The Bible - Medieval Myth or Word of God?

A game of Chinese whispers is played by sitting in a circle and each person speaking into the next person's ear. By the end of the game the simple phrase you began with has been distorted into something completely different. Is this how the Bible was written? Wasn't it passed down by word of mouth? There would have been an oral form of the story, especially at a time when the majority of people couldn't read, but there would have been a written form. The Bible was written on scrolls. Jesus read from a scroll in the temple. Luke 4:16-21. Jesus stood in the temple to give a reading. He did this quite regularly on the Sabbath. The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. He read, 'The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor, to open the eyes of the blind, to set free those who are downtrodden amd to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour.' The Bible was kept in the temple on scrolls, was read publicly on the Sabbath, and was studied amd memorised by people doing rabbinic training.

How accurately cam you copy a scroll? The Dead Sea Scrolls were found in 1947. They were from 125 BC, about a thousand years older than any manuscript of the Old Testament that had existed before. They were preserved in the desert because of the dry environment. They were almost exactly the same. Only a few spelling mistakes. I have some experience of copying scriptures by hand as I memorise scriptures from hand written sheets of paper. In 1998 a hymn book was printed with a scripture index. It was not a very good scripture index and you could not see where all the hymns were in the Bible. But it gave me an idea. I spent 20 years writing s really good acripture index to the hymn book and have a clip file with hand written copies of all the Bible verses used in a hundred well known hymns in alphabetical order. If you make a mistake it is serious. If people are memorising scripture it's very important that the verse says exactly what it said 40 years ago. It is possible to produce an exact copy of a manuscript but requires some effort. The most common mistake is to miss a few phrases out if the passage still makes sense without those phrases, a problem that is actually very common in ancient manuscripts of the Bible. Any change in the words will cause confusion. The preacher Chuck Missler used the 1611 Authorised Version to memorise scripture because the popular New International Version kept changing. In 1984 Psalm 103 changed from 'he forgives all your sins' to 'who forgives all your sins' and in 2003 2Corinthians 5:17 changed from 'If any man is in Christ he is a new creation' to 'if anyone is in Christ they are a new creation.' A scribe in a monastery couldn't possibly make up or invent anything new. They wouldn't dare even change 'who' to 'he' or 'any man' to 'anyone.'

What does the Bible say about the timelessness of God's word? The grass withers and the flowers fade but the word of our God stands forever. Isaiah 40:8. God's word is settled in Heaven. His fsithfulness continues for all generations. The earth stands according to God's ordinances. Psalm 119:89-96. The words of the Lord are pure words. Like silver is refined in the fire several times. God will preserve them for future generations. Psalm 12:6,7. Jesus said, 'Heaven amd Earth will pass away. My words will never pass away.' Matthew 24:35.

The historian Colin Homer compiled 84 checkable historical facts from the book of Acts. The Bible is also well documented. Some ancient historical works have fewer than a dozen copies but the Bible has thousands. The Bible passes the standard tests for checking that an historical document is genuine.

So the Bible we have is a genuine copy of a genuine historical Bible. But how was it written? 2Peter 1:20,21. No prophecy ever came about through the prophet's own interpretation but men spoke as they were carried along by the spirit of God. The gospels were written within two generations of Jesus Christ and were based on eye witness accounts. The differences we get between the gospel accounts of the resurrection are the kind of differences we'd expect from eye witness accounts written by different people. Matthew 28:1-10 mentions an angel who rolled away the stone from the entrance to the tomb and sat on it. He then told the women that Jesus had risen from the dead. Mark 16:1-13 describes a young man, clothed in white, sitting in the tomb, who announces that Jesus is risen from the dead. It says that the stone has already been rolled away, much to the surprise of one of the women who asked, 'Who will roll away the stone?' John 20:1-18 includes Mary Magdalene visiting the tomb on her own, seeing that it is empty, and running to tell Peter. She doesn't understand what is going on. She has a conversation with two angels who ask her why she is weepimg. She then speaks to a man she believes to be the gardener, who turns out to be the risen Jesus. In these stories, we don't know how much time has elapsed and what the story looked like from each person's point of view. The story in Matthew includes the astonishment of the guards when an angel rolled away the stone from the tomb and sat on it. The story in John involves an earlier visit to the tomb, where Mary and Peter are simply puzzled by the missing stone and the empty tomb. The main visit of the three women to the tomb occurs later. The passage in John involving Mary's conversation with the angels and Jesus is the same visit from Mary's point of view. How many angels were there? There were two but the other gospels only mention the one who spoke to the other women. It's like people who have witnessed an accident appearing in court. The person who was giving first aid to the cyclist are going to tell you a completely different story to the people who were inside the car.

How was the Bible canonised and why were so many books taken out of it? The Bible we have includes the Jewish scriptures, which we call the Old Testament, and the scriptures written after the time of Christ, which is the New Testament. There is a further set of books called the Apochrypha which are Jewish but the Jews never accepted these as the word of God. The Catholic church included them in their Bible. The Ethiopian Orthodox church also included the book of Enoch. I've read some of these books myself and they are not inspired in the same way that the Bible is inspired. It is important that the Bible is consistently the word of God and not an ancient equivalent of an action movie. The book of Maccabees praises the Roman government. How could it be the infallible word of God? Daniel feeds a dragon with dumplings until it explodes. Enoch sees the cog wheels that move the stars and when Noah is a baby he can talk. A lot of things in the book of Enoch do seem to be true. It contains some interesting prophecies about the coming flood, at the time of Noah, and about the end of the world. There are other stories about Daniel that aren't in the Bible because they aren't very inspiring. The canon of scripture is the gold standard. That is what the word canon means. Like the Canon camera or the Canon printer, the ultimate scriptures, the only one you will ever need. The story about Daniel preventing a woman being stoned to death for adultery says nothing that is essential to your Christian life or your salvation. The Bible gives you wisdom that will lead to salvation and is useful for teaching, rebuking and training in righteousness so that the Christian may be fully equipped for every good work. 2Timothy 3:14-17. The apocryphal books are neither inspired nor sufficiently inspiring to be in the canon of scripture.

How accurately is the Bible translated? Nearly all Bibles are translated directly from the original languages of Hebrew and Greek. Only the Catholic Bible is translated from the Vulgate which is a 3rd century Latin translation. I have had a Catholic Bible. It isn't very different. It occasionally says 'do penance' when the ordinary Bible says 'repent.' It includes the Apocrypha and the book of Maccabees which tells you to burn incense to atone for your sins. 99 per cent of it is exactly the same, except for these snippets of Catholic teaching. The 1611 Authorised Version and the 1978 New International Version are popular translations which are very literal. Some modern translations are paraphrased, with more of an attempt to explain what is meant simply. This leads to problems where the real meaning of a phrase is ambiguous. In the traditional Bible, Jesus is talking about divorce being equivalent to adultery and one of the disciples says, 'In that case it is better for a man not to marry.' Jesus replies, 'Whoever can accept this teaching should accept it.' Matthee 19:1-12. In The Message Jesus says, 'It is better for a man to marry.' Or is he saying it is better for a man not to marry? In another modern translation he says, 'Let people get married if they want to.' The paraphrased Bibles sometimes give a simple meaning to a phrase that is actually very ambiguous and that's always been controversial. They have the advantage that they are much easier to understand. I use the International Children's Bible when I'm preaching. If you want to know what the verse really means, you should compare the paraphrase to a more literal translation. The other main problem in Bible translation is dumbing down of words which are controversial. Baptism is a made up word, as the 1611 Bible translators couldn't translate the Greek baptismo as total immersion in water. They could have been burned at the stake. Likewise, the Greek word translated church really means gathering of the people and the word presbyter really means older Christian with some responsibility for others and not Bishop. Did Jesus die for our sorrows and infirmities or did he die for our sicknesses and diseases?

Although not written by the hand of God, the Bible is a divinely inspired and accurate book. The differences created by eye witness accounts or imperfect copying are omissions, not mistakes, and the translation is accurate except for a few verses where the original meaning is uncertain and even then is conservative and cautious in its explanation rather than totally wrong. We can be sure that the Bible we have is a reasonable copy of the original scriptures and that it is God's genuine revelation of Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.