No other book in human history has so affected the world for good as the Holy Bible. The influence of the Bible on our values and belief systems, formal education, language, the arts, the scientific method, and justice systems cannot be overemphasized.
We owe to the Bible our seven-day week, the Gregorian calendar (calculated from the assumed date of Jesus incarnation), established process of philanthropy and medical care, law of justice and rights which recognizes that all humans are equal before God and so have inalienable rights to live, freedom of speech and association.
These Bible-inspired social norms contributed immensely to the age of enlightenment and the formal end to savage acts of human sacrifices in many cultures and the slave trade several centuries later.
Different nations, at times of dire needs, have also inspired their peoples to acts of great service and courage by words from the pages of the Holy Bible.
What is the Holy Bible? The Bible is the word of God communicated to mankind through inspired men who were careful to ensure that the exact words were scripted by their own hands or by scribes they personally supervised.
The name “Bible” is derived from the Greek rendering for a single scroll or paper, “Biblion”. Later, at about 386-388 in our Christian Era, Chrysostum was credited to be the first writer to use the phrase “Biblia” (Greek plural for paper) or “The Books” to describe both the books of the Old and New Testament together.
In other words, the Bible is a codex or library of sacred books written on the laws, history, poetry, prophecy of primarily the Jewish nation, to whom we owe much of the knowledge of God’s will and eternal purpose for mankind, alongside the gospel of Jesus Christ, the epistles and the apocalyptic revelation.
The Bible is divided into two major sections popularly referred to as the Old Testament and New Testament and with a collection of 66 individual books written by about 40 authors who lived over a period of about a thousand and four hundred years.
It lends great credence to the writers as well as Christians’ claim to divine authorship or inspiration of the Bible; that although most of these authors never had contacts with each other, the concurrence or agreement in the context of what was written by them is amazing and the exactness of the prophecies with regards to their fulfilment is simply beyond what is humanly coherent. But how did the Bible get to us?
Tracing the history
The Old Testament contains 39 books beginning with the first five books accredited to Prophet Moses, otherwise called the Pentateuch from Genesis to Deuteronomy, and ending with the prophetic book of Malachi. This is exactly the same with the Hebrew sacred book or Tanakh, written in the Hebrew Masoretic Texts, with the first five books referred to as the Torah, followed by the Nevi’im, “The Prophets” (divided into the former and latter prophets) and the Ketuvim or other writings. Though the contents of both the Hebrew and Christian Bibles are the same, the arrangement of the books differ considerably in the order they appear.
The Old Testament or as preferred in some quarters “The Former Covenant”, was initially transmitted by oral tradition – words of mouth from one generation to the next – for hundreds of years before the development of the art of writing. Though Moses wrote down the Ten Commandments from God, the instruction was for the people to be taught these words orally (Exodus 20; 31:12, 13).
With the advent of writing, efforts were made to commit same traditions to writing as inscribed on skin parchment, stone tablets then later papyrus scrolls. Then, the responsibility of writing the inspired word of God was committed to select devoted groups of men, one of whose role requirements include ensuring that the sacrosanct word of God is maintained as inspired without embellishment or deletion.
They developed an intricate process to ensure the copied scripts remain faithful to the original communicated from God by months of checking and actually counting the words to the exact numbers. The original languages of the Old Testament were Hebrew and Aramaic.
Within a thousand years between 1450 BC to 400 BC, the scripts of the Old Testament had been completed with the canonisation of the book of Malachi by a council of Jewish rabbis; this was done to preserve the divine Word from embellishment or alteration following upsurge in circulation of other religious and historical writings from questionable sources not considered divine.
At this time, the scrolls were in limited copies and it took many years of meticulous process to transcribe as little errors identified from copying was enough to make the particular scroll errant and unacceptable. Some accounts record Ezra as the first scribe who attempted to pull the entire scrolls of the Old Testament together into one volume around the 500 Century before Christ.
Translation to Aramaic and Greek
As early as 400 BC, the Old Testament began to be translated into Aramaic, known as the Aramaic Targums, basically to help the Jews taken into captivity in Babylon, who could no longer speak Hebrew. By 250 BC, the Old Testament was translated into Greek by a group of 70 or 72 translators; taking up the name “The Septuagint”, Greek word for seventy. The Septuagint was widely accepted and used by the early Church.
Coming of the New Testament
The New Testament portion of the Bible basically chronicles the events leading to the birth, life and death on the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ in fulfilment of God’s promise to redeem man from sin; the emergence, spread and influence of the Church set up by the Lord and the eventual return of Jesus Christ to mark the end of the age.
During his earthly ministry, Jesus quoted variously from the scriptures but there are no indications He preferred a particular version of these early translations of the scripture to the other; as His use of them were implicit and at times paraphrastic.
Thematic inferences can also be drawn from Jesus’ statements, at various times, to have been referencing the different versions of the Old Testament approved Masoretic Text (the official Hebrew Bible), probably the Greek Septuagint and the Aramaic Targum, which were then in existence. However, the scrolls were exclusively preserved by the priests and openly read during gatherings of the people at the synagogues.
Following the death of Jesus Christ, the events of His life are described in the Gospels, taught in the epistles to the churches and individuals and the approaching but definite end or apocalypse graphically illustrated in the revelation given to John on the Island of Patmos.
The 27 books of the New Testament are dated to have been written between the years 43 AD to 95 AD, with the earliest probably being the Pauline epistles and the books of Luke and Acts of the Apostles and the last to be written the book of Revelation.
The books of the New Testament were written in Greek and there are in existence over 5,600 recovered manuscripts in scrolls of papyrus and skin parchment. Some of the earliest copies of the recovered original manuscripts of the New Testament have been dated as far back as 125 AD, just 35 years after the completion of the last book.
Preserving the Story
Just like the Old Testament, efforts at preserving the legacies of the Lord Jesus Christ appeared initially in the form of oral tradition, amongst the community of believers, to strengthen their convictions. Things were to change shortly after the conversion to Christianity of lettered men like the Apostle Paul and Luke, who started writing accounts to nobility and letters to recent converts to Christianity explaining the person and mission of Jesus Christ, with the aim to firmly establish the foundation for their new faith, or in some other cases simply to respond to issues of morals and concerns of significance within the local assemblies.
These written records and letters were considered inspired responses and later diligently reproduced for public reading in different churches by dedicated scribes guided by the same rule of thumb as the earlier Old Testament scribes. Evidently, it took a lot of debates over several more centuries for the canon of the New Testament to be defined and for writings such as Hebrews, James and Revelation to be accepted as divinely inspired scriptures.
Spreading the Word
The greatest challenge to the nascent Church at this time was the hostilities of adherents of Judaism to their new but radical teachings and this antagonism gave an unintended impetus for the development of the New Testament. As early as 64 AD, the first major persecution of the Church under the Roman government started with Emperor Nero, following the mysterious but famed Great Fire of Rome.
The burgeoning body of believers were blamed for this incident, firstly by the antagonistic Jews and this sparked a wave of violence and persecution of Christians, initially as a matter of government policy and later through sporadic burst of unfair public trials, imprisonments, mob actions and violence in other provinces. Many were found guilty, tortured, decapitated or dismembered as they were fed to the beasts.
The persecution did not achieve its intended aim of checking the spread of Christianity. Many who were forced to move on from their locations on missionary journeys, sought to take along copies of the Gospel and scrolls of the Epistles with them. This led to rapid reproduction of the scrolls of scriptures.
Old and New as One Book
Several unsuccessful attempts were made to combine both Testaments into one book. Success was, however, recorded with the translation of the complete Bible books into Latin, commonly referred to as The Old Latin in 195 AD. This was the precursor to the Latin Vulgate, a translation from the Hebrew and Greek manuscripts by one of the early church fathers, Jerome, in 380 AD, which later became the official Bible of the Western Church until the time of the Reformation in the 16th Century AD.
It must be noted at this time that the complete Bible was only accessible to the very few who could read Latin, notably the clergy of the dominant state churches, namely the Roman Catholic Church, which went into unholy marriage with the state, thanks to the policies of Constantine the Great, assumed patron of the Christian faith.
The many unscriptural practices that resulted from this unholy alliance between Church and State, and subsequent events categorized the period referred to as the Dark Ages in history and over time, aroused in a section of the priests the agitation for the reformation of the Roman Catholic Church.
The Roman Empire was overthrown by a band of barbarian tribes who pulled down the legacies of the Emperors through widespread vandalism and thrust the entire Western Europe into the grips of the Dark Ages.
The Bible in English
Christianity alongside the Bible suffered one of its greatest persecution at this time as tens of millions of true adherents were massacred for reading or preaching the Bible, notably the Albigenses and Waldenses. However, from the burning embers of their faith, God raised up men like John Wycliffe, John Huss, Peter Waldo and Martin Luther, who declared the Bible the only basis for faith and salvation.
John Wycliffe became the first person to translate the Bible into English language in 1380 AD, although it later had problem of acceptance as it was translated from a translation – the Latin Vulgate – and not from the original scripts; Wycliffe could read neither Greek nor Hebrew. Although John Huss was also burnt at the stake alongside others for their efforts to get the Bible to the common people, God emboldened other later reformers as Martin Luther, who were appalled by the practices of the Church and being illumined by the Holy Spirit to the truth of scripture, confronted papacy on the unscriptural practices and sought to place the Bible in the hands of all men. Luther, by nailing his 95 theses to the door of the Church at Wittenberg, unwittingly kick-started the Protestant Reformation.
Many other priests were enthused by Luther’s actions to start the rapid translation of the Bible into local languages and with the aid of the invented movable type, copies were mass-produced at various locations and distributed to the populace at a cheaper rate. The era saw the production of the Gutenberg Bible in 1456 AD, Erasmus’ New Testament Translation, Polyglot Bible and William Tyndale English Translation from original Greek texts.
Enter the King James Version
Though some of these men were persecuted, exiled and eventually martyred for their efforts, God ensured their blood was not shed in vain. For example, while Tyndale waited to be burnt at the stake, he prayed God to open the eyes of the King of England to the truth.
This prayer was speedily answered in 1611, when King Henry gave official backing to the genuine translation of the entire Bible into English. He gathered translators from a wide spectrum of men with impeccable character who were disinterested in the church politics of the day. This resulted in the birth of the official King James Version of the Bible, one of the finest works of prose and credible versions available today.
With the discovery of the massive Dead Sea Scrolls at the Qumran caves and other ancient manuscripts dating to 200 BC, we can state with more assurances that what we have today in most modern translations are close to the original scripts.
We can also appreciate that through the tortuous journey from Palestine, the Word of God has triumphed over all its adversaries, whose brutal and virulent attempts in all past ages to make it defunct eventually snowballed into its spread to hitherto unreached territories. Why is this so? The Bible is the true Word of God and has been proven as the only book that gives coherence to questions of man’s origin and purpose, and provides meaning to life.