3. Can I Trust My English Bible Today?
Week 1 • Day 3
Could you imagine what it was like to live in the earliest days of the church? Christianity was a young but rapidly growing movement taking place right under the nose of one of the most powerful empires the world has ever seen. Little did the church know, this movement of the Jesus “way” would be heavily persecuted by the Roman empire. Could you imagine the prayers that were made to see the Roman empire transform from the inside out and alleviate the persecution of Christians?
Shortly after the turn of the 3rd century, a man by the name of Constantine takes the throne as emperor of Rome. As he is preparing for one of his battles, he experiences a mysterious vision which inspires him to convert to Christianity. Shockingly, the Roman Emperor himself becomes a Christian and everything changes! Years later, Constantine issued the Edict of Milan which brought Christianity out from under the nose of persecution as a legal religion to be practiced. Overtime, Christianity would spread across the entire Empire.
During the reign of Constantine, the leaders of the early church were afforded the opportunity to come out from hiding and seek unity along the lines of major points of doctrine. After many theological debates flared up in local home churches across the empire, Constantine called for the first major church council named the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D.. Here, he invited church leaders from all over the empire to discuss and clarify the core tenants of the Christian religion.
Fast-Forward 500 years! According to the anonymous 9th century legend (remember...500 years later), the leaders of the church did in fact come together at the Council of Nicea. But instead of debating core doctrine, the church leaders met with a more nefarious plot in mind. According to legend, the church leaders placed all of the manuscripts of “scripture” on a table, prayed that God would miraculously reveal which scrolls were the true scriptures, and watched as God swiped some documents to the floor and kept the canon of scripture on the table.
Fast-Forward another 1200 years where author Dan Brown, in his best selling book The DaVinci Code, mythologizes this alleged event at the Council of Nicea and adds the theory that it was really emperor Constantine who made the final decision of which books stayed in the Bible and which books would be overlooked.
So was the Bible really formed in this arbitrary way by the earliest church leaders or as an act of power by Emperor Constantine? Could this be why we see so many variations of what is included in the Bible and what is excluded?
If this is how you believe the scriptures were formed, you wouldn’t be alone. However, the reality is that nothing has ever been found to suggest that the Council of Nicea was intended to be a clandestine meeting for the most powerful Christians to decide what stays in the Bible!
This leads us to today’s question: how was the Bible actually formed and how can I trust that I have the correct collections of 66 books and their proper English translations in my hands?
Up to this point, we have argued that whatever is in the pages of scripture was meant to be there. We then argued that the central message of the Bible, the resurrected Jesus, is supported by the reliability of the Gospel as eyewitness testimony. Yesterday we concluded that since the Gospels were meant to be interpreted as accurate information, it is reasonable to conclude that Jesus lived, died, and rose again as God in the flesh!
Now if the Gospels are reliable and if Jesus rose from the dead as Lord, then we ought to look at his teachings about the rest of the Bible through the same lens that Jesus saw them! Here is how our Lord Jesus view the scriptures:
The 24 books of the Hebrew Bible (39 books of the Old Testament)
Jesus believed that the Hebrew Bible, the collection of what we call today the Old Testament texts, were to be referenced as authoritative scriptures. Consider the very words of Jesus as documented by Matthew’s Gospel account:
“It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’” -Matthew 4:4 (from Deuteronomy 8:3)
“It is also written: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’” - Matthew 4:7 (from Deuteronomy 6:16)
“Away from me, Satan! For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.’” - Matthew 4:10 (from Deuteronomy 6:13)
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.” - Matthew 5:17.
“It is written,” he said to them, “ ‘My house will be called a house of prayer,’ but you are making it ‘a den of robbers.’” - Matthew 21:13 (from Jeremiah 7:11)
While the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them, “What do you think about the Messiah? Whose son is he?” “The son of David,” they replied. He said to them, “How is it then that David, speaking by the Spirit, calls him ‘Lord’? For he says,
“ ‘The Lord said to my Lord: “Sit at my right hand
until I put your enemies under your feet.” ’If then David calls him ‘Lord,’ how can he be his son?” Matthew 22:41–45 (from Psalm 110:1)
So when Jesus picked up a Hebrew Bible in the 1st Century, what would he have seen? Could it have been like the Old Testaments from other traditions which carry more than 66 books, like the Roman Catholics who add 7 more books to their canon or the Orthodox tradition that adds 10 more? To answer this question, let’s dive into a brief history of the Old Testament canon!
In the 4th Century B.C., a man by the name of Alexander the Great would go on to conquer a large amount of territory and impose the Greek language to unify his growing Macedonian Empire. This would eventually inspire a new Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible called the Septuagint. Along with this new Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, the Greek scribes of the time began to include more books that would capture the essence of Israel’s history.
Not only did these Greek scholars add texts to the Septuagint, but these same scribes also reordered the books of the Bible in a way that closely aligned with the Old Testament order that we see in our scriptures today. They begin with the Law of Moses, move on to History, dive into Wisdom and Poetry, and end with the Prophets.
Fast-Forward to the 5th century A.D. where Latin became the common language of the known world. In response, a man named Jerome began translating the Septuagint into the Latin Vulgate. In this process, Jerome noticed these modifications made to the original Hebrew Bible and classified the books added to the canon as Apocrypha - meaning books that were “hidden” or “unclear”. His contemporary counterpart, Augustine of Hippo, disagreed with Jerome’s assessment and wanted the entire Septuagint to be seen as scripture.
So what are the texts meant to be in our Bibles? And what order are we supposed to read them? This is where we can look into the words of Jesus to find out what he thought was true!
He said to them, “This is what I told you while I was still with you: Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms.”
Then he opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures.He told them, “This is what is written: The Messiah will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance for the forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. - Lk 24:44–47.
It turns out that Jesus, who resurrected from the dead and claimed to be God himself, affirmed his Hebrew Bible in an arrangement that aligns with the traditional Hebrew / Aramaic version called the Tanakh (Torah or Law / Nevi’im or Prophets / Khetuvim or Writings).
Remember that in the 1st Century A.D., the mainstream Bible of Jesus’ time would have been the Greek Septuagint with the apocrypha additions. That is why it is extraordinarily significant that Jesus never once cited an apocrypha text. Similarly, the NT authors might have hinted at traditions derived from the apocrypha (which include elements of Israel’s history), but they never cited apocryphal texts even though 2⁄3 of their quotations align more with the Septuagint Greek translations than the actual Hebrew verbiage. (see Jude 9-10, 1 Peter 3).
In the weeks to come, as we trace the key message of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, we too will be following the pattern of the ancient Hebrew Bible attempting to read the scriptures in the way Jesus would have read them! In the chart above, hopefully you can already see some important variations. Why do Ruth and the Psalms come so late? Why does 1st and 2nd Chronicles come at the end of the Hebrew Old Testament? Our prayer is that over the course of this series you will see how the Hebrew Bible order illuminates the Old Testament in a new and fresh way!
The 27 Books of the New Testament
In his work Misquoting Jesus, Bart Ehrman - one of the leading scholars engaged in the attempts to cast doubt on the scriptures - claims that the earliest recorded listing of the 27 books that make up the New Testament dates back to 367 A.D. from a church leader named Athanasius. If this were true, it would further affirm the notion that the Council of Nicea held in 325 A.D. wasn’t about clarifying core doctrines, but selecting the canon of the scriptures. It turns out that an Easter letter from another church leader named Origen from the middle of the 3rd century (1 century earlier) was discovered that listed all 27 books of the New Testament.
So were these early church leaders actually correct in selecting these specific 27 texts? And if it didn’t happen at the Council of Nicea, how did the church decide upon these 27 books?
The Muratorian Fragment written in Greek around the 2nd Century A.D. inches ever-closer to the earliest iteration of the New Testament church by including 22 New Testament books we see today. More importantly, this fragment contains a commentary of how certain books were chosen to be included in the New Testament. In regards to the New Testament inclusion of an important document called The Shepherd, the Muratorian Fragment reads,
Hermes composed the Shepherd quite recently - in our times, in the city of Rome...So while it should indeed be read, it cannot be read publicly for the people of the church; it is counted neither among the Prophets (for their number has been completed) nor among the Apostles (for it is after their time).
Additionally, a document was found written by a pastor by the name of Serapion a few decades later. Serapion writes this about the controversial The Gospel of Peter and its inclusion in the New Testament.
We accept [the writings of] Peter and the other apostles just as [we would accept] Christ, but, as for those with a name falsely ascribed, we deliberately dismiss them, knowing that no such things have been handed down to us.
These two important documents reveal that the early church had already set the standard that a book ought to be included in the New Testament canon if it could confidently be connected to a key Apostle or one of their associates. As the Jesus movement rapidly spread across the Roman Empire, these were the letters that ‘went viral” as they were copied, copied again, and recopied once more. Nevertheless, there were still debates around books like Hebrews, James, Jude, 2 Peter, 2nd and 3rd John, Revelation, and the Wisdom of Solomon. But even if they were wrong about certain books that were included or excluded, the gospel message and the core theology underlying the collection of books are so repetitive that no single book MUST necessarily exist inside the canon in order for the New Testament to remain true.
The Various English Translations
We left the story of Bible translations in which Latin became the dominant language across the Catholic (Universal) Church near the 500’s A.D.. It wasn’t until the late 1300’s A.D. when a man by the name of John Wycliffe began translating the Bible from Latin to English. Wycliffe faced enormous criticism from the Catholic Church whose leadership advocated to keep the Bible in the hands of the clergy and the educated. If the Bible was translated into the language of commoners, there was the threat of disunity and the loss of power that the Roman Catholic church had garnered over the years. Yet amidst this persecution, Wycliffe persisted that the word of God was meant for ALL people, even the uneducated and illiterate masses. Unfortunately, Wycliffe never had the opportunity to finish his translation project after being killed for his efforts. He passed the endeavor on to his associates who were also martyred for their attempts. Eventually, this project ran through the hands of Jan Hus who was martyred as well.
Jan Hus happened to be one of the key inspirations for a young student named Martin Luther.
The dawn of the printing press and the rise of the renaissance in the early 15th century sparked the Protestant Reformation. This era included a renewed vigor to translate the Bible for all people and to do so by looking at the earliest available manuscripts and revisiting the original Hebrew and Greek sources as opposed to the Greek Septuagint or the Latin Vulgate. Many men continued these translation efforts throughout the Protestant Reformation, yet translators like William Tyndale and John Rogers lost their lives over the cause as the governing authorities (like Mary I in England...otherwise known as “bloody Mary”) teetered between the new wave of Protestants (whose mission was to go “protest” the Catholic church and to put Bibles into the hands of everyone) and the authority Catholic church (whose mission it was to retain the Latin translation, protect Catholic doctrine, and maintain the Christian kingdom).
After a tumultuous back and forth history of being pro-Protestant and pro-Catholic and after several translation attempts muddied the waters of which Bible was accurate, England’s King James I had a handful of scholars produce a “finalized’ church-wide translation in 1611 based on the best available manuscripts. This translation would forever be known as the King James Version! Thus, in the English-speaking world, the KJV became the go-to Bible for about 250 years. However, the tide began to change as more manuscripts were found, the English vernacular had changed so much that more modern translations were necessary, and the open frontier of America emerged.
This is where we get to the Bible that you hold in your hand today! Since the 1800’s, many marvelous English translations of the Bible have been written and have stood the test of time. Why do all of these translations look different? It is simply because those who have taken up the task of translation are working with the original Greek and original Hebrew and making decisions about what the words actually mean. Some translations use the standard of what is called formal equivalence in which the translations are the best rendering of the word in front of them (e.g. NASB, KJV, ESV). Some translations follow dynamic equivalence which is a more loose interpretation of the original text that fits our modern sensibilities (e.g. NIV, THE MESSAGE, NRSV, NLT). In the end, there seems to be good uses for both approaches, but also some dangers.
A formal equivalent translation is most useful when you are studying exactly what was said in the original manuscripts. However, pure translations can often be difficult for our 21st century mind to understand, especially when the literature includes idioms and sayings that would have only been familiar to an ancient audience.
1 Peter 1:13 (NKJV - formal equivalent) Therefore gird up the loins of your mind...
Strength: Old Testament connections to “girding up your loins” to the Exodus (Ex. 12:11), the calling of Jeremiah (Jer. 1:17), the escape of Elijah from Ahab and Jezebel (1 Kgs. 18:46), and the command of Jesus to “stay dressed” in preparation for his return (Lk. 12:35)
Weakness: Difficult idiom to actually understand to the 21st century reader who has never had to gird up their loins.
1 Peter 1:13 (NIV - dynamic equivalent) Therefore, with minds that are alert and fully sober...
Strengths: Far more understandable reading of the same passage to a 21st century English speaking audience
Weakness: Loss of the beautiful and intentional imagery that is connected to Old Testament phrases.
The translation conversation can often be overwhelming, but the good news is that with so many translations, we are able to compare and contrast decisions to wrap our minds around the most accurate reading! Combine this with the ability to revisit the textual copies and you can follow the translation journey that has led to our English translations with precision! That is why you can certainly trust that English Bible translation in your hand today!
Share the Gospel: If Jesus rose from the dead, we should take Jesus’ teachings seriously including what he claimed about the scripture. Jesus sees the TaNaKh version of the Old Testament as authoritative while the early church held the standard of Jesus’ words and apostolic authority when considering what fit into the New Testament. We have been blessed with people who gave their lives to translate the scriptures making it available for everyone, including us today!
