How we came to have the Bible

22 Feb, 2015 - 00:02 0 Views

The Sunday News

I HAVE been referring to a lot of the issues that are crucial to our faith as believers on this column. I am still ventilating the fact of our Christian faith and its sojourn in Africa. Before we make a criticism of the current faith patterns we need to understand how we came to believe in the things we believe in today. I am doing as a response to a comment by some of my colleagues last week on Valentine’s Day.

A Seventh Day Adventist posted a blog defying the practice by some of her church mates for sharing Valentine’s gifts on the Sabbath. It was a hot discussion. The conclusion of which was we should only share godly love on the Sabbath and not this other type of Valentine love! Help me out what is Valentine love! Very soon it will be Easter and there will be others who have issues with celebrating the same. We are from Christmas and there were more with the same challenges. How did we come to believe and practise what we believe and practise today? Rather than responding with the words “just believe,” the Bible calls us to, “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have” (1 Peter 3: 15, NIV).

There is a lot we can discuss but allow me to begin with a simple question of ‘‘How did we get the Bible?’’ This question is important because in the past few weeks there has also been discussion on why some believers claim to be praying to the same God yet they neither have a Bible nor read from any text in their gatherings. To many the Bible is the sole authority. The Bible is the foundation of Christianity. In it we learn about the human condition, our need for salvation, God’s plan through Christ, the everlasting joy that awaits those who trust in Jesus, and more.

It is important to show simply how we got it. It is otherwise a complicated study that some have written theses on but I will scan through as the first step to interrogating our beliefs. In doing so we will look at four key areas regarding the Bible: inspiration, canonisation, transmission and translation.

It is important though that before we do so, we look at some misconceptions about how we got the Bible.

There are those who think the Bible was all written down about the same time, copied and distributed. No it is not an “instant” Scripture and it was not all written down around the same time. Instead, the books of the Bible were written over a lengthy period of time by different people inspired by God. It’s not a book that arrived in complete form at one point in history. Instead, the Bible was written over a period of some 1 500 years by a number of authors. Although it is viewed as one book, it is actually a collection of many books.

It is called God’s Word even though God did not physically write it. Instead, God worked through everyday people, inspired by Him, to record what Christians accept as the Bible. The Old Testament is primarily a record of God’s dealings with His chosen people — the Hebrews or Jews. The New Testament continues the record with first century accounts of the life and ministry of Jesus and the struggles faced by new Christians in a hostile culture.

Another misconception says there are many different “Bibles” so how can one be sure the Christian version is the right one? This misconception can take different forms. One form sets forth many different “gospels” as proof that the New Testament record of Jesus is not necessarily the true version. What about the Gospel of Thomas? Keep in mind that there are dozens of writings claiming to be Christian gospels along the lines of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. But very few copies of these rival “gospels” exist.

The Gospel of Thomas, of which there are references to more than one version, has distinctly Gnostic influences. In short, the Gnostics believed that the flesh is bad, but the spirit is good. As a result, they denied that Jesus truly came in the flesh, a position the early church countered by writings such as 1 John. Thomas also presents Jesus doing some things very much out of character. In one passage, for example, Jesus causes a boy to wither (die).

It is also important to keep in mind that these additional “gospels” appear in the historical record long after the New Testament manuscripts, making these “lost” gospels highly suspect not only in reference to their content, but their reliability. As Raisedon Baya would say, “The jury is still out!”

Stories and claims about other “gospels” raise important questions about the transmission and translation of the Bible or any historical record. “Transmission” in relation to the Bible has to do with how the contents of the Bible were transmitted through history. If the record of transmission is poor, then the record we have is highly suspect. But if the record of transmission is rich, having a variety of manuscript copies for instance, then we have cause for trusting the reliability of the record.

In the case of the New Testament, the transmission of the documents through history is astounding. Not only do we have thousands of manuscript copies, as well as thousands more fragments or portions of the New Testament, but in comparing the New Testament copies we have today in various languages with those available centuries ago we can see the message remains intact. Errors or changes are slight, known as variants, and do not change any central belief of Christianity. When it comes to transmission and translation, then, we can indeed trust the documents.

But isn’t it possible to have an accurately transmitted record that is still just a human invention? That’s where inspiration comes in. The word “inspire” comes from the Latin, meaning to breathe on or into. Hence, Paul writes in 2 Timothy 3: 16, “All Scripture is God-breathed.” Scholars Geisler and Nix write, “. . . inspiration is the process by which Spirit-moved writers recorded God-breathed writings.”

Inspiration means that human writers were inspired by God and moved by the Holy Spirit to record accurately what God wanted them to preserve. It does not mean God took control of people in the sense of some occult practices known as automatic writing, where the writer is in a trance-like state. The writers of the Bible were not simply taking dictation. Yet it does mean that their words were divinely inspired and recorded. The Bible was written by real people, living in real places, recording real historical events, and also communicating God’s real truths. That is what makes the Bible real!

Now the question remains about how the Christian church ultimately put the parts of the Bible together. This really relates to the New Testament, as the Old Testament was already accepted and codified in the books accepted by the Jewish people as divinely inspired. Following the death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ around 33 AD, the fledgling Christian church found itself struggling for survival and, in the process, writing inspired documents that would later become the New Testament.

We could go on here but allow me to pause at this point and leave the issue of canonisation for next week.

 

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