Page 55 - Bibliology - Textbook w videos short

Study Section 9: History of Revelation – How we got our Bible

9.1 Connect.

“The Bible you may hold in your hands today is not the exact same Bible that God wrote
thousands of years ago.” Does that statement surprise you? Well, probably the Bible you
own is not written in Greek, Hebrew, or Aramaic, right? The Bible you possess had to be
translated from these languages into your own native tongue. So it is obvious that you do
not possess the original autographs that God wrote! In fact, the copy you have is probably
copied from thousands of previous copies.

Have you ever played a game where you whisper a sentence to someone in a line, and then they pass it
on to the next person, and so on until it is shared to maybe 20 or 30 people. By the end of the line, the
sentence is not even close to the original sentence! It gets messed up along the way as people add,
delete, or alter the words they heard. And this is only passing one sentence on over a short group of
people.

Can you imagine passing on the entire Bible over several thousand years, over thousands of copies, what
the final result would be? It should be quite altered. But the amazing thing we have discovered is that it
is not altered at all in any significant sense. There are a few differences which scholars call variants. But
for the most part, it had remained almost identical from the day it was written to today. Today we are
going to see how this amazing miracle of preservation has occurred over the centuries…..

9.2 Objectives.

1. The student should be able to trace the history of how the Bible came together into the
canon.

2. The student should be able to explain how the early church fathers recognized a book to be
included in the Bible.

3. The student should be able to discuss how the church walked away from God and became a political
force against allowing God’s Word to be read among the people.

4. The student should be able to list some great men of God who were willing to give their lives up to
martyrdom in order that the Bible could be read by the masses of people in their own languages.

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