Walk With Me

Where we Got our Bible Part 2

• JJ

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Speaker 1:

Hello everybody, welcome to today's episode of Walk With Me. I am your host, jj. So good, so good, so good to have each and every one of you here. Thank you all for the likes and shares. Thank you all for the feedback. I really do appreciate it, even if listen, like I told you. I tell you guys often, even if it's bad feedback, I appreciate it, or let's not say bad, maybe if it'sconstructive, but that's okay, all feedback is appreciated. I love your questions.

Speaker 1:

As a matter of fact, today we will be dealing with part two of a question that was sent to the email address, which is walkwithmebiblestudy at gmail. Walkwithmebiblestudy at gmail. And it was such an involved question. I knew that being able to type that out was going to be a book by itself. So we're just going to go through with it and answer the questions. But before we do that, gotta take care of housekeeping. Big shout out to bars and lyricists for the intro and the outro. Exquisite Creations, iron Gate Ministries and also Wise Care for Kinfolk yes, that's going to be the name of the new sponsor, and we will go ahead and take care of that. We will go jump right into it because they still have a lot of ground to cover.

Speaker 1:

Um, I think, if I remember correctly, we left off on Miles Coverdale. Now what Miles Coverdale? Uh? And just to recap, uh, we were talking about where did the Bible come from? Now I get it. When we talk about where the Bible comes from, now I get it.

Speaker 1:

When we talk about where the Bible comes from, everybody always says, oh, it was written by man, and that makes it fallible and that makes it false and it makes all these things, but it still makes it true. So we have to be very careful that we make sure that we understand that it's true. The Bible is true, not because of the paper that or the binder that it's in, but the words on the pages were inspired by God, even if they were written by man. So it's just one of those things that we kind of struggle with as Christians, because people who don't believe say, hey, that book was written by man, which is kind of ironic when you think about it, because yeah, the Bible was penned by man, but so was the science book, and a typical science book, especially when you're talking about evolution, has so many contradictions in it it doesn't even make sense Math books were written by man, but people follow them, people believe in them, people subscribe to them. So there's no reason why we should have a new found sense of doubt when it comes to the Bible, even because it was penned by man. Those men were inspired of holy men. So it's just not feasible an argument that we talk about the validity of the Bible, especially when you can figure out that that Bible has been written over thousands of years and translated over thousands of years and still can't find a contradiction in it. There are a couple words that were mistranslated, like the word Easter in chapter 12 and 4. That word should not be there. That word should be passive, which is Passover. We're not going to get off into the woods the weeds. We're not going to get off into the woods the weeds. But yes, there's no contradiction in the Bible if you take everything in context. When you start taking things out of context, oh yeah, it's going to have a contradiction. Okay, so we're going to pick up where we left off the whole Bible.

Speaker 1:

The first time the entire Bible was printed actually was printed in English. The first time it was printed in English was in around 1535 by this Miles Covertine, and the Bible was still an undercover thing. It was undercover. In other words, the Roman Catholic organization did not want the Bible to be in the hands of common people. They did not want, and there are a lot of schools of thought of this, but I have my own that I will not repeat here because that starts a whole new process and that's not the answer. I don't want to get off into the weeds of this, but we're still dealing with it Right. So after Miles covered, it, finally got the entire bible printed in england.

Speaker 1:

There was king, king henry the eighth. Now we have all heard about king henry the eighth. That man was a wicked man. He was not very godly at all. So just because I'm about to tell you this next thing, I don't want you to think that JJ Steele and King Henry VIII was great, not even in the slightest. But there was a another guy by the name of Thomas Cromwell that somehow convinced Henry VIII to grant a license to be able to issue this Bible. That was in English Now. This was done by John Rogers and it was called the Matthews Bible.

Speaker 1:

It was very, very, very unpopular. And the reason why it was unpopular? Because the comments, what was happening, was he would have the Bible written in English, but then in the margins and all over the scriptures, he was putting out things that was against the Roman Catholic organization. So that was very unpopular, because by then the Inquisition had been in full swing, people had converted to Catholicism. And now here comes this book with the Bible which basically tells by then the Inquisition had been in full swing, people had converted to Catholicism, and now here comes this book with the Bible which basically tells you that you're not believing in the right thing, right?

Speaker 1:

So in 1539, there was a retread that was brought by Coverdell and the others, without the marginal comment. King Henry VIII was like okay, we'll work with it. And that became the first authorized version. Now we're talking about King Henry, not King James. But this was called the quote-unquote Great Bible because how big it was. And King Henry decided that it should be in every parish church and chained to the pulpit so people could come and hear the Word of God and you could see somebody reading it. You could even go up and actually take a look at the pages and forget the fact that you had about a 6% chance of being able to read. You could actually see words, but you couldn't take it home because it was chained to the pulpit. However, the next thing that happened because God is not locked, god is going to do what he wants to do In 1560, a version called the Geneva Bible appeared, and it was done by the Protestants.

Speaker 1:

And this is talking about Geneva, switzerland. This is where this all started, and this was translated from the original Greek and Hebrew. It was smaller in size rather than this big thing that was like a. It was like the Almost. The old one was like the old compact desktop tower that's how big it was. But this one was smaller and it became popular because you could start carrying it around. You still can read it, but you can carry it. And this is the Bible that was made popular by Shakespeare. Cromwell, john Bunyan and the pilgrims brought it to America. Now it's important to this, important to understand this version, this Geneva Bible, because this is where the first division into verses appears.

Speaker 1:

So before we had the guy that just translated into chapters, but it still became kind of tedious if you wanted to know a particular thing about what was said. So that's when they started breaking it down into verses. Basically, every sentence got a number within the chapter and it used what was called the Roman type, what we have in our word processing program like Word, open Office and things like that. It had the Roman type so you could make it more easily read for people who could read. And it was also the first Bible and this is very important.

Speaker 1:

It was the first Bible to use italic for the words translators added. So when you're reading your Bible you go along, you see a word that's italicized. It's because the translators added that word. And the reason why they added that word because without that word the sentence would, would be, would make a little bit less sense because they're actually translating it from the Hebrew and the Greek into English and the English language is kind of backwards and upside down language that I know of, that I can have studied. Adjectives usually go behind the word. So if we see a beautiful girl, we English put the word beautiful in front of girl because that's the adjective, but in most other languages it would be girl beautiful, which makes absolutely no sense to us, but to them it makes sense abatuelas, negro, black beans. You don't think so? Negro being black, abatuelas being beans, and apparently there's a whole bunch of different words for being without. I don't want to go down that road and get off into those weeds. But because of that and the words being translated not making a lot of sense, sometimes they would add words to it that didn't appear in the original Greek or Hebrew text.

Speaker 1:

Now, in 1582, the Roman Catholic decided they were going to get into the translation business. So they translated the New Testament at Reims and then they translated the Old Testament at Douai. Now this includes the Apocrypha, which was translated from the Latin Vulgate, but it had a lot of errors, a lot of mess-ups. Now, what is the Apocrypha? A lot of people use that term and I will admit that when I first heard that I was like, ah, that's some garbage. But the Apocrypha is 14 books that included the Roman Catholic Bible and are not present in the Protestant Bible because scriptures are self-contained and absolutely complete, with nothing lacking.

Speaker 1:

In the Protestant Bible. There was nothing lacking, but they added stuff to it anyway. There's no reference to the Apocrypha in the New Testament. There are warnings against adding to this Bible, like in Moses, deuteronomy 4-2, solomon 30-6,. John had warned about adding to it. So Moses, solomon and John added warnings. They put warnings in there because God was telling them don't add anything to this Bible. So when they put those warnings in there.

Speaker 1:

When you start bringing the Apocrypha in there, it's like I just didn't even want to learn about it. But apparently this is important to learn about Because you got to know when people start throwing random books at you it's not in the Bible, like we have Song of Solomon, but then there's another Solomon book floating around out there that somebody wrote and that book is weird. I'm telling you that book's weird. So I'm off in the weeds again. So I'm off in the weeds again. Now. This Apocrypha is not acknowledged by any Orthodox Jew or any Christian church. I'm just telling you. It's not acknowledged as being inspired. It has so many errors, it contradicts so much of the Word of God and you can't trace his origins. And there's a lot of legendary stuff in there too. Like somebody said, there's a book of Enoch out there that doesn't make sense Historical errors that literally look like somebody was sitting in their basement and wrote it out from imagination. So that's why it's not really recognized as part of the Bible canon, so to speak.

Speaker 1:

Now, now we finally get to one version we know and love. It is King James Version. We finally got here An episode and a half, but we finally got to King James Version. We finally got here An episode and a half and we finally got to King James Version. But this happened in 1611. And this is the version that most of us who speak English as a primary language. This is the one we use. 47 people, 47 scholars, actually went back to the earlier version, weeded out some of the errors and properly translated other things and words and brought them into this new version. Now they went back and got ancient Greek texts, hebrew texts, and consulted with people who spoke those languages fluently to try to get the best translation possible. And that version of the Bible was the Bible for about 370 years, 370 years, so you take 1611, that's when the King James Version appeared, 1611, and 375 years get about 1980. But we are going to not get there just yet.

Speaker 1:

In 1881, there was a bunch of other scholars, about a hundred of them, from ten different denominations. Now wait a minute. What did I just say? That was different from every other translation of the Bible. That's right. In the other translations of the Bible nobody said anything about denominations. So somewhere between 1611 and 1881 we ended up with a whole bunch of denominations. That means Somebody was adding something that they shouldn't have and we talked about that before and I'd be more than happy to revisit it.

Speaker 1:

But so 100 scholars from different denominations in England and America worked on a new Bible, new translation of the Bible. It took them about 10 years and it's called the Revised Version. So you have the King James Version. King James Revised Version. It's not the New King James Version. King James Revised Version it's not the New King James Version. That's a totally different. That's a smaller, smaller version. By smaller I mean a newer, less different version of the King James Version. Okay, but this is called the Revised Version. Now the American Standard Version Came right after that, in 1905. Now you start to see Developments happen very quickly. American Standard Version this took about 15 years. So this basically started Right about the time they had finished the Revised Version.

Speaker 1:

So you see these again. You see these versions popping out Almost all the time they had finished the revised version. So you see again, you see these versions popping out almost all the time now, and it was. They actually divided the Bible into paragraphs, even though we already had chapters. So, like you see some of your Bibles they have, they actually put the verses in paragraph form and instead of having the first, the first number at the beginning of the left indent you'll see the numbers like in the middle, middle of the paragraph, the middle of the. Uh, what does they call that? Middle of the justification? So there's no, there's no. How do I? How do I explain this? So they have the in the King James Version you have a verse and Nicodemus came and Jesus said Verily, verily, I stand to thee that the man be born of the water of the Spirit and I see the kingdom of God, period, and the rest of that line is space.

Speaker 1:

The next verse when Nicodemus asks about if he's going to come back and reenter his mother's womb. Again, that's a whole new line, whereas in the American Standard Version, that next verse, there is no space. At the end of the kingdom of God, there is no space. You just go right into the next concept, right into the next verse. Now, that took about 15 years, 15 years to do. Then we went and we came up. Because that wasn't good enough, we came up with the Revised Standard Version.

Speaker 1:

This was done around 1930, 1929, 1930, and I believe that one was copyrighted and that was transferred to the Council called the International Religious Council. I believe it's International Council of Religious Education. Yeah, that sounds about right. And that body had 40 major Protestant denominations. Again, what did I say that was different from all the other versions? Denomination, which means you are taking something away from the name to make your own church, and that's why it's wrong. And we're going to go back and we're going to revisit denominations anyway, because it's not so. That council appointed there was a committee of scholars and they were coming from seminaries and universities and what they did was they revised the standard version, which was done in 1925. Sorry, 1905. Now that revised standard version was published in 1946.

Speaker 1:

And there is a liberal theology in that Bible. Like we see the translation of the word virgin, a lot of liberal translations in there. So for that purpose I particularly use King James Version, because when you start seeing denominations and stuff having something to do with translation, something got in there, something's going to get in there that is not in the original text. It's going to be somebody's feelings, which means that some of the meanings of the word is going to be softened up. I don't want to know that there's a softer meaning of the word hell. I'm not saying there is, but I'm just using this to draw a point. Know that there's a softer meaning of the word hell. I'm not saying there is, but I'm just using this to draw a point. If it's hell, I want to know it's hot and I want to know eternity is long and I want to know there's a way to avoid it. Repent and be baptized, not anything else. Right, right.

Speaker 1:

So there are um, uh versions that I would recommend, if you're asking me, because that was also part of the question um, king James Version Amplified. Um me personally, I am really starting to like the New Living Translation. Um, and I probably you know it's one of those things where I kind to like the New Living Translation and I probably you know it's one of those things where I kind of like the translation, until, all of a sudden, I don't. But if anything, I have never had a problem with King James Version. The Bible has to stand true to the things, rather than some of these other translations.

Speaker 1:

Some people use translations by the name of Moffat or Weymouth, but it's always good to have different versions of these Bibles, even if you don't use them, because there's a denomination out there. I'm not going to name it by name. They literally changed it in order to fit their theology and if you're not familiar with it, it will completely destroy you if you are not versed on it. And that particular organization. They changed down one and one and all of a sudden you have four or five or six, seven gods running around, and that's not good, right. So, again, keep your main go-to sword as King James Version, only because I don't want the Bible that I'm reading to have any denominational slant to it, because Jesus never preached anything about denominations. He never did. He never did. So, that being said, we're going to wrap this up. I hope I know I went through this very fast. I know I did.

Speaker 1:

If you have questions, feel free Email me, walkwithmebiblestudy at email. Again, if it ends up being a long question or a long answer, oh yeah, absolutely, I'll just do another episode on it. I love doing this, I love talking about this. We may go into and I think I will some of the um, some of the contradictions, and and go ahead and send me a yes. That's all you got to do is send me a yes in the subject line. If you want me to go into the contradiction, uh, and we will, we'll go right into it.

Speaker 1:

But I thank you all for joining and listening and being patient. Um hope you learned something as much as I did by trying to nail down this timeline of how we got that wonderful word of God. If you have any questions again, email me, comment, email me, walk with me Bible study or leave a comment on some of the social medias. I love each and every one of you. Till next time. Tell somebody you love them, tell somebody that God loves them. It may be the only positive thing that they hear today. All right, god bless you. Bye-bye.