Page 53 - Doctrine and History of the Preservation of the Bible Student Textbook

How did we Get the Bible?

Where was the true church of God during these Dark Ages?
On the Scottish Island of Iona, in 563 AD, a man named Columba started a
Bible College. For the next 700 years, this was the source of much of the
non-Catholic, evangelical Bible teaching through those centuries of the
Dark and Middle Ages. The students of this college were called “Culdees”,
which means “certain stranger”. The Culdees were a secret society, and
the remnant of the true Christian faith was kept alive by these men during
the many centuries that led up to the Protestant Reformation.
In fact, the first man to be called a “Culdee” was Joseph of Aremethia. The
Bible tells us that Joseph of Aremethia gave up his tomb for Jesus.

Tradition tells us that he was actually the Uncle of the Virgin Mary, and
therefore the Great-Uncle (or “half-Uncle” at least) of Jesus. It is also
believed that Joseph of Aremethia traveled to the British Isles shortly after the resurrection of Christ,
and built the first Christian Church above ground there. Tradition also tells us that Jesus may have spent
much of his young adult life (between 13 and 30) traveling the world with his Great Uncle Joseph…
though the Bible is silent on these years in the life of Jesus.

The first person to divide the Bible into chapters in a systematic way was Cardinal Hugo de Sancto Caro
from 1244 and 1248 A.D. The chapter divisions that are commonly used today were developed by
Stephen Langton, an Archbishop of Canterbury. Langton put the modern chapter divisions into place in
around 1227 A.D. The Wycliffe English Bible of 1382 was the first Bible to use this chapter pattern. Since
the Wycliffe Bible, nearly all Bible translations have followed Langton's chapter divisions.

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