Holy Bible

Why should we have some understanding of how the Bible came to us? Young children often think that milk comes in cartons from the grocery store. As they grow up they learn that milk comes from cows on the farm. Likewise, many Christians have become so accustomed to having Bibles that they have bought in a bookstore, and they have almost no knowledge of where the current English translations of the Bible came from.

Understand how the Bible came to us, gives us a secure foundation for our faith in the reliability of the Bible. Evidence presented in a criminal case must be proved to have been protected by a proper chain of custody from being tampered with.

We will be able to respond to critics when they claim that the New Testament contains 200,000 errors.

We will have some understanding of why the newer translations as NIV and NASV differ from the King James version in several respects.

Important terms to remember:

Skeptics often claim that the Bible has been altered. But it is important to define the terms that apply to the source of our English Bible.

Autographs:

The original text was written by either the author's own hand or by writing under their personal supervision.

Manuscripts:

Until Gutenberg first printed the Latin Bible in 1456, all Bibles were hand copied onto papyrus, parchment and paper.

Translations:

When the Bible is translated into another language, it is usually translated from Hebrew and Greek. But some translations in the past stemmed from an earlier translation. For example, the first English translation by John Wycliffe in 1380 withdrew from the Latin Vulgate.

Old Testament:

Bible comes from two main sources - Old and New Testaments - written in different languages. The Old Testament was written primarily in Hebrew, with some books written in Aramaic. The following is a brief Snap Shots at the beginning and end of the Old Testament and the causes of the two first translations of the Old Testament from Hebrew to Aramaic, and Greek

1875 B.C. Abraham was called by God to Canaan.

1450 B.C. Exodus of the children of Israel from Egypt.

Autographs:

There are no known autographs of all the books of the Old Testament. Below is a list of the languages that the Old Testament books were written.

1450-1400 B.C. The traditional date for Moses' writing of Genesis-Deuteronomy written in Hebrew.

586 B.C. Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar. The Jews were taken captive to Babylon. They remained in Babylon under the Medo-Persian empire, and began to speak Aramaic.

555-545 B.C. The Book of Daniel chapters. 2:4 to 7:28 were written in Aramaic.

425 B.C. Malachi, the last book in the Old Testament was written in Hebrew.

400 B.C. Ezra chapters. 4:8 to 6:18 and 7:12-26 were written on Aramaic.

Manuscripts:

The following is a list of the oldest Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament, which still exists.

The Dead Sea Scrolls: date from 200 B.C. - 70 AD and contain the entire Book of Isaiah and parts of every other Old Testament book but Esther.

Geniza Fragments: portions the Old Testament in Hebrew and Aramaic, discovered in 1947 in an old synagogue in Cairo, Egypt, which dates from around 400 AD

Ben Asher Manuscripts: five or six generations of this family made copies of the Old Testament uses Masoretic Hebrew text, 700-950 AD The following are examples of the Hebrew Masoretic text-type.

Aleppo Codex: contains the entire Old Testament and is dated around 950 AD Unfortunately, more than one quarter of this Codex was destroyed in anti-Jewish riots in 1947.

Leningrad Codex: The complete Old Testament in Hebrew copy of the last member of the Ben Asher family of AD 1008th

Translations:

The Old Testament was translated very early into Aramaic and Greek.

400 B.C. The Old Testament began to be translated into Aramaic. This translation is called the Aramaic Targum. This translation helped the Jewish people began to speak Aramaic from the time of their captivity in Babylon, to understand the Old Testament in the language they usually spoke. In the first century Palestine in Jesus' day, Aramaic was still the commonly spoken language. For example, Maranatha, "God has come," 1 Corinthians 16:22 is an example of an Aramaic word used in the New Testament.

250 B.C. The Old Testament was translated into Greek. This translation is called the Septuagint. It is also known as "LXX" (which is the Roman numeral for "70") because it was believed that 70 to 72 translators worked to translate the Hebrew Old Testament in Greek. The Septuagint was often used by New Testament writers when they quoted from the Old Testament. The LXX was translation of the Old Testament that was used by the early church.

1. The following is a list of the oldest Greek LXX translations of the Old Testament, which still exists.

2. Chester Beatty Papyri: Contains nine Old Testament books of the Greek Septuagint and dates between 100-400 AD

Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus each containing almost the entire Old Testament in the Greek Septuagint, and they both date around 350 AD

The New Testament:

Autographs45-95 AD The New Testament was written in Greek. The Pauline epistles, Gospel of Mark that Luke and Acts are all dated 45-63 AD John and Revelation may have been written as late as 95 AD

Manuscripts:

There are over 5,600 early Greek manuscripts of the New Testament in existence. The oldest manuscripts were written on papyrus and the later manuscripts were written on leather called parchment.

125 AD The New Testament manuscript which dates most closely to the original autograph was copied around 125 AD, within 35 years after the original. It is designated as "p 52" and contains a small portion of John 18: e ( "P" stands for papyrus.) 

200 AD Bodmer p 66 a papyrus manuscript which contains a large part of John. 

200 AD Chester Beatty Biblical papyrus p 46 contains the Pauline epistles and Hebrews. 

225 AD Bodmer papyrus p 75 contains the gospels of Luke and John. 

250-300 AD Chester Beatty Biblical papyrus P 45 contains parts of the four Gospels and Acts.

350 AD Codex Sinaiticus contains the entire New Testament, and almost the entire Old Testament in Greek. It was discovered by a German scientist Tisendorf in 1856 at an Orthodox monastery on Mt. Sinai.

350 AD Codex Vaticanus (B) is a nearly complete New Testament. It was cataloged as being in the Vatican Library since 1475th

Translations:

Early translations of the New Testament can give important insights into the underlying Greek manuscripts from which they were translated from.

180 AD Early translations of the New Testament from Greek into Latin, Syriac and Coptic versions began about 180 AD

195 AD name of the first translation of the Old and New Testaments into Latin was called the Old Latin, both Testaments, translated from the Greek. Parts of the Old Latin were found in quotes by the church father Tertullian, who lived around 160-220 AD in North Africa and wrote treatises on theology.

300 AD The Old Syriac was a translation of the New Testament from Greek into Syriac. 

300 AD The Coptic Versions: Coptic was spoken in four dialects in Egypt. The Bible was translated into each of these four dialects.

380 AD The Latin Vulgate was translated by St. Jerome. He translated into Latin the Old Testament from Hebrew and New Testament from Greek. The Latin Vulgate became the Bible of the Western Church until the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s. It remains the authoritative translation of the Roman Catholic Church to this day. The Protestant Reformation saw an increase in translations of the Bible in common language for humans.

Other early translations of the Bible were in Armenian, Georgian and Ethiopian, Slavic, and Gothic.

1380 AD The first English translation of the Bible was by John Wycliffe. He translated the Bible into English from the Latin Vulgate. This was a translation of a translation and not a translation of the original Hebrew and Greek. Wycliffe was forced to translate from the Latin Vulgate because he did not know Hebrew or Greek.