S3 E4 TRANSCRIPT
HOW DID WE GET THE BIBLE?
INTRODUCTION
Hello everyone and welcome to Spirit-Led Hope. My name is Glenn Erichsen, and in this episode, we are answering the question:
HOW DID WE GET THE BIBLE?
In the last episode we discussed how the Bible is God-breathed. We said that in some way, the Holy Spirit “carried along” the authors such that they said exactly what God wanted said. We also made the statement, that the original writings of the Bible are without error.
This raises all sorts of questions and I think it is important that we do not shy away from them. If our faith and belief in God is linked so vitally to a book, then surely, we should know something about how we got that book. How was it written? What was the text written on?
Not only will our faith and confidence grow as we learn about the history of the Bible, but we will also learn how to answer some of the hard questions people may ask us, or that we ask ourselves. Many people run away from God, or deny his existence, because of the Bible. If we can help others view the Bible properly, then it may help them on their journey towards God.
I do want to remind everyone that what we cover in this podcast should only be viewed as an introduction to deeper study. In Episode 1 of this Season, I shared that I have three books on my shelves that cover systematic theology. What I find humorous is that the one that is about 1300 pages long calls itself “an introduction to Christian belief.” That is a very long introduction!
But I feel that way about these podcasts. Even though we are going to cover a lot of material, there is so much more we could talk about. I hope you learn a lot from these episodes, but please do your own studying in areas where I am not as thorough as you would like.
WRITING
Let us start by talking about the languages found in the Old and New Testaments. The Old Testament is written primarily in Hebrew, with a few sections in Aramaic. Aramaic is closely related to Hebrew and was commonly spoken in Palestine. They are so closely related that the Hebrew and Aramaic characters are nearly identical…even though they are separate languages.
In the New Testament we read some of the words of Jesus where he used Aramaic expressions. And yet, we also see him reading the Jewish Scriptures which would have been in Hebrew. Jesus most likely knew both Hebrew and Aramaic as well as Greek, which is what the New Testament was written in. The type of Greek used was Koine Greek which was the common dialect at the time. Greek was the most universal language of the first century, and this helped the gospel spread.
We said in Episode 2 that the first writings of the Old Testament started around 3500 hundred years ago. That makes it a very old book. But it is not the oldest thing ever written. There was a time when skeptics of the Bible believed that writing did not begin until after Moses lived. And if that were the case, then Moses could not have written the first five books of the Bible as most scholars believe. That would have cast a lot of doubt on the biblical narrative.
But now it is known that writing existed long before Moses in the form of hieroglyphics. In both Egypt and Mesopotamia, we see examples of hieroglyphs on tombs, and monuments. These date back to around 3000 B.C.
But hieroglyphs are not the same as using an alphabet. It does not appear that the Egyptians were the ones who invented the alphabet. And yet, and I find this fascinating, it appears that the first alphabet was developed somewhere on or around the Sinai Peninsula in about 1750 B.C., roughly 250 years before Moses.
Think about that. Archaeological evidence suggests that Moses grew up in a time and at a location where written language, as we know it, had been practiced for hundreds of years.
Why am I belaboring this point? Well, you may recall from the last episode that I said it is impossible to prove to others that the Bible is God-breathed. But I do not want us to think that there is nothing to indicate that the Bible is true. If the Bible is God-breathed, then we certainly should expect it to be accurate in terms of its historical account. This is exactly what we find when it comes to the very origins of how and when the Bible was written.
While we cannot use this to prove to others that the Bible is true, it is one of many things that collectively convince me, that the Bible is the real deal. It is another case where skeptics tried and failed to disprove the origin or the contents of the Bible.
ANCIENT WRITING MATERIAL
Now that we know that writing existed at the time when the first books of the Bible were recorded, what were they written on? Did paper and ink exist back then?
It turns out that portions of the Bible have been written on a variety of materials. For example, in the last episode we mentioned that God wrote the Ten Commandments in stone. Through archaeology we see cases where ancient writers chiseled or scratched writing into rock. In some cases, plaster was smeared over stones and then written on with ink. Black ink has been around for about 4500 years. It turns out that ink is not that hard to make.
Clay was a very popular writing material used by the Assyrians and Babylonians. They would use a stylus to press characters into moist clay, and then they would allow the clay to harden. This made very durable tablets and thousands of them containing writings of historical interest have survived. Many of these surviving tablets provide valuable confirmation of what is written in the Bible.
In the Old Testament, there are a couple of references where God instructed some of the prophets to symbolically write on wooden sticks. So, we know that writing was sometimes recorded on wood. Wood and wax were a popular writing medium for the Romans. In one method, they would scratch their writing into wax held by a wooden frame. When using wax, they could even erase the writing if necessary. This was like an early version of a word processor! A very early version!
We also see cases in the Old Testament where writing was done on metal. In the book of Exodus, we read a verse where an engraving was made on a small gold plate that Aaron, the priest, wore on his forehead. The Greeks and Romans liked to use bronze tablets to record official decrees or treaties.
I find it very interesting that broken pottery sherds were often used in Bible times for writing. Instead of using something like post-it notes, people then would take pottery fragments and either scratch on them or write on them with ink. These pottery pieces were so tough that many survive today and give interesting glimpses into ancient life.
All those things I just mentioned were used by ancient people for writing and were certainly used by some of the authors of the Bible. But those materials have a lot of disadvantages. Can you imagine trying to carry around something like a book of Psalms written on hundreds of clay tablets? Or organizing hundreds of pottery sherds to make a coherent book of the Bible?
It is no surprise then, that these materials were replaced by papyrus and leather, which became the most popular writing materials for both the Old and New Testaments.
Papyrus was used as early as 3000 B.C. by the Egyptians. Our modern-day paper gets its name from papyrus. I just bought a package of printer paper from Costco, and it is remarkably uniform in thickness, and size, and color…just right for my ink-jet printer. Modern paper has come a long way from the early days of papyrus.
To make paper from papyrus during Bible times, strips from a papyrus plant were pressed together and dried in the sun. Any rough spots would be smoothed out to make the final product. Ink was typically applied with pens made of hollow stalks of grass or reeds frequently sharpened to a point with a knife. The Bible authors using papyrus would have valued it because it was light, compact, and could be rolled up. Much of the New Testament was probably written on this type of paper.
Much of the Old Testament was written with ink on leather using pens like those we mentioned with papyrus. Small pieces of leather were sewn together to make long rectangles that could be rolled up. Some of the rectangles could be up to 100 feet, or 30 meters, long. The text was written in columns perpendicular to the long direction, and this allowed the making of scrolls. After wrapping the leather around a rod, the writing could be read by slowly unrolling the leather from the starting rod and rolling it onto a receiving rod. With scrolls, it was now possible to conveniently carry around much larger amounts of writing. Scrolls were also made using papyrus.
Leather was used very early on by the Bible writers, but things changed a little after 200 B.C. At that point, parchment became more prominent in use. Parchment is still leather, but instead of the leather being tanned, parchment is made by stretching and drying the leather on a frame. This produces a very high-quality material that can have writing on both sides, and it is much more durable than papyrus. This is why most Bibles produced from the fourth century through the Middle Ages are written on parchment.
Sometimes you will hear or see the word vellum, instead of parchment. Vellum and parchment are often used interchangeably. But technically, vellum was made with the skin of young calves and antelopes, and parchment was made from the skin of sheep and goats. But, again, vellum and parchment today are considered the same thing.
Everything we just talked about refers not only to what the Bible authors used as writing materials, but also to those (like scribes) who copied the Scriptures after they were first written.
I am not going to go into any detail on this, but scrolls were ultimately replaced by the codex, which was the beginning of books in the form as we know them. They started becoming popular in the third and fourth century A.D. and were primarily made of parchment or papyrus.
THE ORIGINALS ARE GONE
At this point, you may wonder why we are discussing the materials upon which the Scriptures were written. And there are, I think, a few different reasons.
The first reason, is that knowing the mechanics of writing, helps explain some of the verses we read in the Bible. For example, in the 36th chapter of Jeremiah, we read about a scribe named Baruch who used ink and wrote on a scroll the words of God given to Jeremiah. It turns out that the king did not like what Jeremiah said on behalf of God, so after every few columns of the scroll were read, the king cut them off with a knife and burned them.
If you know something about how the scrolls were made and written, these verses make perfect sense. As a side note about this story…after that scroll was destroyed, God asked Jeremiah and Baruch to remake it. With just the little we have mentioned in this episode, you can appreciate how much work that was. Knowing something about the history of writing is very useful in understanding parts of the Bible.
The second reason is something I mentioned earlier. When we see that the Bible is historically accurate even about how the Bible was written, it is more confirmation that it speaks the truth.
The third reason we are discussing the materials on which the Bible was written, is going to take us in a very different direction. We now know that most of the Bible was first written on materials that have a shelf life. Papyrus and leather do not last forever.
I have a book of my father’s that is 90 years old, and it sure looks like it. The pages are yellow, and you need to be careful with it. That is after only 90 years, and the Bible was written thousands of years ago.
If you have the right environment, it is possible that paper, ink, and leather can last a long time. But the authors of the Bible did not have the right environment. What they wrote was circulated and shared in a variety of conditions. Scrolls were constantly flexing the leather and papyrus and would eventually fall apart.
My point is this, because the Bible is thousands of years old, we no longer have the original writings. They are gone. All we have are copies of copies. And this can make Christians uncomfortable.
I mentioned in earlier episodes and earlier in this one, that the Bible is correct with regards to its original writings. How do we know that what we have today is still okay? That is a much bigger topic than we can handle in this episode. So let us set that aside for now and come back to it.
THE SPIRIT-LED RARELY SEE THE BIG PICTURE
This is the part of the episode where I want to look at what we just discussed from the perspective of a Spirit-led life. Unless you are an author, an episode about leather, ink, papyrus, and writing may not seem like it is relevant to you. But it very much is if you look at what the Biblical authors went through to write the words we read today.
Based on what we just looked at, writing in Biblical times was a bit of an adventure. Whether you were scratching notes on a pottery sherd, or making ink to write on animal skin, or preparing the animal skin, being carried along by the Holy Spirit involved a lot more work than picking up paper at Costco.
Not only was writing more difficult, but there was no guarantee that what you wrote would have a large audience. In our era, it is not unusual for a news event, or even a cat video, to go viral. But how could anything go viral at a time when information could not move much faster than a horse could run, or a person could walk.
What I am really trying to get to here, is that the authors of the Bible submitted to the work of the Holy Spirit without ever seeing the big picture. They did not always see the bigger results of their actions. How could they know that thousands of years after they wrote it, you and I would be reading the words which God wanted us to read? Their efforts to join with the Holy Spirit accomplished something much bigger than they ever could have imagined.
And that is what I want us to see. When we participate with the Holy Spirit in a Spirit-led life, we have no idea of the big picture. We may see immediate results and a lot of it may make sense to us, but God loves taking our obedience and, multiplying in unseen ways, the work of the Holy Spirit.
Many times, the work set before us is tedious and does not seem like much, but God uses it. When the king threw the scroll into the fire, I am sure that Jeremiah and Baruch groaned. They knew how much work went into that writing. And when God said to rewrite it…I bet they groaned again. And yet, here we are, the beneficiaries of something they did because they followed God. We never know the extent of what God will do with our obedience to the Holy Spirit.
As you respond to the Holy Spirit guiding you in your life, do not worry over whether the task is large or small…or whether it seems trivial or significant. God will use your life, led by the Holy Spirit, to achieve what he wants to achieve. Take hope that your Spirit-led life will give hope to others.
CLOSING
In our next episode, we will continue with our discussion about not having the original writings of the Bible.
As always, if you have any comments, suggestions, or questions, please email me at glenn@spiritledhope.com, or simply use the Contact Form at spiritledhope.com. That is spiritLEDhope.com. I look forward to hearing from you.
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As we finish:
May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope, by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Until next episode, take care.
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