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Study Section 10: History of Revelation – continued

10.1 Connect.

I took Greek in seminary. It was not easy as we had to learn tons of vocabulary words,
sometimes as many as four words which stood for one word in English. We had to learn the
number, gender, and cases of nouns, the person, number, tenses, voices, and moods of
verbs. Then within the voice of a verb, we had to learn about active, passive, and middle
voices. We learned the indicative, imperative, subjunctive and optative moods of verbs. And
then to add to the confusion, we had to learn that each verb has one of five tenses: present, aorist,
perfect, future, and pluperfect tense. My head was spinning every day of class. It was not after I
started putting all this together that I fully understood why God chose Greek as the language of the New
Testament.

You see, Greek is a very exact language. By knowing all these characteristics about each noun and verb,
you can almost without any hesitation tell the reader exactly what the author penned. And since God
wanted what He said to be communicated as clearly as possible, He selected a language that could not
have been more precise. Through the ages of Biblical development, great scholars who learned Greek
translated it into the language of the common people, often costing them their lives. Today we will
continue to learn about how the Bible came to us, about the languages God used in the process, and the
various methods God used to make sure our copy is as exact a replica of His original words as possible.
Let’s get started….

10.2 Objectives.

1. The student should be able to cite the History of how the Bible we have today was
transmitted to us from Reformation to the current day.

2. The student should be able to describe the languages the Bible was written in and why God
chose those languages.

3. The student should be able to describe the various methods used in translating the original languages
into other languages.

10.3 How we got our Bible – Continued.

Martin Luther had a small head-start on Tyndale, as Luther declared his intolerance for the
Roman Church’s corruption on Halloween in 1517, by nailing his 95 Theses of Contention to
the Wittenberg Church door. Luther, who would be exiled in the months following the Diet of
Worms Council in 1521 that was designed to martyr him, would translate the New Testament
into German for the first time from the 1516 Greek-Latin New Testament of Erasmus, and
publish it in September of 1522. Luther also published a German Pentateuch in 1523, and
another edition of the German New Testament in 1529. In the 1530’s he would go on to publish the
entire Bible in German.

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