The Strand Study Bible

How We Got OUR Bible (our English Bible) W hile God found it expedient to speak to the human race through The Spoken Word and The Living Word in times past, He has chosen to communicate with all people for all ages through The Written Word ( II Pet 1: 15- 21 ). According to the Bible, what God gave to us by inspiration, He kept for us by preservation . The Psalmist said in Psalm 119:89: For ever, O LORD, thy word is settled in heaven. Jesus said in Matthew 24:35: Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away . The complete process by which these books came to be generally regarded as exclusively authoritative is not known for either the Hebrew or Christian canon. We do, however, appear to have a selection of certain books that have been preserved. Obviously, a God wise enough to communicate His words to man is powerful enough to preserve them. The question is: How did God preserve what He inspired? J ews, Christians and Catholics all have ‘canons’ of scripture. The Jewish canon consists of 39 books (the Old Testament); the Christian canon consists of 66 books (the Old and New Testaments); and the Catholic canon consists of 73 books (the Old and New Testaments plus 7 of the 13 books of the Apocrypha ). So why is it that some books have been ‘canonized’ while others, such as, the Gnostic Gospels ( Colo 2:16 ) and the Apocrypha ( Lk 11:51 ) have not? And why is it that some books that are talked about within the Scriptures, such as, the book of the Wars of the Lord (Num 21:14), the book of Jasher (Josh 10:13 and II Sam 1:18), the book of the annals of Solomon (I Ki 11:41), the book of Nathan the prophet , and the book of Gad the seer (I Chro 29:29), became information instead of inspiration? It’s called preservation; God preserved what He inspired. W.H. Griffith Thomas in How We Got Our Bible notes:

At this point the important question arises how we can be sure that our Bible today really represents the books which have been thus naturally and simply collected into a volume. The answer is that it is quite easy to prove that our Bible is the same as the church has had through the centuries. We start with the printed Bibles of today and it is obviously easy to show that they correspond with the printed Bibles of the sixteenth century, or the time when printing was invented. From these we can go back through the English and Latin versions until we reach the great manuscripts of the fourth century as represented by the three outstanding codices known as the Codex Sinaiticus (in Petrograd), the Codex Vaticanus (in Rome) and the Codex Alexandrinus (in the British Museum). Then we can go back still farther and compare the use of Scripture in the writings of the Fathers of the third century, and from these work back to the second century when versions in several languages are found. From this it is but a short step to the time of the apostles and the actual composition of the New Testament writings. There is no reasonable doubt that we possess today what has always been regarded as the Scriptures of the Christian Church. 1

The sixty-six books we call “the Bible” were written, copied, and circulated amongst the churches of the ancient world. God made sure of that. Thus, the originals were copied and recopied for centuries by hand: the Codex Sinaiticus (c. AD 330), Codex Vaticanus (c. AD 330), Coptic Version (c. AD 350), Ethiopic Version (c. AD 350), Codex Argentus (c. AD 350 – Gothic Version), Armenian Version (c. AD 400), Codex Alexandrinus (c. AD 450 from Egypt), and English Versions (from c. AD 700 – present day). This is how God preserved what He inspired. He made sure that His words were never lost or hidden, but that they were copied and recopied till He had tens of thousands of copies. The King James Study Bible notes:

The doctrine of preservation argues that inspired books providentially survived, implying that the lost books were not inspired. They may have recorded interesting background to the inspired record of God, but they were not Scripture. 2 The History of the Received Text ( Antioch Text ; Textus Receptus )

U p until the fall of Constantinople, in which crowds of Greek scholars were driven for refuge into Western Europe (May, 1454), and the invention of the printing press (November, 1454) our pile of “ancient manuscripts” (our Scriptures in their original language) remained untouched. For almost 1,000 years, from c. AD 400 to 1476 (the first Greek grammar was published in 1476 and the first Hebrew grammar in 1503) all mankind had in the form of a Bible was St. Jerome’s translation of the “ancient manuscripts” in the form of Latin. Concerning Eusebius Hieronymus (better known to us as St. Jerome) and his work (The Latin Vulgate), J. Paterson Smyth in How We Got our Bible notes:

No other work has ever had such an influence on the history of the Bible. For more than a thousand years it was the parent of every version of the Scriptures in Western Europe, and even now, when the Greek and Hebrew manuscripts are so easily accessible, the Rhemish and Douay Testaments are translations direct from the Vulgate, and its influence is quite perceptible even on our own Authorized Version. 3

Even Wycliffe’s English translation (1383) was a translation of St. Jerome’s Latin translation. It wasn’t until the Greek scholars were forced into Europe from Constantinople that mankind was finally able in 1516 to produce a New Testament from the “ancient manuscripts.” T hanks in part to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947, the majority of Christians believe they have the preserved Word of God concerning the Hebrew Old Testament. Concerning the New Testament, however, there are some disagreements. Up until the 1880s every English Bible (with exception to a few earlier translations, including John Wycliffe’s in 1383, which was a translation of a translation based on the Latin Vulgate of St. Jerome) was translated from the same Greek text, i.e., the Textus Receptus , which came from the Byzantine (Antioch) textual family.

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