Craig’s How We Got Our Bible Study Notes:   (part 1, Rough Draft) (more to come)

 

 

2 Timothy 3:16  All Scripture is God breathed (inspired by God) and useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

 

Psalm 68:11  "The Lord gave the word: great was the company of those that published it"

 

 

“Our Faith is not Speculation, It’s Revelation!” -Rick Thompson, CRBC

 

OLD TESTAMENT:

Also called, the Hebrew Bible, the Hebrew Scriptures, the Tanach

The Tora is the first 5 books, also known as the Law.

Old Testament canon was closed approx. 90AD

 

Complete Bible is 66 Books, 40 Authors, written over 1500 years.

 

Over 40,000 manuscripts exist of O.T. texts, some complete books and some complete bibles.

 

The oldest complete copy of the O.T. is dates to 1007 AD, and it is located in St.Petersburg Russia.   The King James was most likely translated from this copy.

 

The oldest fragments of the O.T. date back to 90 to130 AD.

 

CANON:

Canon means measuring rod of faith or practice.

From the Greek word Kanon, meaning rule, standard of measure

Canon of Scripture refers to the authoritative books.

 

The canon (rules or criteria for the N.T.):

1.       Were the books authenticated by the apostles? Peter authenticated Mark, Paul authenticated Luke, etc.

2.       Were the books content judged as being inspired?

3.       Was it recognized by the early church?

4.       They must have eyewitness flavor and testimony

5.       They must all be coherent

The Apocrypha was excluded for example, because it did not measure up.  They were not eyewitness accounts. 

 

 

NEW TESTAMENT:

 

The N.T. was written between 49 and 90 AD

Earliest complete canon of the N.T. dates 135 AD

Another complete N.T. text date to the 4th century discovered at St. Catherine’s Monastery at Mt. Sinai, Egypt.  It was written by a heretic named Marcion, and therefore it’s believed that his was a copy of an even earlier one.  In AD 140, Marcion tried to eliminate Matthew, Mark, John, Acts and three of Paul’s letters from his churches Bible.

 

Over 20,000 manuscripts exist of N.T. texts.

Some are complete New Testaments.

 

In AD 110, Papias mentions the four Gospels.

 

The four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, rose to the top very early in church history and distinguished themselves from everything else.  Their use was well established by the end or the 2nd and beginning of the 3rd centuries. Some sources say by AD130, the four gospels and thirteen of Paul’s letters were accepted as authoritative by many churches.

 

The Gospels did not evolve.

 

The early N.T. texts were written in Greek UNCIAL (Capitol Letters). They wrote this way for about the first 1000 years AD., Then wrote in cursive text or MINUSDULE (Running hand) which was faster and allowed them to make more copies.

 

 

Misc. Notes about Texts:

 

The Scribes would copy texts by candle light in the cold as a life long calling.

By writing on scrolls from right to left, there was no way to add in or edit the texts later.

Some texts are found with corrections.  The proper way to look at this is that they wanted to make sure it was correct! 

 

The Jews often buried their old texts in burial closets called GENIZAHS.

 

There are some minor differences in texts over time.  Word order, mis-spellings,

__________________________________________

 

The most often used Colophon by the scribes at the end of the texts:

“Oh reader take note, that while the hand that copied this text rots in the grave, the word copied lives on.”

 

Martin Luther said his knees would shake in the pulpit for fear that he would misinterpret God’s word.  Luther translated the Bible into German, the N.T. in 1521, and the O.T. completed in 1534.

 

So far no texts have been discovered that talk about the Sadducees other than the New Testament books.

 

By  180 to 220 AD they had complete table of contents of the Whole Bible

By  180 to 220 AD they had complete Gospels written in book form on papyrus.

By  350 AD they had complete Bibles.

 

Earliest fragment of N.T. text is of the book of John and dates to 105 to 130 AD, this is within 10 to 15 years of John’s death.  The scrap was found in a garbage dump.

 

Oldest Luke fragment dates to 180 to 220 AD.

 

We have about a dozen text fragments that date to the 2nd Century.

 

By 180 AD The church fathers were quoting from all the books of the bible.

 

? We have some 5700 Greek Bibles.

 

FYI: There are parts (certain books or sections) of the Bible in English that date before 1066. Other old English translations existed from 1066 to 1500.  What we call Early Modern English translations began in 1500 to 1800.

 

The first King James Bible was published in 1611.

 

The credit for the King James Version we have today can be traced back to the work of Tyndale. The King James Bible represents a revision of Tyndale's translation. When his New Testament appeared in 1525, Tyndale was a "Lutheran" to the extent that denominational labels had meaning in 1525, in other words, a supporter of Luther's movement to reform the whole Christian community.

 

 

The Dead Sea Scrolls:

Discovered in 1947.

The oldest texts date back to 250 BC. to 100 BC.

The Dead Sea Scrolls or Desert Scrolls do not contain any N.T. texts.

The do not mention John the Baptist.

 

The Dead Sea Scrolls contained a complete book of Isaiah, 1250 years older than the previous one we had.  When compared they were 99.9% the same.