WORD: How to Study the Bible (1)

Class Outline:

Can You Trust the Bible?

The Message of the Bible

The Task of the Interpreter

Genres

Context

Meaning

Test Drive (1)

Test Drive (2)

Ground Rules:

1. I will not share another person’s story or struggle unless given permission.

2. I will seek to start on time and end on time. (9:15-10:15)

3. I will seek understanding before seeking to be understood.

4. I will not take disagreements personally.

5. I will do to others as I wish done to me.

6. I will not try to “fix” other people. But will encourage, love, and point to Christ.

7. I will commit to regular attendance and necessary preparation

Session One: The Reliability of Scripture

Session One: The Reliability of Scripture

Tonight we will be discussing The Reliability of Scripture. Is Scripture really God’s Word? Who wrote the Bible? How did we come to get our Bible? What is Inerrancy, and does it matter? Big topics that we need to jump right into.

INTERACTION:

What are some of the reasons that people give for not trusting Scripture? What are reasons for not believing that Scripture is God’s Word?

Possible responses:

Just ordinary people—drawing from other religions—wrote the Bible for their own purposes. And the church throughout the years decided to edit and reorganize. Etc. Issues of canon. The Bible is full of errors and contradictions. Your Bible is no more the word of God than the Qu’Ran or any other “holy book”. The “original autographs” are inerrant, we don’t have those so why does it matter?

T/S We are going to interact with three big topics. 1) Who wrote the Bible 2) How did we get the Bible in its present form? 3) What is inerrancy and why does it matter?

Section 1: Who wrote the Bible?

The quick answer is that God wrote it. Perhaps you’ve even heard the statement, “God wrote. I believe it. That settles it.” I actually really appreciate that statement—and understand the historical context in which it was uttered. But I think it needs a little more meat to it. Why? Well, what would that statement say about such passages as (, Philemon v.19, to name a few places)

This is the disciple who is bearing witness about these things, and who has written these things, and we know that his testimony is true.

I, Paul, write this with my own hand:

But the Bible also claims to be “breathed-out by God”.

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, 17 that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work.

This is where we get our word “inspiration”. Perhaps you have heard that before that the Bible is “inspired by God”. That wording comes from this text. But what does it mean that the Bible is “inspired by God”. There are several theories, I want to briefly familiarize you with them and then move on.

Theories of Inspiration:

We’ll take these as a continuum going from left to right. I’ll leave the theory of inspiration that I believe to be biblical until the very end.

Intuition theory: Moses had special religious insight.

On the far left is the intuition theory. According to this view the writers of the Bible have a “natural religion intuition. This really is not much of a theory of “inspiration” because the more conservative of this view simply believe that the writers of Scripture had great artistic ability and religious insight. But Moses, Luke, John, Paul, etc. are qualitatively no different than Plato, Mohammed, Buddha, or any other religious author.

Illumination theory: Out of his own spiritual life and understanding Moses writes about his experience.

Closely akin to this view is the illumination theory. This view does hold that the Spirit of God did work on the minds of the authors but not in any way different than how he communicates with the rest of humanity. The degree of the spirits influence is different but not its kind.

Dynamic theory: God gave Moses ideas and Moses wrote them in his own words.

Dynamic theory

Now moving further right is the dynamic theory. This is sometimes called the concept theory—because this view holds that God gave “definite, specific impressions or concepts” to the biblical authors but allowed them to communicate these concepts in their own words. The phrasing of the Bible is human but the overall message is determined by God.

Sum:

Dictation theory: God told Moses what to write, and he wrote it exactly.

On the far right is what is known as the dictation theory. This is sometimes called the mechanical or type-writer theory because it believes that God dictated the exact words to the human authors. The authors of Scripture exercised no human will in the composition of their writings.

Sum:

Verbal Plenary Theory: Supernaturally, Moses freely wrote exactly what God wanted him to.

The view that I hold is what is known as the verbal plenary theory. That is a pretty fancy way of saying “God inspired the complete text(s) of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, including both historical and doctrinal details. This view holds to a dual authorship of the Scriptures. The authors of the Bible wrote as “thinking, feeling, human beings” but God “mysteriously superintended the process that every word written was the exact word he wanted to be written—free from all error”.

Sum:

Implications of Dual Authorship

If you want to understand your Bible a good place to start then is to understand the clear purpose of the human author. Ex: If you want to understand Colossians it is important to understand why Paul wrote the letter.

But you never stop with only the purpose of the human author. The purpose of the divine author is that which is most significant. This is what we see in the Old Testament. “God included patterns or foreshadowing of which the human authors are not fully aware”. Therefore, Scripture can at times mean something that the human author was not consciously aware of. Ex: If you want to understand Leviticus you need to understand the overall message of the Bible.

There is also an implication of divine authorship. Our doctrine of Scripture is tied to our view of God. God reveals himself in the world—this is known as general revelation. But God also specially reveals himself through His written word—Scripture. Scripture declares that’s it author is God—(All Scripture is God-breathed).

Scripture is the Self-Attesting Word of God. With any piece of literature you allow the “author” to speak for himself/herself. Scripture claims to be the Word of God therefore we must treat it based upon this claim. If any other book claims to be the Word of God we must treat it based upon this claim. The truth even under this is that God is the only adequate witness to himself. Only God can identify his Word. So, when something makes this claim it must be tested. So you test Scripture (and any other book claiming to be written by God) by Scripture.

Definition of Inspiration: “Inspiration is the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit upon the human authors of Scripture such that their writings were precisely what God intended them to write in order to communicate his truth, and as such, they are completely trustworthy and authoritative.”

T/S That is all well and good and it would be really awesome if we had the original manuscripts. But those are not preserved so we have NO idea of what this original God-inspired text actually is.

Section 2: Do we have the Bible?

Is the Bible we have today the one that the original authors wrote?

There is so much more that could be said on these issues than we have time for tonight. I will attempt to quickly give an answer to two broad questions. 1) Are the 66 books that we call the Bible all there should be, and who determined this? 2) Can we be certain that these 66 books have been faithfully transmitted from their original?

Issues of Canon

It is common in our day to picture a group of men in the 4th century with a deeply engrained political agenda filtering through a large number of possible Scripture books and declaring them Scripture. Sort of like this: “We like the Letter to the Hebrews so we will call this Scripture, we like Paul’s letters, we like these four gospels but these others do not fit our agenda, the Shepherd of Hermas is out, the Revelation of John we like but not the Apocalypse of Peter.” At the end of the day they all voted and said we like these 27 and we’ll call this the New Testament.

That’s not the way that it went down. First let’s consider the acceptance of the 39 books of the Old Testament. This one is fairly easy. If you can establish the 27 books of the New Testament as authoritative then the 39 books of the Old Testament will follow. Why? Because Jesus and His apostles declared these 39 books to be the Jewish Scriptures, so we affirm the same. Yes, there was some continuing debate even in the time of Jesus and shortly after. But we know that Jesus held these 39 books because of what he said in ;

Then he said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.”

Moses, Prophets, Psalms is the typical threefold Jewish division of the Scriptures (Law, Prophets, and Writings). This being the accepted Jewish canon has not the subject of much debate.

The New Testament, however, is a different story. When did we first have a list of our current recognized 27 books? Actually the oldest extant list that exactly matches our 27 books is that of Athanasius’ letter in 367 AD; hence, the charge by some that the NT canon was adopted in the 4th century.

But that is not the whole story. Actually all 27 books were completed by 100 AD. They were widely read and considered to be Scripture in the next 100 years. Many early church writers referred to NT passages as Scripture. There are even lists one called the Muratorian canon at the end of the 2nd century and one’s by church historian Eusebius in the 3rd-4th century.

What really happened is that this council in the 4th century just recognized what had been practiced in the church since the time of the early church. There was a heretic named Marcion that just kind of picked which books he liked. This caused the early church to say—“hey wait a minute we need to put something in writing that recognizes which books are authoritative and which are not”. Huge difference here:

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The canon is not an authorized collection of writings (in that the church conferred authority or approval upon a list of books). Rather, the canon is a collection of authoritative writings.

How did they decide this?

Three rules for canonicity:

Was it written or tied closely to an apostle (an authorized eyewitness of Jesus)?

Was it widely recognized by the churches?

Was it widely recognized by the churches?

Did it conform to the rule of faith—basic orthodox Christianity that had been orally handed down from the apostles and even Jesus himself?

Did it conform to the rule of faith—basic orthodox Christianity that had been orally handed down from the apostles and even Jesus himself?

Conclusion: The 66 books we have is the collection of authoritative writings for the church.

Issues of Transmission

So we have in our possession the 66 God inspired books of Scripture? Or do we? Is this actually what was written or has it been subtly changed through the years. Muslims will claim that we have polluted the actual texts. But they are not alone. It is a common charge to say that inerrancy does not matter because we do not have the original autographs nor can we be certain what they said. So, has the Bible been accurately transmitted?

The OT was originally written in Hebrew (some Aramaic) from 1400-430 BC. The NT was written in Greek from 45-90 AD. Yes, the original copies of these are lost. We do not have in our possession anything that was actually penned by the apostle Paul. But we do have thousands of ancient copies. Are these faithful?

To answer that question we engage in something known as textual criticism. Essentially, textual criticism is the process of looking at all of the ancient manuscripts that we have and determining the wording of the originals.

I would love to have more time to go through what is known as textual variants with you. But I cannot. A textual variant is when two or more ancient manuscripts do not square with one another. So textual criticism looks at all of these manuscripts and tries to decipher the original. In some instances it is really quite easy. At other times it is really difficult.

At the end of the day I’ll just cite you the statistics. Leading bible scholar,

D.A. Carson notes that the NT can be reconstructed with roughly 96-97 percent accuracy.

That is indisputable. Some put the percentage higher at maybe 99 percent—but few put it lower. The OT is around 90 percent.

Textual variants sometimes explain the differences in Bible translations. In most translations you will see a footnote that says, “some manuscripts say _____”. Of the 1-4 % that we are uncertain on they have little to no doctrinal significance—there is no doctrine affected by textual variation that is not adequately supported by other passages.

Example: :2

I’ll give you a quick example of a textual variant. In it says, “as it is written in Isaiah the prophet”. Some manuscripts omit “Isaiah” and it reads “in the prophets”. This one we can be pretty certain that it is “Isaiah the prophet”. But even if not—“in the prophets” would not make a huge difference on doctrine or theology.

In conclusion we can absolutely trust that the Bible we possess has been accurately transmitted to us.

Section 3: Is the Bible Without Error?

But even so, does this Bible have errors in it. This is a huge debate and I really only desire to give us a survey of issues related to the reliability of Scripture. Forgive me if anything is overly simplistic. We will only ask a couple of questions: Does the Bible claim to be without error? What does inerrancy mean? And what are the implications of that?

Since God wrote the Bible we have to consider and .

God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind. Has he said, and will he not do it? Or has he spoken, and will he not fulfill it? --

6 The words of the Lord are pure words, like silver refined in a furnace on the ground, purified seven times.–

The Bible claims to be written by God, and to have the words that God wants:

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness,

For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

So from these two things we can see that the Bible claims of itself to be the pure Word of God; or as the theological term has come to be titled—inerrant.

Qualifications of Inerrancy

There has been quite a bit of misunderstanding about this doctrine. So let’s work through what inerrancy is and is not saying.

Inerrancy applies only to the autographs.

(So you can’t say—see the Bible is not inerrant because of what you just said about ).

Inerrancy respects the authorial intent of the passage and the literary conventions under which the author wrote.

This would also apply to our passage. And probably why the variant. According to our modern standards Mark lied. The quotes after this introduction are not only from Isaiah the prophet. It’s a combination of Exodus, Isaiah, and Malachi. So, there is an error, right? No, this was a literary convention in Mark’s day and we must respect that. This also applies to the seeming contradictions of the order of events in the Gospels.

Inerrancy allows for partial reporting, paraphrasing, and summarizing.

The words of a speaker do not have to be given verbatim for it to be accurate.

Inerrancy allow for phenomenological language.

In other words the Biblical author can refer to the sun rising—even though scientifically the sun does not rise.

Inerrancy allows the reporting of speech without the endorsement of the truthfulness of that speech.

In other words you can quote a guy but not necessarily agree with everything he says. The words of Eliphaz are not inerrant. God himself said that. The fool who says in his heart, “there is no God”, is not speaking truth.

Inerrancy does not mean that the Bible provides definitive or exhaustive information on every topic.

As Rob Plummer explains, “If you want to learn to bake French pastries, there is no biblical text that I can suggest. I can, however, exhort you to do all things for God’s glory and not to engage in gluttony. And I would be happy to sample any of the pastries you make”.

Inerrancy is not invalidated by colloquial or nonstandard grammar or spelling.

If your Word processor corrects the spelling or grammar of your Bible it does not make it inerrant.

Inerrancy defined: “Scripture in the original manuscripts does not affirm anything that is contrary to fact.” Or to put that another way, “The Bible always tells the truth and it tells the truth concerning everything it talks about”.

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Conclusion: You can absolutely trust your Bible. It is God’s message to us. To think that the Creator of the Universe would desire to communicate with humanity and to put it in writing so that we would always have His message. We should trust the Bible. We should read the Bible. We should know the Bible.

Upcoming: Next week we will look at the overall message of the Bible. Now that we know that we can trust the Bible it is important for us to ask—what does the Bible say?