History of English Bible

A history lesson tonight Use Text in study Guide

A. Copying Techniques

1. In 586 B.C., Jerusalem was captured by the Babylonians. The Temple was looted and then destroyed by fire. The Jews were exiled.

About 70 years later, the Jewish captives returned to Jerusalem from Babylon. According to the Bible, Ezra recovered a copy of the Torah (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) and read it aloud to the whole nation.

From then on, the Jewish scribes solidified the following process for creating copies of the Torah and eventually other books in the Old Testament.

They could only use clean animal skins, both to write on, and even to bind manuscripts.

Each column of writing could have no less than forty-eight, and no more than sixty lines.

The ink must be black, and of a special recipe.

They must verbalize each word aloud while they were writing.

They must wipe the pen and wash their entire bodies before writing the word "Jehovah," every time they wrote it.

There must be a review within thirty days, and if as many as three pages required corrections, the entire manuscript had to be redone.

The letters, words, and paragraphs had to be counted, and the document became invalid if two letters touched each other. The middle paragraph, word and letter must correspond to those of the original document.

The documents could be stored only in sacred places (synagogues, etc).

As no document containing God's Word could be destroyed, they were stored, or buried, in a genizah - a Hebrew term meaning "hiding place." These were usually kept in a synagogue or sometimes in a Jewish cemetery.

Until 1948, the oldest manuscripts of the Old Testament dated back to 895 A.D. In 1947, a Sheppard boy discovered some scrolls inside a cave West of the Dead Sea. These manuscripts dated between 100 B.C. and 100 A.D. Over the next decade, more scrolls were found in caves and the discovery became known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Every book in the Old Testament was represented in this discovery except Esther. Numerous copies of each book was discovered (For example, 25 copies of Deuteronomy).

2. Preservation Techniques - Ways they preserved the Word.

A. Down thru time preserved accurately by s

1. Oral tradition

2. Strict copying techniques

3. Destroying old or damaged copies. To keep anyone from misreading or misunderstanding it.

3. Authorship Authority

1. By putting it to the test (New Testament mostly)

A. The people would have remembered Christ and his miracles and the happenings. If they had been false reporting’s in the Bible you would have heard about it.

2. Kind of like if I were to write an article in the Flaming Sword about us building a brand new church and crowds averaging 1000 every Sunday morning. There would be some differing stories from you folks to the rest of the church. These differing stories cannot be found. In fact the opposite is true we find agreeing reports in other sources