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Manuscripts and versions
We don't have any part of the Bible's original handwritten
documents today. That is, we have nothing personally written by
Moses, Isaiah, John, Paul, and the rest. Those writings have been
lost or have disintegrated with age.
Many people ask how we know, since we don't have the original
documents, whether the Bible we have today is the same as what God
intended. Fortunately, Jesus promised us in Matthew 24:35,
"Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will by no means
pass away." God, by His unfathomable providence, has preserved
His word for all generations. The Bible has been painstakingly and
faithfully copied by devoted men, by hand at first, for generations.
The
Old Testament books were written in the Hebrew language between
1,400 BC and 400 BC. The oldest manuscripts now known are the
Scripture portions of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were found in
caves near the Dead Sea in 1947. The oldest of these manuscripts
date to 100 years before Christ. The New Testament was
written in Greek during the first century after Christ. The oldest
New Testament manuscripts that we have today were copied about three
hundred years later. One is called the Sinaitic Manuscript because
it was discovered in 1844 at the foot of Mt. Sinai. Another is the
Vatican Manuscript, so called because it has been kept in the
Vatican library since 1448. A later manuscript called the
Alexandrian Manuscript was copied about 400 AD. More than a hundred
other manuscripts exist, dating from the fifth to the tenth
centuries.
People also translated the Scriptures into other languages. These
translations are called versions. The oldest known
translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, used by Greek-speaking Jews of
the first century, is called the Septuagint. One of the
earliest efforts to translate the Scriptures into a language that
the masses could read and understand was in 735 AD. The Bede
Version translated the gospel of John into Anglo-Saxon, one of
the languages from which English developed. Then, in 1830, John
Wycliffe translated the Bible into English. In 1525, William Tyndale
created an English version of the New Testament. The development of
the printing press in the early 1600s allowed for mass production of
the Bible into many languages. In 1611, the revered King James
Version was published. The Bible has been translated into
hundreds of languages. Today, many English versions are used to tell
us of God's will, including the New King James Version, the New
International Version, and the New American Standard Bible. These
versions are not different Bibles; they are merely different
translations of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures. We can be
absolutely sure that we have God's perfect will in the Bible today.
In 1 Corinthians 2:12-13, Paul said, "Now we have received, not
the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we
might know the things that have been freely given to us by God.
These things we also speak, not in words which man's wisdom teaches
but which the Holy Spirit teaches, comparing spiritual things with
spiritual." This is what sets the Bible apart. |
