other patterns, but these are the most common.

And among them, papyrus was by far the most common because it was the least expensive and it was carryable. Velums can start to get heavy and obviously pottery and stone do. Papyrus looks like this it grows along the Nile in in Egypt and out in the wild that looks kind of like this What they'll do is they'll cut that down and what you see on the left is they'll make thin slices of it And that's what they would do and then they would take those slices and lay them down one direction and then lay them down the other They would that would be wet so that and there's sort of an adhesive built into the material so it's like it's perfect, okay, and and they would lay them down in each direction. It would take about three days. They'd put them in a press, and it'd take about three days for the stuff to dry, and that's what these New Testament letters were written on by the thousands. The papyrus paper ends up looking about like this.

For us, that might be a little distracting, but that was what they had available. The other thing that they would have is their writing kit. And this is real interesting, because what you see here, they found an ancient writing kit. This is a kit made out of wood. You know, they didn't have routers, so that's a real job, okay?

And what they would do is they'd have a little opening here, and these little pins, which would be reeds or sticks sharpened at one end, would be carried in here. Then they would have swept or ground up charcoal here, and they would use either like olive oil or a gum material, wetted, and then that would be their ink well there, and then they could carry this around between that and some papyrus. be equipped to copy and write letters. Imagine when Paul was ready to write, he frequently had somebody else, and they would be equipped with something like this and the papyrus paper in combination. Now, the apostolic era laid a foundation for the canon, and we'll take a look item by item at what that means. The Old Testament has a fixed canon.

Unfortunately, we won't have time to look at the Old Testament in great deal. The one thing I will point out to you, and boy, this is like flashing red lights, okay? In your appendix, which is behind the back yellow divider there, right after the table of contents on the appendix, the outlines of church history, there is a quote from Josephus that is powerful. It basically says that once the Old Testament was finished, and he, by the way, listed the Old Testament books, he said, once it was finished, They were very reluctant to do anything to it, okay?

It basically is saying this thing was nailed down long ago, not something as some folks who are inclined to try to tell you, oh, the Bible was written later and people didn't know, people weren't contemporaries. This flies in the face of it, and it's bold fact, okay? Well-attested. Anyway, that's a quote, and the whole quote is included there in that front section of that, Outlines of Church History. Great quote. Take the time to read it if you'd like.

Jesus' words had authority from the outset because of who he was. It was real clear. There was authority to what Jesus said and did. As a matter of fact, that's one of the things the Gospels even note. When he spoke, he spoke with authority. And by the way, that's contrary to the average Jewish writing of the time. A lot of times the Jews would show that there's this side and that side and then leave you. And so they noted, hey, he speaks with authority. This says something and says that's the truth.

So that was in contrast to the culture. The other thing is the apostles themselves functioned as a living canon. In other words, here's the apostles. These are the ones who walked and talked with Jesus, Paul actually having been a special case because of personal revelation. But these were contemporaries who could testify to what they saw and heard and touched. And so you see those kinds of words, especially 1 John 1, 1-3.

He just appeals to several senses and says, you know, we're not giving you a fairy tale here. We're not giving you myth. We are telling you about the things that we have witnessed personally with our eyes, with our ears, with our hands. Those things. And he's repetitive and emphatic about that.

So the apostles served as kind of a living canon during their time. Now, here's a key verse. I read this verse and started studying the stuff behind it, and boy, I just got really jabbed. Look at this. Beloved, while I was making every effort to write you about our common salvation, I felt the necessity, and by the way, that felt the necessity means I was compelled to write to you appealing that you contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all handed down to the saints. And you have this in your own handout.

This first one, contend earnestly, Epagonizami, it's an intense athletic struggle. You would put it this way, the ultimate Olympic effort would be the way to put it in modern vernacular. How about that? He could have said agonizami and that would have been just athletic. He put epagonizami, he says, I want you to contend with the ultimate Olympic effort. That's the way he's communicating. Isn't that amazing?

Look at this. The faith, this body of teachings which constitute the apostolic teaching. And that phrase, the faith, shows up again and again and again in the New Testament. And in context, you can see where that significance is implied. Here is one of them.

And finally, and this is potent, once for all, the Greek word is hapax, once given, perpetually valid. And here's why it's potent. It's the same word used several places in Hebrews, and you've got the text, where it's communicating in the past, we used to have sacrifices given every year, right? But now Christ has hapax once for all time been given as a sacrifice. Once given, perpetually valid. See the impact of that word? That word just hits really hard because what it says is this faith which was given by these apostles is not something you have to have a subsequent revelation. Sorry, Church of Latter-day Saints. Sorry, Christian Science. You don't need that. Why?

Because you are to contend with an ultimate Olympic effort for the faith that was taught by the Apostles, once given perpetually valid. That's powerful. The Apostles themselves had canonical activities. I'm going to let you go over what that means. Selecting and verifying of contents. Luke is writing to Theophilus, and what does he do? He's writing the Theophilus, who, by the way, the evidence indicates is a legal bureaucrat in the Roman Empire. And as he writes to them, what does he say? He says, various people have put together compilations of what happened with Jesus. What I've put together with you, I've looked at carefully and checked it out. So this isn't just some sort of a myth. This isn't a, hey, I kind of think this is what happened, or it's truly nice. This is something that he looked at very carefully, Luke himself having been a medical doctor. Okay.

The public reading of scripture. You see that being called for or described at various places, and these are a few of them. The circulation of scripture. Paul tells them, okay, take this letter that I wrote to you and have it read here. Have it passed along over to this church. Okay? So there would be some taking of scripture from one place to another.

The next one was this determination of what was in the canon and what was not. One of the things that stands out is you have the use of the word with a definite article. That means you've got the word, not a bunch of words, okay? Not a bunch of different truths and, okay, pick one, okay? The final one there is the quoting of Scripture.

We find in 1 Timothy 5.18, Paul's quoting from Luke 10.7, okay?

Already you have these canonical activities taking place among the apostles, within their writings, during apostolic time. Here's the next aspect of this church history timeline. We're going to start in the early church era. That's 96 through 312, and that's the idea of the death of the Apostle John. That's 96. 312 is after a period of time of a couple of centuries plus where Christianity was illegal in the Roman Empire. Finally, at least in the western portion, Constantine makes it legal.

Here are events which confirm or require a New Testament canon. Here's Valentinius, he's writing about 140. This is less than 50 years after Apostle John has written the book of Revelation. He's saying the New Testament books are being circulated all over the place. Everybody's making copies and sending them to other churches. These are getting everywhere, and he's making note of that. Here's something that forced the church to begin taking a close look at which books are the right books.

Marcion was a heretic and his heresy was this. He didn't like the Jews. So any New Testament book that sounded Jewish, he said, I don't want it. He cut it out. So what he did is he had a doctored up version of the book of Luke. He cut out anything that sounded very Jewish to him. And then he picked out ten of Paul's letters that weren't very Jewish, and he said, that's it.

That's the canon. That's the New Testament. Well, then people in the church said, well, wait a minute. That isn't right. So it got to be a matter of saying, what's right? It pressed the issue. Here's another one. Montanus. And you'll read this and say, oh boy, I see this now. 170 AD, he added to and contradicted the New Testament canon. He had additional revelation.

He and two other prophetesses, would go around, they spoke in tongues, they had additional prophecies, they said Christ is coming back in what is now modern-day Turkey, not to Jerusalem and Israel, but to modern-day Turkey. And so that kind of pressed the issue again. And a couple of direct disciples of the Apostle John said, this guy is a heretic. But nonetheless, it pressed the issue with the church, because they had to decide, okay, what's canon and what isn't.

Marcion took away, Montanus added, Here are some other events. This is real interesting. If you look at late 1st century and into the 2nd century, the early church authors, every single one of the New Testament books is quoted. Multiple times. Every single one quoted multiple times by these authors. 1st century and 2nd century. Under Emperors Decius and Diocletian, a couple of different events there, it was made illegal to purchase scripture.

So what did you have to do? You needed to know which scripture is really scripture and which isn't, because you're going to die for it. Doesn't that kind of press the issue? If you're going to die for it, you better know what's scripture and what isn't, huh? So that pressed them to say, okay, this is scripture, this is not, and to define it.

One of the other things that happened during this period of time, and I'm going to refer to this map a few times and use underlining to underscore the ones that during this period of time were translated. Here's Old Latin, translated before the end of the 2nd century, about 190. Here's the Syriac version, about 200. And then this, the Sahitic version, which is a Coptic, it's a language in what we'd call Egypt now. So here were some early translations that came to the surface.

Now as we step into the imperial church, here's 312 when finally Constantine says Christianity is legal, to 590 when Gregory I steps up and he is the first one given the title Pope. That period of time the church changes from being persecuted to being now backed by the imperial forces of Rome. One of the things we find here is the first complete New Testament. It's written somewhere around 340 AD.

It was found at St. Catherine's Monastery in Sinai. Count Tischendorf was down there visiting, and he noticed that the monks down there were using scraps of paper to light fires. And he says, what are you burning there? And he started taking a look at it, and they were burning copies of the New Testament to start fires. They didn't know what they had.

So I looked at it, and they hadn't damaged this one, and it has the complete New Testament and about half of the Old Testament. And in very good shape, as you can tell. And by the way, this bound form only came into play right about the time the New Testament was finished. Prior to that, people didn't bind books. So this is something relatively new. Now, here's something, and you've got copies of this, and I'm glad that you have it.

There are at least 5,309 surviving hand-copied Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. They contain all or part of the New Testament. There are more than, get ready for this, 19,000 ancient New Testament manuscripts in Latin, Syriac, Armenian, and other languages. That is a lot. And we'll see how much that is in a little bit here. The oldest copies of the New Testament are actually in Syriac and the old Latin versions.

We've got full sets of those in those languages. All total, more than 24,000 handwritten copies of the New Testament have survived. And that's during a period of time when it was capital punishment if you were caught with them. Isn't that amazing? You'll see in a minute, it's miraculous. Here's why. Here's something, and you have this chart as well.

If you look at Caesar, which is a history written in the century before the New Testament, the earliest copy we have is 900 AD, so there's a thousand years period of time. We have of those ancient copies about 10. And you can see going down the list, the number of copies is small, with several of these, just one or two digits. The best we have here would be Demosthenes, and that was written 1,300 year gap between the earliest copy and the actual writing and 200 copies. Now, the New Testament, in spite of the fact that it's being illegal for such a long period of time, the New Testament has an embarrassingly large number of copies and a much smaller period of time between the original writing and the copies. So that, here's the 1st century to the 2nd century, it means basically less than 100 years and in some fragments actually only decades between the original writing and the copy that we have.

So you have by one order of magnitude here improvement over a lot of the ancient documents and here you have a couple orders of magnitude over a lot of the other ancient documents. Huge, huge difference. If somebody comes to you and says, oh these are just a bunch of myths and stories and There's not good historical backing for it. That's rubbish. If the New Testament documents are not reliable, we don't know anything about ancient history. That's the bottom line.

Ben? What's an order of magnitude? Order of magnitude is ten. One order of magnitude in order to have a thousand years down to a hundred years. Thanks for asking. Okay, let this engineering talk, you know? Okay. Here's the next step here. You notice it starts getting translated into other languages, okay? And we've got different languages here that it's being translated into, and these are some examples out of that period of time. The Bible is getting increasingly translated. By the way, this is just a sampling. This is not the whole picture. We'll get to that in a minute.

Jerome translated the Greek and the Hebrew Old Testament into Latin, and this was around the year 405. Actually, he'd done the New Testament earlier, but he translated from the Greek Old Testament, again, since the Old Testament was written in Hebrew, that's Hebrew to Greek to Latin, and he didn't like it, so he started over. So he didn't get finished until 405. And that is to replace the old Latin translation, and update it, and check everything out in the way of the definitions. And that translation work was done in Bethlehem. It was this translation that the Roman Catholic Church, just a couple centuries later, would say, this is the inspired version.

Here are some other final indications of the canon during that period of time. Here's Athanasius, wrote in 367. He listed the present 27 books. And he actually used that word canon for the first time. So this kind of brings it to real clear definition. And then there were church councils at Hippo and then two at Carthage that each confirmed the present list of 27 New Testament books. And there's a picture of ancient Carthage there. All right. One of the things we've got to ask is, what qualifies a book as canon? How do we conclude that this is inspired and this one isn't?

How many, by the way, have heard of the lost books of the Bible? Have you ever heard of those? If you hear about that, read of that. One of the things, there are books, and matter of fact, you can download copies from the internet. The Gospel of Thomas is one of them, that were written later. The Gospel of Thomas was written by somebody else, because it was written a century after Thomas was around. So that'd be an example, but there actually are a number of books that claim to be New Testament books, and so it was a matter of saying, hey, it's not those, it's this, okay?

But here's the question. They ask, is this book apostolic? That means certainly, did it come from the apostolic era? Was it either written by an apostle or by an associate of an apostle in such a way that the apostle had a chance to review things and to kind of put some official blessing on it?

An example, Mark. Mark was not an apostle, but he had an association with Peter. And what you find as you read through that, that that reveals that association as you read through the book. About Luke. Luke was not an apostle. He wrote the Gospel. Luke in the Book of Acts had close association with Paul.

As a matter of fact, in the Book of Acts, you even read his writing, we, we, towards the end, where he actually includes that pronoun that includes himself. And those are describing time he spent with Paul. Paul also makes reference to Luke in his own letters, so we see that connection real clearly.

The next thing is spirituality. This is not just an apostle shopping list. Okay, go to the store and do this and this and the other thing. It isn't Paul's description of here's how you make a tent. Even if it was apostolic, it certainly needs to have spiritual content too. So that's one of the criteria. The next one is universality.

Was this book circulated and received among those in the church? Or is this some obscure book that, you know, whoever heard of it? If it was universally received, it was because it was recognized early on among the churches as being apostolic. It's connected. The next thing you see here, this inspiration. Did the book give evidence of being divinely inspired? What does that mean?

It needs to have revealed information that you could not have gotten except by revelation. If it's just talking about things, oh we already knew that, then that doesn't help. It needs to be divinely inspired such that it conveys information you couldn't have gotten without revelation.

Why the canon is closed, and of course we went through the Jude 3 verse, but here's a couple here and they're all related to the coming of Lord Jesus and to the apostles. God has completed the revealing through his son and those he elected to serve as contemporary witnesses. We have several New Testament passages in the next bullet there that speak of the finality of the apostolic era. It's been given, like we saw in Jude 3, it's been given This is it.

You're not getting more after this. And then finally, there aren't any more apostles. We've got biblical qualifications to be an apostle. And if you look down that list, you don't have apostles. There are those who will claim to be apostles today. They don't meet the qualifications. They're real clear and they're well laid out in scripture. Okay. How's folks holding up? Doing okay? Alright. We'll keep going then, we won't stop.

590-1517, roughly a thousand year period of time. Here is this period of time when the scriptures kind of went under, in one sense there was some copying being done, but in the other sense it was difficult because actually it became increasingly hard for the average person to get access to the scripture during this period of time.

Here's a fellow who, in England, translated the Gospel of John into what I'll call pre-English. If you and I were to read that, we would recognize very few words. Most of the words would be, we'd look at them and say, that doesn't make any sense to me. But nonetheless, he translated the entire Gospel of John and they could hand copy it and pass that around and get the Gospel from that.

It was in English that they could read at the time. Here are several translations done during this period of time. There's a subsequent English translation. By the way, I'll show you later, you've got a sample of that for John 3.16 from 995 AD. The first German translation, and I tried to find copies of that, but my sense is you probably couldn't read that very easily either. German has changed enough.

The Old Slavic. And Eliska, I was talking with her about that, they do have copies of some text right from that era. And that's basically how a lot of the Slavic languages, have you noticed like, for example, Russian, has letters, characters that look very Greek. And it's because these guys came, they actually came from Thessalonica and went up into this area and created a language that was largely founded on Greek. So some of the letters are Greek-ish looking.

Alright. Now you wonder where your chapter breaks came from. There's this Langton guy. And some others credit this Cardinal Hugo. Most folks will look to Langton as being the guy. If you want to call it objectively, during the 13th century it happened.

But all they did is they put chapter breaks in. One of the things you'll note, and a few places it even shows up in the Old Testament, a common saying was, somewhere it says. Because nobody had any way to refer anything. Somewhere it says. Or the scripture says this, or Isaiah said that, because they had no way to specify where things were. This is the beginning of being able to tell a chapter and a verse. John Wycliffe comes along. He translates the Bible from the Latin Vulgate. Again, not from the Greek and Hebrew, from the Latin Vulgate. And he got that produced about 1380. And all the copies then were hand copied. And so he was able to produce that.

One of the things you'll notice, in those days it was as important to put all kinds of fancy work all over the scriptures as it was to get them out. So they spent hours and hours and hours. Can you imagine doing all this by hand? That's the way it was done. They would spend hours and hours and that would be one page and then they'd have to do the next one. Every page was all hand done with all this artwork. So you get a copy of the Wycliffe Bible, a great number of them are done like this. And they would have people doing this sometimes had no idea what the content was. Putting hours and hours into all this stuff. Made it expensive. Okay. We talked last week about the printing press and its impact.

About 1455 is when that showed up, and that hit like the internet is hitting in our culture now. Now, from there, what you see, here's Erasmus' copy of the Greek New Testament. And actually, I say the Greek New Testament, it was Greek and Latin, side by side. So it was a Greek-Latin interlinear sort of, side by side, not so much interlinear. 1516, there, And he was the first one to pull the Greek text together. Now, what he was doing, though, was scrambling to get this together because there was another fellow he was competing with. So he was, you know, give me some texts, okay?

And there was even some verses at the end of Revelation he couldn't find, so he translated them from the Latin back into the Greek. So instead of having the original Greek, it was Greek to Latin back to Greek. And so some of it at the end is a little strange. It also is one of the reasons why at the very last part of the King James Bible, your words don't match up with the modern translation, because they use just text. Okay.

Martin Luther came up with the German Bible in the New Testament in 1522. My understanding is he did an outstanding job for that time. It just did an outstanding job and eventually produced the entire Bible. By the way, you can see the pages of those days weren't as thin as they are now. That's a pretty thick Bible. And here's the interesting thing. When you start stepping into the history of printed English Bibles, we go into a Bible bookstore now and we've just got study Bibles like crazy. There's more varieties than you can imagine. But the way it started, here's Tyndale New Testament, and by the way, Tyndale at the time was doing something that was illegal. They had guys, they had bounty hunters going after this guy.

And so, can you imagine trying to translate the Bible, and you've got all these things all over, and you're trying to do that while you're running? And so, he would get wind that somebody's after him, he'd pick everything up and move somewhere else. And so he kept ahead until finally they caught up with him. And he got this out. Oh, and he also had the entire Bible translated, was carrying it across the English Channel on a boat, and the boat went down, he lived, everything was lost, he had to start over. All by hand. Okay? This wasn't, you know, I'll modem a copy onto you and it's somewhere else. This was the whole thing done and having to start over again. He had a friend named Miles Coverdale, and so here's Miles Coverdale. This was around the time that Tyndale was already caught.

And then the Matthews Bible. By the way, the Matthews Bible is a pseudonym. This was still during a period of time where translating was something you wanted to be careful about. So here's one that was released, and that's not actually the guy's name, but that's the pseudonym that he put out there so it would make it hard to track him. A few others, the Great Bible, and this is one, the Geneva Bible, that was particularly well received.

1560 was the time that started, and that was very well received. We'll look at that in a little minute here. The Bishop's Bible was not terribly well received. King James Bible, which we're going to take a deeper look at, 1611 was the date for that. So actually, there were a number of English Bibles before the King James. And by the way, this isn't a complete listing, there are some others in there as well, but these are some of the main ones.

Now, the verse numbers and breaks were added, basically first in the Greek New Testament, 1551, and then finally in the New Testament, 1557, and then the Old Testament in 1560. That was the first edition of the Geneva Bible. That was the first one that had the verse numbers in the whole Bible in English. Isn't that amazing? So we take it for granted, oh, chapter and verse. Most of church history, that's not been the case. They've had to say, somewhere it says. The numbers are not inspired. They are very helpful.

Now you have in the back of your package today a scanned copy, and I tried to do it high resolution so that it was pretty good. This is a page, Ephesians 1-3, because it's two-sided. Ephesians 1-3 out of a Geneva Bible. And so you've got a copy there, and that's older than the King James. And you get an idea of what it was like. It did have some kind of cross-references and notes and things of that sort filtered through it. All right, here's some textual comparisons. And by the way, in the back of your handout, there's a five-page piece that has this and several other of the old translations. You can take a look at it.

Here's the first edition King James for John 3.16. What's amazing is that it has actually changed. There has been revision. One of the differences is the U's and the V's have been switched. Remember in the old days they used to have the U's and the V's the other way. Here's Tyndale's translation And you can certainly read it, but you can also see some of the differences. Given is G-E-V-E-N. Son is S-O-N-N-E. And then perish, boy, that's really something. And life, L-Y-F-E. So there have been some definite changes in the English language from these early translations. Now, you have this timeline also in yours. And I apologize for the small size, but that's to fit it all on the page. But you've got the full size in your package there with you.

And one of the things to take note of here is that, you know, how many of you have heard somebody say, well, the King James Bible, that's the only one. That's the inspired version. You heard that? OK. Now, you have to ask them, which one? Because this was the 1611. And you've also got a sample of that we'll talk about in a minute. And then there was the 1629 and the 1638 revision. And then in the 1600, 1762 and the 1769 revision. And finally, you got one. Here's 1871. It's actually 1885 when they finished it. I think that's what's on yours. 1885 when they finally finished it and pulled everything through on that one. Here's something that's fascinating. When the King James Bible first came out, the Puritans and the Pilgrims in this country, they would not have it. If you had a King James Bible, they wouldn't read it.

They wouldn't look at it. They didn't want you to have it. They were just mad as hornets about that coming out. They called it the Devil's Bible. And it took several decades for the King James Version to actually take the dominance that it came to have. But initially, they wouldn't have it. They wouldn't allow it in their churches. They discouraged people from having it. And people had it, they said, get rid of it. Okay? Wouldn't allow them to have it. Yeah? What would they use? The Geneva Bible. The Geneva Bible, they figured, was accepted.

And there's also some other reasons that we'll see in a minute here. Here is a 1611, and you have a copy of this, and notice the S. You've got a copy of this in your handout, so you've got the page there. This is Jeremiah and the end of Isaiah. And one of the things you'll notice here is there's some things that have definitely changed from this first version. You see, this is restoring. It looks like an F. And that you'll find throughout the whole text there. That F appearing S is a little confusing to folks.

A lot of the things that we spell now with a J had an I, including Jesus. Jesus was Yesus, okay? Not Jesus. So there are things like that where the spelling is substantially different. Look at how he spells chariots, okay? In there. Or here's sanctify, with the end as I-E. Here's the themselves, and it's U instead of V at the end, okay? Or here's another one, it's Jerusalem. So you see that pattern, and then look at the note.

Here's Jeremiah, and what do you see reference to? The church. The church was not revealed in the Old Testament, but through and through, You'll find in the top headings as well as chapter titles reference to the church in the Old Testament in the original King James Version. What they did eventually is weed that out because that may have been, you know, that was the Anglican view and the Anglicans were happy with it but a lot of the folks when you went, that's one of the reasons why I call it the Devil's Bible, you get over into the Americas and it was not well received and a lot of the people in the European continent didn't care for it at all. And so a lot of the notes were offensive. And this is an example. The original version also talks about unicorns and things like that. Okay. Now, church history timeline as we go through here, this is real interesting.

You go over to America, this is the first Bible printed in America. It was to the Algonquian Indians. And this fellow John Eliot devised a language for them, because they didn't have a printed language, so he devised a language for them that was something he would have to teach them to read, but at least it spelled out words in words that they would recognize. Isn't that interesting? It would be almost two lifetimes later that the Aitken Bible would be printed. And so it's amazing.

This was after the Declaration of Independence. So this was a long period of time later before they actually start printing other Bibles in the United States aside from that special purpose Bible for the Algonquian Indians. This Bible had the Apocrypha taken out.

It was common from Tyndale's time and even Wycliffe's all the way up until about this time to have the Apocrypha right between the Old and New Testaments. And we'll talk about the Apocrypha in a bit. Here's the Bible from Abraham Lincoln's boyhood home. It had the Apocrypha in it. That was common.

From about the time of Aitken's printing up until about the middle to late 1800s was a period of time when the Protestant Bibles started taking the Apocrypha out. Even up until that time it was common to have the Apocrypha included. Okay, why not the Apocrypha? Now, what's wrong with that? A few things.

The Jews never received the books. We mentioned before that Josephus listed the 39 books of the Old Testament, and he didn't list the Apocryphal books at all. There are many errors of time, history, geography, just basically in fact, that are in the Apocrypha. Christ and the Apostles in the New Testament, they quote 260 times from the Old Testament, never from the Apocrypha, even though the books were available at that time if they wanted to quote them. Never were they quoted.

And finally, we listed Josephus as listing. The main reason the Apocrypha were added as a part of the official portion of the Old Testament was by the Catholic Church after the Reformation had begun, because one of the Protestant attacks was on the idea of purgatory.

And, you know, paying indulgences and things of that sort. And there was one text there that they would quote in 2 Maccabees that they used as support. Matter of fact, you'll still find it in the Catholic Catechism as support for this. It doesn't hold up, but nonetheless, that was one of the reasons why they finally said, OK, this is a part of the scripture, because they were able to pull that in and try to use that as support.

OK, this is a King James Version 1872 printing open to the 23rd Psalm. Just copy it over there. It's my great-grandmother's Bible. You can take a look at it if you like. Some things to look at. There's also a 1611 replica. It's one you can take a look at if you want to see other parts other than the part that I gave you. You can see, you know, some of the different things that are in it. It has the Apocrypha. It's got the Ecclesiastical Calendar and a whole bunch of other things about the phases of the moon and everything else. It's amazing. There is a copy of the Apocrypha.

You can take a look at some of the books and things that are in it. Other books on the history of the Bible. So feel free to have a look at those. Nancy has the paper I mentioned earlier. It's about 14 pages. It also gives a history from the King James on to the late 1800s. It gives information that isn't in the package that you have. Take a look at it if you want it. We can print it up and there's a sign-up sheet there. And so we'll be glad to print that up for you if you'd like it. And, let's see, I think that's it. Questions? Blown away? Yes?

Yeah, you know, we tend to think that we have an explosion of versions, but actually, There were versions of the King James back in the 1700s and on. The first gender-inclusive Bible was actually in the 1700s. And there were numerous people... I showed, for example, this one here. It was a year before that. Darby put out a version of the Bible as his own translation. So there has always been a great number of translations since about that time when the King James was first put out. Here's the thing that I would say about the modern versions. Today, there's lots of footnotes and things like that.

The thing to be careful with, I think, is in two areas. One is a paraphrase is good to read to kind of get the general gist of something that's not good to study. So that would be one caution. And the other thing is they can put anything they want in the footnotes, you know, at footnotes and various references.

And so you'll have Bibles that are slanted in a particular direction, and there's lots of those. The hazard with a lot of these Bibles is people will look at it and they'll say, well, it's in a Bible, it must be true. The problem is that it doesn't hold the inspiration of Scripture. So I would say if you have something that's a study Bible, no matter who produced it, check everything. Check everything. Because what you have in a lot of today's study Bibles is a number of notes. It's basically somebody's commentary, isn't it? You've got somebody's commentary that's in there. So like any other commentary, check it out.

Yes. The Vulgate actually came out originally in 405 AD. Jerome was the one that put that out. It was around the year 600 that Gregory I, the first pope, said this is the inspired translation. It was except on the peripheral areas because we've shown some other translations that were later. It was, after a time, increasingly enforced.

This is the only Bible you're allowed to have. Like in the 13th century, people were not allowed to have Bibles within the area of the control of the Roman Catholic Church. It was a capital offense for you to have a Bible. You got a Bible, you're dead.

Yeah, more questions? That's enough. Let's pray. Lord, thank you for your word. As we've seen here today, you have preserved the very words that we need. Lord, you have preserved your revelation miraculously over these centuries. And Lord, at this time when we can just see the amazing hand of your preservation over these scriptures, we thank you for them and thank you as we behold you through them. that we have the marvelous opportunity to grow from glory to glory. I just pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.