Walk With Me
Christian discussion of biblical topics, and a dose of daily application. Yes the Bible is still relevant, and we find out more and more each day how relevant it has always been.
Walk With Me
From Ancient Scrolls to Modern Chapters: How We Got Our Bible part 1
Hello everybody, welcome to today's episode of Walk With Me. I am your host, jj. It's so good to have each and every one of you here. I know you're probably tired of hearing that. If you just skip through this, then that's fine too, but I really mean it. It is good to have each and every one of you here.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for the likes and the shares and the comments, even on the social medias. I really do appreciate it. I have to admit that I'm not great at sharing it on social media. I am really going to get better at it, I promise, I promise, I promise. I just have to just get better with it. You know, knuckle down and be more disciplined, right? But thank you all so much for liking and doing the sharing on your own. Thank you all for showing other people about the podcast. I really appreciate it. Uh, thank you all, thank you, thank you. I love you so much and I wanted to say that, um, I'm not just saying I love you because you guys are listening. I know that some of that stuff goes around, but I really do love each and every one of you who listen, um, who are out there, even if you don't listen, even if there are a couple out of you, a couple of you out there, that kind of listen to it to try to have debates, which I, again I am thankful for because you know if you, when you send me the questions, I kind of can feel where they're coming from and we're going to deal with such questions today. But it actually it actually helps me if I don't know the answer, because then I have to go and study and research and that in turn allows me to know the word of God better. So I do appreciate all of your questions and your comments. If you do have questions and comments, send them to walkwithmebiblestudy at gmail. Walkwithmebiblestudy at gmailcom. Big shout out to Bars Lyricist for the intro and outro music. I keep saying I'm going to get with him about maybe changing the bump. Um, I think he's got some big projects getting ready to start, so I guess I better get in where I fit in, right. Big shout out also to exquisite creations and iron gate ministries, and one more coming up.
Speaker 1:Big shout out to all of you out there who are supporting this podcast. Remember this is for the kingdom of God, it is not for JJ. Okay, that's why I don't charge anything. I don't have a special members-only podcast or members-only stream and, please understand, I'm not disparaging anyone who does. I, that's I. I'm just saying I don't disparage anyone who does. That's just how god is leading me on this podcast. So this podcast which you guys are on here, you guys can be listening to any of those other podcasts. I, it is what it is, but you guys are listening here and I really really do appreciate it. Love each and every one of you all, right? So for no further ado, big long intro there. Thank you all so much.
Speaker 1:We're going to deal with a question that I got and, again, I love questions. So this one is not going to have a lot of scripture in it, which is why I kind of hesitated on doing this in the uh, in the podcast format, but there was just so much to type uh, and I'm sure that other people get this message, get this question too. So the question is how did we get our bible? Where did that new beautiful king james version bible that you have sitting on your living room table collecting dust? How did we get access to that, right?
Speaker 1:So here's the thing, before we even get started in that we have to understand and the reason why this question came up, because we always get that somebody that we know that say well, that Bible was written by man. Ok, this is true, this is true. It is true, the pen and the ink and the paper were all held in men's hands as it was being written. But it was inspired by the word of God himself. And the reason why we know that is because, over the thousands of years this book was written, none of it contradicts itself. We've gone over that. I may revisit that, but that's the thing, and this is one of the things that makes the Bible so amazing, the word of God so amazing, god himself so amazing that God can be walked with through people, can speak through people and not contradict himself. Now, I get it. People are people. Sometimes people will say things that contradict the word of God. People may interpret things that contradict the word of God, but the word of God itself does not contradict him and it does not contradict itself. So now that we got that out the way and, like I said, we may deal with that again later, but now that we got that out the way, how do we get that bound book with the red letters and the black letters and the chapters and the chapters and the chapters and the books and the verses right. How do we get?
Speaker 1:Well, the first thing we got to understand the bible was originally written. Not in bible form, it was just manuscripts that were written on long streets of parchment and then they used wooden rollers to roll it up. So that's why when you hear people say scrolls, that's what they're talking about. But they were actually called manuscripts, meaning it was written by the hand. A lot of these words real fancy words that have real simple meaning Manuscripts means written by the hand. Now, the men who copied that word of God onto these manuscripts were called scribes.
Speaker 1:Now we often talk about scribes in the New Testament in a negative connotation. This is where I think a lot of people get this sort of a bad taste in their mouth when they're talking about scribes. But the original scribes were inscribing or writing the word of God as it was being told to them, both by the men of God themselves or by God himself. Like, for instance, moses wrote the first five books of the Bible, but we only have one book of Exodus. Like, for instance, moses wrote the first five books of the Bible but we only have one book of Exodus. So God was speaking through Moses and telling him what to write down on his paper.
Speaker 1:Now, the manuscripts were very expensive when they were first written and at the time when they started having you know, the Hebrew faith, and I'm talking about the Old Testament now, when they were very expensive to write, you had to cut the tree down, you had to treat the tree, you had to thread it up, you had to make it into paper and you had to get wood. It was a lot. It was a lot that was just one page Right. So lot, it was a lot, that was just one page Right. So they were very expensive and it took a long time to write them, a long time to get the scrolls ready, to write them. So what was happening was the manuscripts had to be read to the congregation. By the congregation we mean the Old Testament, nation of Israel, it had to be read. And when we consider that the Old Testament, the nation of Israel, it had to be read. And when we consider that the Old Testament was written in Hebrew because we were reading them to Hebrew people, then that makes sense.
Speaker 1:Now, in the New Testament it was written in Greek because Greek was the prevalent language at that time, the Romans. You know. He had all the nation states and a lot of the churches were actually formed in and around Greece and we'll get into that. At some point Now, about 220 years, about 225 or 227 before Christ, there was a Greek translation of the Old Testament. That was that they made by 70 scholars we're just talking about just the Old Testament was 70 scholars that made the Old Testament. They made the well translated the Old Testament into book. They made the well translated the Old Testament into book form and it was kind of it was made in these two particular translations I'm pretty sure it was only two and one of them was the Latin translation and that was the Old Testament. And then there was the original Greek of the New Testament. So there were some things that were translated from the Hebrew to Latin because when it was done, latin and Greek were the prominent languages of the time. Now they called that the Decepticons and I may have butchered that, but that was widely circulated and they then used that translation to translate to the Vulgate. Now this is another Latin translation of the Decepticons version of the Old Testament, but it still used the original Greek of the New Testament.
Speaker 1:Now that Vulgate it may sound familiar to you, but they used it to that word actually comes from we know that word more as Vulgar. Now I know I know when I say the word vulgar you think of a lot of things. But back at that time vulgar meant to make common or public, and that's why we get the feeling of dirty, because in the Old Testament to say common meant dirty or low value or inarticulate. Right Even Peter said you know, hey, these things are common, I don't eat anything common. What he was saying was he doesn't put bulk or things in his mouth. But you know, I'm trying not to get off into the weeds because this is strictly biblical history as far as the, the penmanship of it.
Speaker 1:Now, this Vulgate version of the Latin and the Greek into this new version was made in North Africa and there was a guy by the name of Jerome in the 4th century by 4th century I mean 400 AD that actually revised it. Now, after Jerome revised it, there was a thousand years that this was it. This was the standard Bible. You had Latin and you had Greek and that was it. That was about a thousand years. So now that brings us up to about 1400. Now here's the problem, that version being in Latin, that was the standard Bible.
Speaker 1:In what organization? The Catholic organization. Now, why is that? Because the common people were not allowed to read Latin. Remember, I said you just heard what I said there the common people, the vulgar people, the low quality people, the peasants, the non-nobility, were not allowed to read Latin. So the priest would get up there and he would read and he would say whatever he wanted it to say. Now they also called this age, if you know your world history, they called this period the Dark Ages, and I'm of the impression that the reason why it was called the dark ages not was because we didn't really know anything, but because the word of god was kind of kept from the people and people were quote in the dark about what god wanted from us, right? So the leader would read to the people and then, once the Bible was read, with whatever mass or service or whatever, the Bible was locked away, like no one could go in there and say they pick up a Bible and say, hey, john or hey, leticia, let's go have a Bible study.
Speaker 1:That was not going to happen. There was no Bible study, right. So there was right about that time the first Anglo-Saxon translation Came out. This was done by by Someone named Venerable Beattie. Now, what they did was translate only the Psalms and the Gospels into Anglo-Saxon, which is the Book of Psalms, and the Mark, matthew, mark, luke and John, which is the Gospel. That's it. None of the letters, none of that other stuff, just the Psalms and the four G gospels. Right now, alfred the Great came along and said, hey, that was a good idea, but now I want the whole Bible translated. But he died and so that got put on hold. Then the Catholic Church sort of saw the light on this around 1250. And you can all look this up. So this is all open information.
Speaker 1:In 1250, cardinal Hugo, which is from the Catholic organization, divided the Bibles into chapter and verse. No, just for chapters. And the reason why he divided it into chapters is because the book you see right now was not written in chapter and verse. It was just written in the beginning and then you just kept writing. We had periods and stuff like that. You had punctuation for what it's worth, but there was no chapter, there was no verse. We do that now and this is where this started.
Speaker 1:In 1250, cardinal Hugo says well, you know what? Let's have factors to make it more easily referenced, have chapters to make it more easily referenced. Now, there are some divisions. That doesn't make sense, like if you're reading along and instead of a chapter in the book, usually when you have a chapter in the book it actually starts a whole new idea or a whole new storyline or a whole new string. But sometimes in the Bible it just sort of picks up right where the last chapter left off and it doesn't, and then there's like a switch in ideas somewhere about halfway through the chapter. That's, honestly, that's kind of unfortunate. That's just how it is, because he's the one that decided this is how the chapters are going to be.
Speaker 1:But I will say that when you look at all the following translations after that, they all seem to follow that same breakdown, same chapter breakdown. So you're probably sitting there, you're probably, you know, dazed off and drowsy and trying to figure out oh my God, when is he going to get to the King James? We're coming to it. We're coming to it. As a matter of fact, the first English translation Was done by John Wycliffe. Now, he was the first one To translate the entire bible Into English, for what we call the Latin Vulcan, in other words, the Latin Common language. It took him 22 years To translate everything and it was so expensive that One copy would cost 40 pounds and it would take 10 months to write. And the Roman Catholic organization opposed him every step of the way. But wait, I should tell you you should not think of 40 pounds as in $40, or if today's 40 pounds, no, when you had, when you generally earned about a pound a year. Yeah, now you see why it's so expensive and people just didn't. There were more important things to worry about Saving up all that money To get a Bible.
Speaker 1:But John Wycliffe died he's not here today, so he died. He died around 1384, 1385. And it was like an ascending paralysis. I think they call one of those type of paralysis like the Gidon-Barré syndrome, where it starts off as the low extremity paralysis in the lower extremities. It just worked them ways up and then, when they got to a certain point, lungs paralyzed and he died. Okay, 40 years later. Now, this is how bad. This is how bad some things get when you threaten people's power. This is how bad some things get.
Speaker 1:40 years after he died, roman Catholic Dug up his bones. People's power. This is how bad something gets. Forty years after he died, roman Catholics dug up his bones and burned them. They spread the ashes of the burnt bones on River Swift. Now I just want you to think about just how oh boy, what's the word I want to use here how grimy you have to be feeling right about now to pick up a man after he's been buried 40 years and then sprinkle his ashes, burn the bones. The guy's gone. You burnt the bones all the way down the ass and then pour the ashes in the room. That was crazy.
Speaker 1:So, that being said, that still did not prevent the word of God from making his next journey, because right around 1450 we started seeing things in print, and that's because the printing press was invented in Europe by none other than Gutenberg in 1450. And that's why we have the term Gutenberg Fiber the very first thing that was printed. And this happened, I would say, around 1451, 1452, don't quote me on that Now. That then was introduced into England by a guy by the name of Caxon, and it took another 26 years to get there, so 1476. Now, what happened in 1492? There you go. But right after that happened William Tyndale now, if you've been in church and stuff like that. These names might start sounding familiar.
Speaker 1:William Tyndale was the one Protestant reformer, because right about that time, during all this time, you had the Spanish Inquisition. The Spanish Inquisition was basically the Catholic Church trying to suppress this Bible, suppress the truth of the Lord Jesus Christ, and I know, if you're listening to this podcast and you're Catholic, I understand. Remember I said in the beginning you're going to like some parts of this and some parts you're not. But the Catholic Church was really trying to suppress this whole Bible thing coming out and getting into the hands of common people. So that's exactly why people ended up leaving Europe and coming to America. That was the original purpose of coming to America. It wasn't. Oh, we got to go establish a new land. No, no, they were escaping persecution. And I would go back like I did and reread all of our Spanish Inquisition with the knowledge of who was actually doing the inquisiting. I know Christians kind of got the bad rep for that, but it was the Catholics, right.
Speaker 1:So, tyndale, in 1525, he made another English translation and he was the first one to publish it in print. What he did was he published an English New Testament. He had to do that in two different places One in Cologne in France modern day France and one in Worms. In order to get it to England, it had to be smuggled into England. I just want you to take a moment to think about just how precious the word of God is. Is that now we can go down to Barnes, noble or I don't know, whatever your favorite bookseller is and you can go online, amazon? You can go to a hotel and there's Bibles everywhere. Well, I don't know, I don't think they even have hotels anymore, but there's Bibles everywhere. But in England at that time you had to smuggle the Bible into England and they had to take it apart and they put it in cotton, and they put it in fur, ball fur sacks, flour, and every step of the way you had the Catholics trying to prevent that and there were thousands of copies that were intercepted and burned, thousands of copies. So when you hear people complain these days about burning books, what do you think they got that from? So, anyway, now, what he did was he translated from Greek and his translation, a lot of the Bible scholars would say was the most accurate. He translated directly from Greek and he skipped all the other translations, and people say that this is the most accurate translation. I don't know, there are different matters of opinion on that, but this one was very, very, very accurate. And he also translated what was called the Pentateuch and Jonah into English. And in 1535, he issued a revised version of the New Testament from the original Greek.
Speaker 1:Now, because I'm sure that you're bored now, you probably have to get a cup of coffee. We're going to go ahead and end this here. I want, if your homework, if I was ever going to issue homework, is to go back and follow those dates that we talked about, because it's important to know how the Bible that you hold, that we hold. And I'm going to be honest with you Before I did all this, before I saw this, I kind of took it for granted this thing took 1,500 years just to get into a form that we kind of recognize. I'm only saying that 1,500 years because after Christ it actually took longer than that, because it was on scrolls before that 6,000 years. My suggestion would be to go ahead and look girls before that 6,000 years. So my suggestion would be to go ahead and look back through the years that I've mentioned and do your research.
Speaker 1:Now I know that you're going to find some garbage websites out there that float a lot of different little weird things put out by other organizations. I know, I know I've come across that. That's why it's taken me so long to answer your question. But by the time you chase all that down, you realize that it was garbage. I don't want you to fall into that, but I also don't want you to just randomly take my word for it, because this is a Bible study podcast, not a Bible dictatorship podcast. But I love each and every one of you. Next week we're going to talk about Miles Glovendale, who actually started putting the Bible in print. We're going to keep going on, because now this case is going to pick up faster, and then we're going to go through all of the more prominent translations.
Speaker 1:Ok, love each and every one of you. See y'all on the next one. Hey, tell somebody that you love them. You See y'all on the next one. Hey, tell somebody that you love them, even if you have to fake it. I know somebody was like how can you tell somebody that you love them when you don't? You do, because the Bible says to love your neighbor as yourself. If you love yourself, then you can say hey, guys or tweet. You don't have to walk around looking all scientific I love you. You don't have to be that, but you can treat them kindly. You can hold the door for somebody and smile. You can pick up some. If somebody drops something on the floor, you can pick that up for them and then, if God moves, you say Jesus loves you, because God is reaching out for a lot of people. There's going to be a revival soon and we want to be a part of it. All right, god bless you all. See you all in the next one. Bye-bye.