Basics of the Bible - Lesson 2

In this second lesson, we're going to cover the topic of what's called Bibliology — what do we believe about the Bible. You may know a word, "bibliolatry," which is the worship of the book and not the author. That's not what we're doing here. But this is Bibliology — what do we believe about the Bible?

A. The Bible as a Library

In very broad strokes, the Bible is a library. It's got 66 books from around 50 authors that were written over about 1,500 years, and there's a tremendous amount of variety — variety in language, variety in culture reflected in the writings, difference of style, different vocabulary, those kinds of things. And yet what's amazing is that you have this consistent message all the way through the Bible, and it's about Jesus. In chapter 3 of Genesis, the first book in the Bible, God promises that a descendant of Eve will crush Satan. And so you have this promise of salvation, of redemption, starting at the very beginning, and it's repeated in various ways as you go through the Bible until you get to Jesus, and you find out that Jesus is the fulfillment of that prophecy that God made so many years ago. It's why we talk about Jesus being the theological center of the Bible. Everything points to him.

B. The Two Testaments

Those 66 books are divided into two testaments. We call them the Old or the Hebrew Testament and the New Testament. A testament is simply a covenant — it's an agreement. God makes an agreement, defines the nature of the relationship that he has with his creation. And these covenants come with blessings and curses sometime. But a testament is simply a covenant. It's an agreement.

And so we have what we call the Old Testament, and it's all originally written in Hebrew, a little bit in Aramaic. Sometimes people call it the Hebrew Testament or the Hebrew Bible. It covers the story of creation in Genesis 1, all the way up through the prophet of Malachi around 400 BC. It's about four-fifths of the Bible.

Then you have the New Testament, and this starts with the Gospels, the story of Jesus. Then it goes through the expansion of the church, and Paul coming in and helping us understand theologically a little more of what Jesus taught. And so we have this Old Testament, and we have this New Testament.

The 66 books are broken down into books, and then hundreds and hundreds of years after they were originally written, somebody broke them into chapters and into verses. So if I refer to John 3:16, I'm referring to the book of John, chapter 3 and verse 16.

II. How We Got the Bible

What I want to do is I want to go through chronologically how the Bible is written and how we got it.

A. Oral Teaching

It all starts with oral teaching. Jesus basically, by word of mouth — that's what I mean by oral — taught. The apostles may have taken notes; we don't know for sure, but most of the teaching was just done orally.

It's important to understand that even though it was oral, it was accurately recorded. We have authors, like the 12 Apostles, that were in a position to actually hear it and to remember it. You have the fact that much of what Jesus taught was said in public, and so you have this much larger community — larger than just the 12 — who would have heard, who would have listened, who would have made sure the stories were told accurately. But Jesus promises the disciples right before he goes to the cross in John 14:26 that the Holy Spirit would superintend and help them to remember accurately. So just because things started orally doesn't mean they can't be trusted.

B. The Period of Writing

Then you move into this period of writing. You have Paul's 13 letters that were written, perhaps as early as the late 40s, certainly into the 50s and 60s. We believe the Gospel of Mark was written in probably the 50s. The Gospel of John would have been the last thing written, and that would have been in the 80s to the 90s. We'll talk more about this. But you had this period of writing. Perhaps even the book of James was the first book written — that would have been very, very early.

What's important is that we know these authors. We know who they are, except for the author of the book of Hebrews. We don't have a clue who wrote the book of Hebrews. But apart from that, all the authors were in a position to know the stories of Jesus and to therefore know the truth. And what happened was their authority got transferred to their writings. So it didn't matter whether you heard Paul talking or whether you read his letter to the Roman church — that letter carried Paul's authority. So we had this period of writing.

III. Inspiration

That brings us to the whole doctrine of inspiration, which is a very important doctrine. The definition of inspiration simply has to do with source, and that is that Scripture comes from God. And in 2 Timothy 3:16, there's this verse where it says, "All of Scripture is..." And the Greek word is a hard word at one level, because Paul makes up a word. And you can do that in Greek like you can in other languages. He just made up a word. He took the word for God and he took the word for breathe, "theopneustos," and he put them together and he said, "All Scripture is theopneustos." It means that all Scripture comes from the very mouth of God. It's breathed out by him. And because God is the source of all of Scripture, we therefore believe that it's true in everything that it says.

In the 2 Timothy passage, he continues, and he says, "All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work." And if you're a Christian, you are that servant of God. In other words, because Scripture comes from God, we use it for our teaching, for rebuking sin, for correcting behavior, for training people how to be right with God, how to be righteous. And so Scripture comes from the mouth of God and is therefore the unique and sole authority in our lives.

How did that happen? It's a mystery. We don't know. We can see in the text that different writers have different vocabulary and different styles and different ways of thinking, but somehow in that whole process, God superintended the process so he got said what he wanted to get said. In fact, Peter talks about this in his second letter, in 2 Peter 1:19 and 20. He goes, "Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture" (in other words, nothing that Scripture says) "came about by the prophet's own interpretation of things. For prophecy never had..." — and again, prophecy is what we would call Scripture — "prophecy never had its origin in the human will." And here's the line: "But prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit." So that's the doctrine of inspiration — comes from the mouth of God, and is therefore authoritative and true.

IV. Canonicity

Okay. So Scripture was inspired, it was eventually written down. But then we move into the whole topic of what's called canonicity, and canonicity is the discussion of how did we get the books in the Bible that we have? There were some books that were written that are not included; there are other books, the ones that we have, that were included in the Canon — the official list of authoritative books. How did people decide what books belonged in the Bible?

A. Three Tests for Inclusion

There seems to have been three tests.

1. Apostolic Authorship

One is apostolic authorship — who wrote it? That seems to be the number one thing that the early church looked at. They would look at Romans and go, "Well, Paul wrote it, so obviously it's authoritative, so we'll accept it." But then you get the Didache and go, "Well, it's good stuff, but we don't even know who wrote it." So the number one rule for inclusion into the Bible was who wrote it.

2. Harmony of Doctrine and Tone

It appears that there was a second criteria, and I just say it's harmony of doctrine and tone. In other words, does this book feel like the other books? Again, there's a lot of variety. Hebrews is really different from John. But still, do they feel like they belong together? Do they feel like they are from God? You may have heard about the Gospel of Thomas, and some people think it should have been in the Bible. But if you look at these two tests: it wasn't written by Thomas, because it was written in the second half of the second century, and no matter how long Thomas lived, he didn't live that long. But it's also fundamentally different from the New Testament, and if you read it at all, you'll see how fundamentally different it is.

3. Acceptance by the Church as a Whole

So how did books get in the Bible? It's who wrote them. Do they agree with the books that we have already accepted as authoritative? And then the third test was, did the church as a whole accept them? Sometimes people say, "Well, some scholars off in a corner made these decisions." That is not true at all. The people looked at the church in Ephesus: "What books do you believe are from God?" They would go to Thessalonica: "What books do you believe are from God?" Origen actually went from place to place talking to people, trying to see what the churches had agreed on. And the books that are in the Bible are those that the church as a whole recognized as having divine authorship.

B. The Canon Established Early

You can see why books like 2 and 3 John had a little trouble getting into the Bible, because they were very short — they wouldn't have been distributed very widely, and they were written to two specific churches. But eventually, apostolic authorship won out and they were included in the Bible.

There's no conspiracy here. There are a lot of conspiracy theories about this — about Nicea, about Constantine, Constantine's mommy. There are a lot of conspiracies out there, but they're not true at all. They're built on lies, frankly.

So what we have is that very early — by at least the 60s — we had this core. We had Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. We had Acts, we had all of Paul's 13 letters, and we had 1 Peter and 1 John. Those books were accepted — and actually Revelation too — were accepted instantly as authoritative. And then the other books were compared to them to make sure they agreed. So the process of canonizing the Bible, of collecting the books, was very clearly laid out in history, and we know how it was done.

V. Transmission

So canonicity — we know the books that we have now. How did those books get transmitted through the centuries? What about the transmission?

A. Autographs

There are two words that are important here. One is autographs. When Paul sat down and wrote the letter, or his amanuensis wrote the letter to the church in Rome, that document was called an autograph. And actually, we believe that of every letter that was written, there was another one that was written — one was saved, one was sent off. But that was the autograph. And the problem is we don't have any of the autographs. They were written on parchment. Parchment is biodegradable, and so we don't have any of those.

B. Manuscripts

But what we have are thousands of handwritten copies of the autographs. We call these manuscripts, and if you look at and compare these manuscripts, we have about 6,000 of them — more than any ancient book ever. But when you look at these, there are differences. There are differences, but when you start comparing the differences, you find people are comfortable that at least 99% of these differences, we know what the original was. And in fact, a lot of them simply don't matter. The differences don't affect the meaning at all. For example, on the Greek name for John, you can spell it with one N or two Ns — no difference in meaning at all. Most of the differences among the manuscripts are those kinds of differences, and we can look at them and we can see what was original, if it matters. And again, what's really important is that 1% — and Dan Wallace argues that it's actually about 0.3% of the remaining differences — contain no biblical doctrine. There's no doctrine — the Trinity is not called into question by textual differences in the manuscripts. So God superintended the process. For some reason, he allowed differences to creep in, but they're differences that have no real value or warrant, so you can trust what we have.

So we have the manuscripts that come to us. Eventually, around the time of Erasmus, they started getting printed out — movable type — and so that changes things.

VI. Translations

We finally get to the last topic, which is translations. Unless you're going to read Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic, you're going to need to read a translation, because the Old Testament is written primarily in Hebrew, a few chapters in Aramaic — a kind of a sister language to it. The New Testament is all written in Greek. And so we have these three languages reflected in the Bible.

A. The Challenge of Translation

The problem — and it is a problem in any kind of translation — is that it's virtually impossible to say in one language what's being said in another language. I mean, Greek doesn't even have the word "a," the indefinite article. The difference in English between saying "the" and "a" can be really significant, but we don't even have the word "a" in Greek. And so, languages aren't codes. They don't go together neatly, and you have to interpret. That's the only way that you can do it.

I was the New Testament chair of the English Standard Version, and I'm currently on the Translation Committee for the New International Version. And I will tell you, every verse has to be interpreted because of the nature of languages. This ambiguity that we have between different languages certainly is at the word level. I mean, think of the English word "can." What are all the ways you can use the word "can"? Or the word "run"? You could run a race. The clock could run down. You could run a company. Words have this breadth of meanings that's not reflected in the other language.

Word-Level Ambiguity: "Doulos"

One of the more common illustrations is the Greek word "doulos." "Doulos" in Greek can either mean servant or slave. It doesn't mean exactly either one of those. So are you a slave of Christ or are you a servant of Christ? It takes interpretation, but that's the kind of ambiguity that we have to deal with in translations.

Grammatical-Level Ambiguity: Colossians 1:11

But we also have ambiguity at a grammatical level. And again, this is what makes translation work fun and enjoyable, but hard work. In Colossians 1:11, Paul prays that the Colossians be "strengthened with all power according to the might of his glory." What does that mean? "Might of his glory" — what does that mean? If you know your Greek, you know the "of" construction is the genitive case in Greek, and this case can function a lot of different ways. And this is clearly what's called a Hebraic genitive, and so "might of his glory" means "his glorious might." It's a way to take a noun and make it function as an adjective. To translate word for word, "the might of his glory" doesn't mean anything. But when you understand the ambiguity and the use of grammar along with vocabulary, "Oh, it's glorious might." That's real obvious. And all the modern major translations, I should say, go with "glorious might."

B. Translation Philosophy

So there's this ambiguity in language, and this frankly is why translations are different — all verses require interpretation, and every committee has a translation philosophy. And it's mostly how close to the words are we going to stick? Are we going to just try to translate the words and let you kind of figure out what they mean? Or are we going to translate the meaning of the words?

Example: Romans 16:16

Let me give you an example, and this is one of my favorites. Paul ends his letter to the Romans in 16:16. In the NIV, it says — and most translations say this — "Greet one another with a holy kiss." What's that? What's a holy kiss? I don't know what that is. The Good News Translation says, "Greet one another with a brotherly kiss." That actually works. It means something. Later on, the Good News changed it to, "Greet one another with a kiss of peace," which I think is just going backwards. I don't think that really means anything.

The initial Living Translation said, "Shake hands warmly with each other." And actually they got it right. Because when Paul says, "Greet one another with a holy kiss," what he's saying is use the traditional form of greeting a person that you're close to. For them, it was a holy kiss, whatever that is. For us today, it's a good handshake, maybe a hug, I don't know. But the Living Bible is actually very good at that point. The later edition, the New Living, says, "Greet one another with a sacred kiss." Again, I don't think that means anything. J.B. Phillips' translation says, "Give each other a hearty handshake all around." That actually is very good, I think, because it conveys the meaning of what, culturally, Paul was expressing by a holy kiss.

This is why our translations are different. How close are you going to stick to the words, or are you going to try to convey the meaning of the words?

C. You Can Trust Your Translations

I want to close by emphasizing this. You can trust your translations, even though there are differences. The differences tend to be that one is a little more general and the other is a little more specific, in trying to help you understand the meaning of it. But you can trust your translations. And what I encourage you to do is to pick one for study. Pick one that you can mark up, underline, write in, and stick with that. But always read a second translation.

Don't read the second translation of the same kind. In other words, you could pick either like the ESV, NASB, or the CSB, or you could pick the NIV or the NLT — something like that, so you're getting a real different look at it. But Bruce Waltke is famous on the committee for saying — the NIV committee — that there's no translation that will lead you astray, and every translation will lead you to the cross. And he's right. There are going to be little differences, but they're basically saying the same thing.

What we're going to do in the next two lessons, we're going to summarize the Old Testament and the New Testament. But then in lesson five, we'll actually talk about, okay, how do we go about understanding these translated Bibles? Thanks.