BIBLE SUMMARY

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THE BIBLE




The Bible is God’s Word to us. It is the traveler’s map, the pilgrim’s staff, the 


pilot’s compass, the soldier’s sword and the Christian’s character. It should fill 


the memory, rule the heart and guide the feet. It should be read slowly, 


frequently and prayerfully.



SOUCE : UNKNOWN






THE TWO COVENANTS OR TESTAMENTS



Although the Bible has many books, it is really one book - one continuous - with two distinct parts or “testaments,” from the Latin testamentum, meaning “oath” or “covenant.” The Old Testament contains the covenant God made with the people of Israel at Mount Sinai: “Now therefore, if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples” (Ex. 19:5). The New Testament contains the new covenant, which was foretold by the prophet Jeremiah: “The days are surely coming [said the Lord] when I will make a new covenant . . .” (Jer. 31:3). This covenant was instituted by Jesus at the Last Supper, when he said to his disciples: “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood” (Luke 22:20).




THE BIBLE: FORMATION, STRUCTURE AND BOOKS


The English word Bible comes from the Greek word biblia, meaning “books.” So the Bible is a collection of books, though technically not all are “books.” In the Old Testament the books of Psalms and Proverbs are collections of poems and sayings, and in the New Testament the majority of the books are letters.


The books themselves were written over a period spanning at least twelve hundred years - from 1100 B.C to A.D. 100 (“B.C.” stands for “Before Christ;” “A.D.” comes from the Latin Anno Domini, meaning “in the year of our Lord”). The books were written by many different authors, some of whom are known and many of whom are not, especially in the Old Testament, and they were written in many different places, including Palestine, Babylon, Corinth, Ephesus, Rome, Antioch and the Isle of Patmos. The Bible has been translated into some two thousand languages, and more than 80 percent of the world’s population has access to the Bible or some portion of it in their own language.




THE OLD TESTAMENT


Emperor Frederick the Great once asked his personal physician, Dr. Zimmermann, “Can you name me a single proof of the existence of God?” Zimmermann replied, “Your Majesty, the Jews!” By that he meant that if one wanted to ask for a proof of God, for something visible or tangible, that no one could contest, which us unfolded before the eyes of all men, then we should have to turn to the Jews. Quite simply, there they are to the present day. Hundreds of little nations in the Near East . . . have dissolved and disappeared in the huge sea of nations; [only] this one tiny nation has maintained itself . . . 


If the question of a proof of God is raised, one need merely point to this simple historical fact. For in the person of the Jew there stands before our eyes the witness of God’s covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and in the way with us all. Even one who does not understand Holy Scripture can see this reminder.




THE OLD TESTAMENT



The Old Testament has thirty-nine (39) books in Protestant Bibles, forty-six (46) books in Catholic Bibles and fifty (50) books in Orthodox Bibles, divided into four sections, as follows;


  • The Torah or Pentateuch are five “foundation” books - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy - in which God calls (elects) Israel to be his people, frees Israel from its bondage in Egypt and enters into covenant with Israel at Mount Sinai.
  • The Historical Books of Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah and Esther. The Historical Books trace the history of Israel over a period of eight hundred years: The entry of the Israelites into the Promised Land (Canaan) under Joshua in 1250 B.C.; the settlement of the land during the two-hundred year period of the judges, the monarchies of Saul, David (c. 1000 B.C.) and Solomon as kings over Israel; the split and division of the land into the kingdom of Israel and Judah and their defeat by the Assyrians (in 721 B.C.) and the Babylonians (in 586 B.C.); the Exile in Babylon and the return of the exiles 
  • to Israel (in 538 B.C.); and the resettlement of Jerusalem and Judea under the leadership of Ezra and Nehemiah (mid-400s B.C.).
  • The Prophets are the collected writings of the four “major” prophets - Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel - and the twelve “minor” prophets - Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk. Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. The prophetic writings also include the book of Lamentations, Jeremiah’s laments over the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B.C.
  • The Writings, also called the devotional and wisdom literature, comprise the books of Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and the Songs of Solomon or Song of Songs.




THE NEW TESTAMENT



The New Testament has twenty-seven (27) books, also divided into four sections:


  • The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are the written testimonies to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.
  • The Acts of the Apostles are the historical account of the early days of the Jerusalem church and the three missionary journey of Paul, covering the period A.D. 30 to the early 60s.
  • The Letters or Epistles comprise thirteen letters by or attributed to Paul - letters written to church communities in Rome, Corinth, Galatia, Ephesus, Philippi, Colossae and Thessalonica, and personal letters written to Timothy, Titus and Philemon; the letter to the Hebrews; and the seven “general” letters of James, Peter, John and Jude.
  • The Revelation to John consists of apocalyptic visions about the sovereignty of God and his coming victory and triumph over the forces of evil.


THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES



The Hebrew Scriptures - meaning the Old Testament, because the New Testament was written in Greek - is a record of God’s words to and dealings with the people of Israel, whom he called to be “a light to the nations” (Isa. 42:6). The stories of God’s words and acts were passed down in oral form from one generation to the next. Beginning with the kings of Israel (1020 B.C.), the stories and traditions were written down and collected and then, during and following the Exile (500s B.C.), were blended and combined books. It is believed that the Torah was completed around 400 B.C., the Historical Books and the Prophets around 200 B.C., and the Writings around 100 B.C. Scholars used to believe that the Hebrew canon - the books that were accepted by the rabbis as sacred or inspired Scripture - was agreed - upon and closed by a council of elders at Jamnia, the present city of Jabneh, around the end of the first century A.D. This view has since fallen out of favor.




THE JEWISH AND CHRISTIAN OLD TESTAMENT CANONS



Jews, Protestants, Catholics and Orthodox have different canons, that is, different numbers of books.


  • The Jewish canon contains twenty-four (24) books, because many books in the Hebrew Scriptures are not divided. For instance, Kings, Samuel and Chronicles are each one book. Ezra and Nehemiah are one book, and the twelve Minor Prophets are one book (the Book of the Twelve).
  • The Protestant Old Testament contains thirty-nine (39) books, and they are arranged differently than the books in the Jewish canon.
  • The Catholic Old Testament contains forty-six (46) books; the seven (7) additional books come from the Septuagint (Apocrypha).
  • The Orthodox Old Testament contains fifty (50) books: The Catholic Old Testament books plus 1 Esdras, 3 Maccabees, the Prayer of Manasseh and Psalm 151.

Also, the Hebrew Scriptures have a threefold rather than a fourfold order. What most Christian Old Testament call the Historical Books, the Hebrew Scriptures call the Former Prophets - the book of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings - which in the Hebrew canon are prophetic or “religious history” rather than “history history.” The Hebrew or Jewish Bible is sometimes called the Tanak or Tanakh, a word based on the first letters of the Hebrew names for its three sections - T for Torah (the Pentateuch), N for Niviim (the Prophets) and K for Kethuvim (the Writings), with vowels added for pronunciation.





THE SEPTUAGINT 


The Bible of the early Greek-speaking church was the Septuagint. When Alexander the Great Conquered the ancient world in the fourth century B.C. Greek became the lingua franca or common language of the world. Over time, Jews living outside the Palestine began to speak Greek rather than Hebrew and there was need for Greek translation of the Scriptures. Around the year 250 B.C., a group of Jewish elders and scribes in Alexandria, Egypt, which had the largest Jewish community in the ancient world, translated the Scriptures into Greek. According to Jewish legend, there were seventy-two (72) translators - six (6) from each of the twelve tribes - who translated independently of one another, and when they finished there was not a single discrepancy among them! The name Septuagint comes from the Latin septuaginta, which means “seventy,” the nearest round number for the seventy-two translators. The Septuagint is sometimes abbreviated LXX, the Roman numeral for 70. The Septuagint became the Bible for the Greek-speaking Jews living outside of Palestine, and also for the early Christians.




THE ORDER OF BOOKS


The order of books in the Christian Old Testament is based on the Septuagint, which differs from the Hebrew Scriptures. Also, in the Hebrew Scriptures, the last section comprises the Writing rather than the Prophets, and the Writings include five books that the Christian Old Testament includes among the Historical Books (Ruth, Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah and Esther) and two books that it includes among the Prophets (Daniel and Lamentations).




THE APOCRYPHA


The Septuagint contains fifteen books that are not in the Hebrew Scriptures, books such as Tobit, Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabees and Baruch. When Jerome translated the Old Testament into Latin around the year 400, he included several Septuagintal books, with a caution that they were not to be considered on the same level as the books in the Hebrew canon. Over time, however, these deuterocanonical (meaning “second canon”) books were given equal status with the canonical books in the Hebrew Scriptures, and some gave birth to Catholic doctrines , such as purgatory, which comes from 2 Maccabees 12:43-45.


When Martin Luther and others translated the Bible into the common language of the day (in the early to mid-1500s), they either put the deuterocanonical books in a separate section between the Old and New Testaments - between Malachi and Matthew - called Apocrypha, from a Greek word meaning “secret” or “hidden” referring to their questionable authorship and authenticity, or eliminated them together. The reason the Reformers rejected the deuterocanonical books is that they had not been received by the Jewish elders into the Hebrew canon. To counter the Reformers’ rejection of the deuterocanonical books - and to authenticate its teachings based on these books - the Catholic Church accorded twelve of the apocryphal books full canonical status at the Council of Trent in 1546.


Despite their noncanonical status, the deuterocanonical books are important documents. Books such as 1 and 2 Maccabees provide a history of God’s chosen people during the period between the Old and New Testaments. Other books, such as the Wisdom of Solomon, reflect changes that began to occur in Jewish religious thinking prior to the coming of Jesus, such as a growing belief in the afterlife, which is only briefly alluded to in the Old Testament. Today some Protestant Bibles, such as the New Revised Standard Version, have editions that include the Apocrypha.


Because the books of the Apocrypha have long been excluded from Protestant Bibles, most Protestants know very little about them.




THE NEW TESTAMENT


In the Old Testament, the Pentateuch and the Historical Books appear more or less in chronological order, and the four major and twelve Minor Prophets, with a few exceptions, appear in the order in which they were written. In the New Testament, the books do not appear in chronological order, For instance,


  • Paul, who died in the mid-60’s wrote his letters prior to the writing of the Gospels, the first of which (Mark) is dated around the year 70, and prior to the Acts of the Apostles, which describes his travels.
  • The letters of Paul are ordered according to recipient and roughly in order of length rather than chronologically. The nine church letters are first, followed by four personal letters, not because it was Paul’s first letter (actually, it was one of his later church letters). And Philemon is last among Paul’s personal letters because it is the shortest such letter, though it was probably first in point of time.
  • The Gospels, begin with Matthew, but the majority of New Testament scholars believe that Mark, not Matthew was the first or earliest gospel to be written.


The books that make up the New Testament are written testimonies to the good news of Jesus and letters to Christian faith communities. In the mid-second century, the writings were gathered together to form the written witness to the new covenant or testament between God and humankind. The final recognition and acceptance of the books into the New Testament canon cannot be dated precisely; as with the Old Testament, but it appears that as early at the middle of the second century there was already general agreement on twenty (20) of the twenty-seven books, all except Hebrew, James, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude and Revelation.


The basis for books being accepted into the New Testament canon was threefold:


- First, the authors had to have had apostolic credentials or have enjoyed a close association with an apostle, such as Mark with Peter and Luke with Paul. 


- Second, the writings had to be consistent with the church’s teachings about Jesus. 


- Third, the writings had to have had church-wide acceptance and usage.



Christians have good reason to be confident of the reliability and authenticity of the New Testament. More than five thousand Greek manuscripts have been found and cataloged, including complete New Testament manuscripts, such as the Codex Sinaiticus, discovered at Saint Catherine’s Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai in 1844 (now in the British Museum in London), and the almost complete Codex Vaticanus (now in the Vatican Library in Rome), both of which are dated to the middle 300s. By way of contrast, the earliest extant (existing) manuscripts of Julius Caezar are dated 1,000 years after his death, those of Plato 1,200 years after his death and those of Aristotle 1,400 years after his death, and scholars universally accept the authenticity of these manuscripts.


Another reason for confidence in the New Testament writings, in addition to the abundance of extant manuscripts, is that the writings were written within one or two generations of Jesus’ death. The earliest letters of Paul are dated 50 or 51, just twenty years after Jesus’ death; Mark’s gospel is dated around the year 70, forty years after Jesus’ death; and almost all of the books can be firmly dated before the close of the first century. According to the British scholar John A. T. Robinson, “The wealth of manuscripts, and, above all, the narrow interval of time between the writing and the earliest extant copies, make [the New Testament] by far the best-attested text of any writing in the ancient world.”




THE BOOKS OF THE BIBLE



THE PROTESTANT OLD TESTAMENT CANON



  • The Pentateuch: Genesis , Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy
  • The Historical Books: Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah and Esther
  • The Writings: Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon
  • The Major Prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, (and his Lamentation), Ezekiel and Daniel
  • The Minor Prophets: Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi




THE NEW TESTAMENT CANON


  • The Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John
  • The Acts of the Apostles
  • The Pauline Letters: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus and Philemon
  • The General Letters: Hebrews, James, 1 and 2 Peter, 1,2, and 3 John and Jude
  • The Revelation to John




THE THEME AND MESSAGE OF THE BIBLE


Many students of the Bible claim that it has a unifying theme, running from Genesis to Revelation. Some say the theme is that of the covenant - the covenant that God made with Israel, and through Jesus with all humankind. Others say the theme is salvation history - the successive, progressive revelations of God so that all might come to the knowledge of the truth and be saved (1 Tim. 2:4).


A variation on the covenant and salvation history themes is promise and fulfillment - God’s promises of a Messiah from the House of David (2 Sam. 7:12-16) and a new covenant (Jer. 31:31); and the fulfillment of these promises in Jesus of Nazareth (Luke 1:31-33), who established a new covenant at the Last Supper (Luke 22:20).


As for the message of the Bible, the first place to look is in the Bible itself. C. H. Dodd, in his classic book The Apostolic Preaching, says the Message of the Bible can be derived from the speeches of Peter and others in the book of Acts and from the letters of Paul. The following is an example of the apostles’ preaching from Peter’s speech to the household of Cornelius in Acts 10:34-43: God sent a message to the people of Israel that Jesus, the one about whom “all the prophets testify,” was “Lord of all. [He was] put to death . . . on a tree, but God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear, not to all people but to us who were chosen by God as witness . . . who are and drank with him after he rose from the dead . . . He is the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead . . . Everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through is name.” The message of the Bible is that Jesus Christ is the one sent by God - the one prophesied by the prophets and witnessed by the apostles; the one sent to die for our sins - to forgive us and to save us; the one sent to reconcile us with God the Father - and also with each other.




THE TRANSMISSION AND TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE


The earliest manuscripts were scrolls, such as the one from which Jesus read in the synagogue at Nazareth (Luke 4:17-20). They were written on papyrus (made from reeds), later on parchment (the skins of sheep, goats and other animals) and finally on paper. Early in the second century (c.130), manuscripts began to be produced in books or leaf form, called codices, which pages that could be turned.


Like other books in the ancient world, Bibles were written in capital letters. Upper and lower cases were introduced in the ninth century and spacing two centuries later. There were no chapter or verse divisions until Stephen Langton, a lecturer at the University of Paris and later Archbishop of Canterbury, divided the Bible into chapters in 1226, and Robert Estienne, a French printer in Geneva, divided the chapters into verses in 1551. The Geneva Bible, published in Geneva in 1560, was the first bible in which the text was divided into verses. Originally, copies of Bibles were made by hand, usually by scribes in scriptoriums, and were few in number and very expensive (it is estimated that the Codex Sinaiticus required the skins of 360 goats and sheep). In the year 1456, Johann Gutenberg of Mainz, Germany, invented the printing press, and the production of Bibles moved from handwriting to movable type.




EARLY TRANSLATIONS


The earliest Bibles were written in Greek, but as early as the second century A.D. the Bible began to be translated into languages. When the church grew in the West and became Latin-speaking, there was need for a uniform, authoritative Latin Bible. Pope Damascus asked Jerome, the most accomplished scholar and linguist of his day, to translate the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures into Latin. Jerome completed his translation in 405, which came to be called the Vulgate, from the latin vulgatus, a word meaning “common’ or “ordinary” (language). The Vulgate became the Bible of the Western church until the Reformation, and it was the basis of all Roman Catholic translations until 1943. The Vugate was the first Bible to be printed with movable type (the Gutenberg Bible).




TRANSLATIONS INTO ENGLISH


In the Bibles we study and read in church, Jesus speaks modern day English, and does Abraham, though neither spoke the same language and certainly not English. The first translation of the Bible into English was begun by John Wycliffe, who translated the Latin Vulgate into English in 1382 so that it could be read by the people in their own language. The first English Bible to be printed was a New Testament translation by William Tyndale, the “father” of the English Bible, who translated the Scriptures into English from the original languages (Hebrew and Greek). Tyndale’s New Testament translation was printed in 1526. He was betrayed, arrested and burned at the stake in 1536 before completing his translation of the Old Testament. (Church leaders were afraid that giving people the Bible in their own language would weaken the leaders’ hold on the interpretation of Scripture).


After England split with the Roman Catholic Church in 1534, many English translations began to appear - so many, in fact, that King James I of England (reign: 1603 to 1625) commissioned a committee of fifty-four scholars to produce an “authorized version, known today as the King James Version of 1611. The KJV became “the Protestant Bible” of the English-speaking world until well into the twentieth century, and its popularity continues even today with the New King James Version (NKJV, 1982), and with revised translations based on the KJV, such as the New American Standard Bible (NASB, 1971), which has a strong following among conservative Christians, and the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV, 1989). 




RECENT TRANSLATIONS


The twentieth century witnessed more than one hundred new translations. There are three reasons for this. First, more ancient and accurate manuscripts have been discovered, such as the Codex Sinaiticus (dated to c. 350), which is several hundred years older than the Erasmus Greek New Testament of 1561 used by the King James translators. Second, important archaeological finds, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran in 1947, the most important manuscript find in the twentieth century (some eight hundred manuscripts), and the Nag Hammadi Library in Upper Egypt in 1945, which contained twelve papyrus codices written in Coptic, and ancient  Egyptian language, the most important being the apocrypal gospel of Thomas. These discoveries have given biblical scholars a far deeper understanding of the intertestamental world and of early Judaism, and also fo early Christianity. Third, the desire to update antiquated biblical words, such as thee and thou, and to translate biblical words and texts in a less gender-oriented way, using, for example, person and humankind rather than man and mankind.



SOURCE: “A handbook of the Christian Faith” 

by: John Schwarz pp.12-29


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