How did the Bible Come Down to Us?

Mentioning the Bible to some people is like waving a red rag at a bull.

"The Bible!" snorted one such gentleman. "Who cares about the Bible? Why should we take any notice of a book like that?

"Just look at its history. Written so long ago that nobody knows who wrote it. Copied and re-copied until no one knows how much it has changed with time. Translated so often that you can take your pick of a dozen English versions-all different. And when you've got it, you can interpret it to mean almost anything you like."

"In any case," he said as an afterthought, "how did they choose the books to go into the Bible? Pick them out with a pin?"

Although his language was not very courteous, this man was expressing some very real problems. I have dealt with his first question

-authorship-in the previous chapter. That leaves the following problems:

(1) Copying. Our oldest manuscripts are, at best, only copies of the original writings. Much more probably they are copies of copies, or maybe copies of copies of copies of copies. Some of the more recent copies may have come down through ten or twenty copyists' hands. What guarantee have we that our best copies are not full of copyists' mistakes? And what's the use of believing that God inspired every word of the original writings, when we certainly cannot rely upon every word of our existing copies?

(2) Selection. Our Bible contains sixty-six books, beginning at Genesis and going on to Revelation. Why those sixty-six and no others? Who chose them, and when, and how? And the Roman Catholic Bible contains some extra books; why are they not included in the Protestant Bible?

(3) Translation. Most of us have to read the Bible in English and cannot understand the Hebrew and Greek in which it was written. Millions of other people rely on translations into Chinese, or Swedish, or Swahili, or some other of the thousand-odd languages in which the Bible is available. But books lose something when they are translated. What was the point of God's inspiring the words of the Bible, when those words have all had to be changed in translation?

(4) Interpretation. There is only one Bible. Yet there are dozens of different sects, all interpreting the Bible to prove themselves right. What use is a book that is supposed to be inspired of God, if it is worded so vaguely that men can make it mean what they like?

These are all perfectly reasonable questions. We must face them honestly and see how far we can go towards solving them.

How Good were the Copyists?

Take first the Jews who copied the manuscripts of the Old Testament. There is only one word to describe the quality of their work:

magnificent.

A group of Jewish officials called the Massoretes drew up a set of rules for copying out Bibles (that is, Old Testaments). Their work was in full swing by the sixth century A.D., but we know that Jewish copyists were incredibly painstaking long before those days. It just happens that we have details of the rules of the Massoretes.

Another service the Massoretes performed for us was to fix the pronunciation of the Old Testament. Even in English there are some words whose meaning depends upon the pronunciation. The word, LEAD, for instance. This has one meaning in "Lead me to it", and another meaning in "heavy as lead". We decide from the way the word is used whether to pronounce it "led" or "leed", and that decides the meaning.

There are many more pronunciation problems in Hebrew, because the language has hardly any vowels. If there were a word, LEAD, in Hebrew it would just be spelt LD. So we should not only have to decide between the two forms of "lead"; we should need to consider the possibility of "lid", "lad", "laid", "load", and "loud", also.

When Hebrew is your mother tongue this creates very few difficulties. The inhabitants of Tel Aviv read their Hebrew newspapers without vowels quite happily. But the Massoretes left nothing to chance. They added pronunciation marks (called "vowel points") to every word.

In 999 words out of a thousand their pronunciation marks are obviously right. In the thousandth case, scholars sometimes wonder if the Massoretes got the pronunciation, and hence the meaning of the word, wrong.

The Jews had always recognised the importance of having one standard copy of the Old Testament from which they worked. There are a number of references to this standard copy in ancient Jewish books,1 as well as in the Old Testament.2

In earlier days the Jews had kept their standard copy of the Scriptures in the temple in Jerusalem. We have a standard weight in London called the Imperial Standard Pound. Until Britain began to go metric it was the ultimate standard against which every grocer's scale in Britain was checked. In much the same way, all the earlier copies of the Hebrew Bible were checked for accuracy against the standard copy in Jerusalem.

That standard copy was carried in triumph to Rome when the Romans destroyed the temple in A.D. 70. For the next five centuries the Jews were without a standard. Then, by comparing all the copies available to them, the Massoretes were able to recreate a standard copy. They then drew up their rules to ensure that the new standard was copied accurately.

Just one example from those rules will illustrate their severity. The Massoretes drew up tables, one for each book of the Bible, showing how many times each letter occurred. Such a table would run like this:

This book contains so-many alephs (A's) so-many beths (B's)

-and so on, to the end of the alphabet.

When a scribe had finished copying Out a book, he had to count up the letters in it and compare his scores with those in the table. If he was one out, on one letter, he was supposed to scrap the whole book and start again. (Human nature being what it is, you can't help wondering if he always did!)

Scholars tell us that Hebrew manuscripts all over the world are extraordinarily similar, thanks to these stringent rules of the Massoretes.

This leaves unanswered one serious question. The Massoretes recreated a standard copy, four or five hundred years after the Romans took away the original standard. How do we know that the new standard was anything like the old?

Until 1947 it was impossible to answer that question. The oldest Hebrew scrolls belonged to about the tenth century A.D., and were therefore based on the standard Massoretic text. Apart from a few fragments we had no pre-Massoretic manuscripts with which to compare them.

In 1947 the first of the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. These were manuscripts of Old Testament books and other Jewish religious writings that were hidden away in caves just before A.D. 70. The Roman legions were marching through the land, and the Jewish monks who owned these books hid them away "for the duration of the war". Alas, they never came back to claim their property. Few Jews escaped being killed or deported, and the monks' treasures lay in their hiding places for nearly nineteen centuries.

To the Bible student the two most interesting scrolls are copies of the book of Isaiah. One, known as 1Q Isaiah A, is complete; the other, 1Q Isaiah B, is incomplete. It appears that one of these is a higher quality product than the other.

A chemist today would buy an expensive, accurate copy of the Imperial Standard Pound (or, more probably, of the Standard Kilogram); a grocer would buy a cheap copy, not very accurate, but quite good enough for weighing potatoes. In the same way it seems clear that 1Q Isaiah B was a high-quality copy of the Standard Scroll, prepared perhaps for some large, rich synagogue; while 1Q Isaiah A was a less accurate copy, turned out by less skilled scribes for the use, probably, of less important people.

According to a leading authority these and other Dead Sea Scrolls confirm "that the Jewish scribes of the early Christian centuries copied and recopied the text of the Hebrew Bible with the utmost fidelity".3

Even the less accurate scroll, 1Q Isaiah A, differs from the Massoretic text in only a few small particulars. 1Q Isaiah B is "as close to the traditional Massoretic text as makes no practical difference".4

We obviously owe the painstaking Jewish scribes a great debt. They have bequeathed us a Hebrew Bible that is very, very close indeed to the words that were first written.

The New Testament Copyists

One sad fact has to be faced. The Christian copyists were not in the same street as their Jewish colleagues. If they had been we should have a superbly accurate text of the New Testament, because there are two points in favour of the New Testament copies.

First, the New Testament manuscripts go back much closer to the originals than do the Old Testament manuscripts. And secondly, there is a wider variety of New Testament manuscript evidence to draw upon.

As it is, these two great advantages just about compensate for the relative inaccuracy of the Christian scribes. For it was only relative inaccuracy. They were not at all bad copyists; they just could not attain the fantastically high standards of the Jews.

The great age of the oldest New Testament manuscripts was discussed in the previous chapter. The other advantage, of great abundance of material, is equally important.

There are something like 5,000 separate manuscripts of the Greek New Testament in the museums and libraries of the world. Some are only fragments, but many are practically complete. Also there are a great many early copies of the New Testament translated into other languages. In addition to this, a very large part of the New Testament exists in the form of quotations in early Christian writings.

A nineteenth-century scholar, Dean Burgon, counted up all these early quotations that he could find. He reported 19,370 quotations from the Gospels, 14,905 from the Epistles, I, 38~ from the Acts of the Apostles and 644 from the book of Revel ation.5 A present-day recount would reveal much larger numbers.

You may wonder what use all these manuscripts are if none of them is accurate. The answer is that by comparing them it is possible to sort out most of the errors, and recover a nearly accurate text. This is very tedious work but it can be done. Fortunately for us, thousands of dedicated men over the past four centuries have given the best years of their lives to this work.

There are two kinds of errors: deliberate ones, and accidental ones. The insertion of the second sentence into 1 John 5; 7, is regarded as a deliberate corruption of the text. Some scribe apparently thought he could improve John's writing. The spurious nature of this sentence, which appears in the Authorised Version, was discovered a very long time ago. It is omitted from all modern versions.

Accidental slips are often harder to locate, but there are techn1Ques for finding them. Names are given to the different kinds of mistakes that can occur. Most of these are almost impossible for the ordinary man to remember. One common form of error is called "homoeoteleuton" (from the Greek for "same ending"). If the same word occurs, say, at the end of line 3 and the end of line 4, it is very easy for the copyist to jump from the end of line 3 to the beginning of line 5. If he does, then that is a homoeoteleuton. Fortunately, it is usually easier to spot where a homoeoteleuton has occurred than to remember what it is called.

Another form of error, also easy to detect, has an unforgettable name: dittography. No prizes are offered for guessing that it means accidentally writing the same word twice.

It soon becomes clear to the scholar working in this field that there are good manuscripts and bad manuscripts. He is able to divide them up into families, and say fairly confidently, for example, that manuscripts X, Y and Z are all copies of the same earlier manuscript. Gradually he ends up with a text which he knows to be more than 99 per cent perfect. That is to say, he is practically certain of the complete accuracy of most of it.

Just occasionally there is a word or a phrase about which he cannot be sure. If he is a Bible translator he will probably indicate his uncertainty in a footnote. For example, Mark 1: 34 tells us that Jesus "suffered not the devils to speak because they knew Him". The Revised Version of 1885 translates these words in exactly the same way as the Authorised Version. But it tells us in a footnote that after the last word, "many ancient authorities [manuscripts] add 'to be Christ'."

This is fairly typical of the uncertainties that exist in the text of our Greek New Testament. They are generally few and far between. They are generally small. And they generally have little effect on the meaning of the passages in question.

How do these small uncertainties affect the question of inspiration? We must consider that later. But first I want to look at another question.

Drawing the Line

At some time or another somebody-or a number of somebodies-must have drawn a line. On one side of that line they placed the sixty-six books that make up our Bible. On the other side of the line they left all the other books in the world. The line they drew is usually called "the canon of Scripture", because "canon" is an old-fashioned name for a measuring rule or an approved list.

"Take these sixty-six books, and these alone," they must have said. "These books are the inspired Word of God. All the other books ever written, or likely to be written, are in a different class altogether. All other books are just the writings of ordinary men and women."

We need to know how this tremendous decision came to be made. Otherwise we shall not know whether to trust the decision-makers. We need good reasons before we can feel sure that the line was drawn in exactly the right place. What, then, are the facts?

As with so many other questions about the Bible, the first fact is this: the scholars disagree. There are two main schools of thought.

The first school maintains that the Bible "just growed", like that famous young lady called Topsy. The majority of modern scholars belong to the Topsy school. Put very briefly, their theory runs like this:

For thousands of years men have been churning out religious books by the cartload. Some of these have been written from scratch, others by tinkering with older books that looked as if they could do with a rewrite. Gradually men began to realise that some of these books were of outstanding merit, just as men regard Shakespeare's plays as being the greatest English literature ever written.

At first the Jews were not unanimous in their choice of the very best religious books. They argued for years and years before making their final choice. By the time of Christ they were almost agreed on which books constituted the Word of God. But some haggling still went on over a few books.

The matter was finally settled in about A.D. 90 by the Jewish religious council, known as the Sanhedrin. This held a great many debates on religious matters during the years after A.D. 70. Its meetings during this period are often called the Council of Jamnia, after the town near Jaffa in Israel where they were held.

It is possible that the rabbis did not make any forma1 proclamation of their findings until later. But from that time onwards the Jews never seriously questioned the canon of Scripture. Their Bible remained exactly the same as our Old Testament.

Meanwhile, the early Christian Church was busy building up its own collection of sacred books. Some of these came to be recognised as outstanding, and Christians began to add these to their Jewish Old Testament, which they already accepted as the Word of God. But it took a long time before the early Church finally made up its mind about the canon of the New Testament.

The last word was not spoken until A.D. 393 at another committee meeting, the Synod of Hippo. And even then it was thought necessary for another meeting in A.D. 397, the Third Synod of Carthage, to confirm the ruling. From then o~ the New Testament has been fixed in the form in which we have it today.

Put like that, the situation does not look too good. But there are two sides to every story. Another group of scholars takes a very different line.

They say that the Topsy theory simply does not fit the facts. The Bible is altogether too remarkable a book, and too much of a united whole, to have emerged in this haphazard fashion. They consider that the following theory fits the facts much better:

When a man had been used by God to write an inspired book he must have been aware of that fact. His immediate associates would probably be guided by God to recognise that this was indeed an inspired book. Thus the line would have been drawn immediately each inspired book was Written. The canon of Scripture would have been built up, book by book, as time went by. It grew, but it did not just grow. It grew under the guiding hand of God.

If this is what happened, why were there ever any arguments about it? This can be explained quite simply. Some of the objectors might not have been aware of the true facts, just as Thomas argued about Christ's resurrection because he had missed seeing the proof for himself.6 Others would have been men of the kind you sometimes meet on committees today, men who love to overturn a decision already made.

How can we choose between these two theories?

It is no use simply plumping for the majority view. As this book has shown repeatedly, in matters affecting human emotions, and particularly in religious questions, majority opinions are very often wrong. We need to look carefully at the facts behind the theories before coming to a decision.

But before we do so, let me utter a word of caution. This is a subject where prejudice-mine, and yours, and all the scholars'-plays a part. If we dismiss the idea of anything miraculous happening, if we reject the Bible's claim to be verbally inspired-if this is our outlook we shall be hopelessly prejudiced against the second theory. We shall cling to the Topsy theory like drowning men to a life raft, because we have left ourselves no alternative.

But as I shall show in Chapter 21, it is more scientific to accept the possibility of miracles than to reject it. And we have already seen in Chapters 14 to 16 that there is good reason to believe in the verbal inspiration of the Bible. So there is nothing impossible about the idea of God's Spirit supervising the process of collecting together His own books.

Now let's take a closer look at the historical facts.

Th(' Old Testament Canon

History-that is ordinary history, not the historical records inside the Bible itself-can tell us practically nothing about the very early days of the Old Testament books. The Scriptures of the Jews were completed by the fifth century B.C. They were already ancient literature before they came to the notice of the outside world.

In the three centuries before Christ there were many Greek-speaking Jews living outside the land of Israel, especially in Egypt. During the third and second centuries B.C. they gradually produced for themselves a translation of the Bible into Greek. This has come to be known as the "Septuagint" (or LXX, for short) because of a ridiculous legend about its production by seventy-two men in seventy-two days. (Septuaginta is the Latin word for "seventy".)

It is not an ideal translation, because its accuracy varies from place to place. But for want of anything better the early Greek-speaking Christians quickly adopted it as their own. We owe its preservation to these Christians rather than its original proprietors, the Jews.

During the period 300 B.C. to A.D. 100 a large number of Jewish religious books was written. None of these was accepted as Scripture by the Jews of Jerusalem, but the Jews of Alexandria translated a few of them into Greek and tacked them on to their Septuagint. This small collection of later books is called the "Apocrypha". Perhaps "tacked them on" is a misleading phrase; in those days a large book like the Bible would be in the form of a whole series of separate rolls kept in one place. Books more like ours, made from flat sheets stitched together, were not invented until after the time of Christ. (This sort of book is called a "codex".) But when the Septuagint appeared in this form the books of the Apocrypha were bound among the Old Testament books.

Why this happened remains a mystery. Some scholars think that the Greek-speaking Jews accepted these newer books as inspired, but this has never been proved. If they did hold such a view it was certainly a highly unorthodox opinion.

The Jews in general, and the Jews of Jerusalem in particular, had long regarded the canon of Scripture as closed. We know this from the writings of two famous Jews, Philo and Josephus, who lived in the first century A.D. What they wrote about the canon was worded in rather vague terms, so we cannot prove conclusively that they accepted the usual thirty-nine Old Testament books.

But one thing is quite certain. They both believed very firmly that the canon of Scripture was complete, and had been so for a long time. They did not express this as a personal view, but as the orthodox Jewish belief.

It therefore seems unlikely that the Greek-speaking Jews of Alexandria (of whom Philo was one) regarded the Apocrypha as God's Word. Their habit of keeping these other books along with the Old Testament books probably has another explanation. I once possessed an English Bible which included the Book of Common Prayer. But this was bound in with the Bible just for convenience. Nobody ever regarded the Prayer Book as inspired. The Alexandrian Jews probably regarded the Apocrypha as useful books to keep along with the Bible, and nothing more.

It is practically certain that the early church did not regard the Apocrypha as a part of the Bible. The writers of the New Testament quote the Old Testament as Scripture more than 200 times. That is to say, they introduce each of these 2oo-odd quotations by, "Thus saith the Scripture", or, "As it is written", or some such phrase. Yet never once do they quote the Apocrypha in this fashion. This strongly implies that the Bible Jesus used contained the same thirty-nine books as our Old Testament.

The only difference (apart from language) between Christ's Bible and our Old Testament is the order of the books. They both start with Genesis, but our Old Testament ends with Malachi while the Jewish one ends with 2 Chronicles. So did Christ's Old Testament. When he wanted to refer to all the martyrs of the Old Testament, He said:

"The blood of all the prophets, which was shed from the foundation of the world, may be required of this generation; from the blood of Abel unto the blood of Zacharias."7

Abel was the first martyr mentioned in the Jewish Old Testament (Genesis 4), and Zachariah was the last (2 Chronicles 24). There are lots of martyrs mentioned in the Apocrypha as coming after Zachariah, but Christ disregarded all these.

In the light of this evidence it seems highly probably that the canon of the Old Testament was fixed long before the time of Christ. As numerous scholars have pointed Out, the Jewish Council of Jamnia did not try to decide a new question, but merely to prevent a longsettled question from being reopened8

Nevertheless the question was reopened-but not by the Jews. The early Christian Church used the Greek version of the Old Testament, and, as we have seen, this had the books of the Apocrypha bound up with it. This caused some Christians to think that perhaps the Apocrypha was part of the inspired Bible. Others strongly disagreed.

The question was debated for many centuries. It was settled for Roman Catholics in 1546, when the Council of Trent declared the Apocrypha to be fully inspired. The Protestant churches never accepted this view, but have always kept to the original Jewish decision about the canon of the Old Testament.

The Roman Church's attempt to introduce the Apocrypha into the Old Testament as late as 1546 went against the facts of history. It also went against the teaching of the New Testament. Paul said:

"What advantage then hath the Jew? . . . They were entrusted with the Oracles of God [the Old Testament]."9

Thus it was the responsibility of the Jews, said Paul, to look after the Old Testament. Neither the Roman Catholic Church nor anybody else, has any right to overrule the Jewish decision about the Old Testament canon.

The New Testament Canon

Unlike the Old Testament, the books of the New Testament were mentioned by outside writers-lots of them-while the New Testament was still young. Because of this we know that at least twenty out of its twenty-seven books were accepted as Scripture by practically the whole Church at an early date.10 Just how early we cannot be sure, but it was probably by A.D. 150, and could have been considerably earlier.11

The remaining seven books are Hebrews, Revelation, James, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, and Jude. The first two of these are substantial books, but the other five are all brief. Consequently all seven books together make up only about one eighth of the entire New Testament.

It was only this small fraction of the New Testament that was ever seriously disputed. The historical record of these disputes, and their final silencing at the Synod of Hippo in A.D. 393, is not complete. Some of the books were rejected by some of the churches for some of the time. That is about as good a summary of the story as is available today.

There are at least three reasons why wise historians are cautious about this subject:

(1) New facts crop up from time to time which throw a new light on the situation. For example, Professor Ridderbos pointed out in 1958 that new evidence about the Epistle to the Hebrews had just been discovered.12 It was now known that this book was accepted as Scripture in Rome as early as A.D. 150. Previously all that was known was that Hebrews was still not accepted in Rome at a much later date. Why this book should have been "in","out", and then, finally "in" again, is not known. But this story shows the dangers of jumping to conclusions. If this case is anything to go by, other books among the disputed seven could have been accepted in the very early days, and then rejected by some men at a later date.

(2) The Church in those days was not a closely knit community. Individual churches were separated by great distances, and in times of war and persecution communications were very poor. What was going on in one place may have been quite unrepresentative and misleading, if assumed to apply to the Church over a wide area.

(3) It is the Church leaders that have left their mark on history, not the rank-and-file Christians. We may know what some of the early bishops thought about the disputed books. But we have no means of telling what the lesser brethren thought. And where there is a difference of opinion within a church, it is not always the leaders who are right. Whose opinions, for instance, are right in Russia today? Those of the few well-known church leaders who have come to terms with the state? Or the unknown thousands who suffer in prison and concentration camp for the sake of an uncompromising faith? God knows.

Evidently the Topsy theory-that the canon of Scripture "just growed"-is not borne out by the facts of history. Neither is the alternative theory. The historical evidence is incomplete and inconclusive. Either theory could be true, so far as the historical evidence goes.

This gives us a clear field, then, to look at the internal evidence. Let the Bible speak for itself, and tell its own tale of the formation of the canon.

The Bible's Own Evidence

Throughout the Bible, from Moses the first author to John the last, we are repeatedly told how the canon was formed. Dr. Bullinger has compiled a chain of thirty-two such passages running through the Old Testament from Exodus to Malachi,13 and his list is far from exhaustive. Some, but by no means all, of the passages quoted below are taken from his collection.

The story begins in the book of Exodus. Moses went up into Mount Sinai. He talked with the Lord, and finally:

"Moses wrote all the words of the Lord. . . . And he took the book of the covenant, and read in the audience of the people."14

There was no doubt about this being the beginning of the canon. No other man had ever had an experience like this. No book like this had ever been written before. Moses had a conversation with God, and then wrote a permanent record of it. In a very direct sense, this beginning of Scripture was the Word of God.

By and by Moses added to his book:

"These are the journeys of the children of Israel . . . And Moses wrote their goings out according to their journeys by the commandment of the Lord."15

He knew that his own writings were on a special plane. They were unlike any other writings. They were God's commandments. Consequently no man must touch them. Nothing must be added, nothing taken away:

"Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish ought from it, that ye may keep the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you."16

This law of God that Moses was writing was very precious. It would have to be kept very, very carefully. So a group of custodians were appointed:

"When he (your future king) sitteth upon the throne of his kingdom, he shall write him a copy of this law in a book, out of that which is before the priests the Levites."17

"And Moses wrote this law and delivered it unto the priests the sons of Levi, which bare the ark of the covenant of the Lord."18

"And it came to pass, when Moses had made an end of writing the words of this law in a book until they were finished, that Moses commanded the Levites, which bare the ark of the covenant of the Lord, saying, 'Take this book of the law) and put it in the side of the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God, that it may be there for a witness against thee! "19

So the collection of holy writings began. Moses wrote the first portions, and handed them over to the priests. They placed them reverently beside the ark of the covenant; that is, in the Most Holy Place of the tabernacle, where the Spirit of God was known to dwell. Copies would be made from these, by future kings and others. But those scrolls kept in the tabernacle would always have the pride of place. The books admitted to that collection would form the canon of the Word of God.

But Moses was an old man. Soon he would die. Who, then, would carry on this work of giving God's Word to His people? Moses explained that this was provided for-God would appoint a successor:

"And the Lord said unto me ... 'I will raise them up a prophet from among their brethren like unto thee. And I will put My words in his mouth, and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command him.'"20

The New Testament tells us that this promise was ultimately fulfilled by the coming of Jesus.21 But there was also an immediate fulfilment. The next prophet after Moses, his immediate successor, was Joshua. This was very fitting, since Jesus and Joshua are the same name, one written in Greek and the other written in Hebrew.

As might be expected, Joshua added to the canon of Scripture. After the five books written by Moses, the next book bears Joshua's name. And the last chapter of that book tells us: "And Joshua wrote these words in the book of the law of God."22

These words do not expressly say that he gave his book to the priests, to add to the collection in the Most Holy Place. But they clearly imply it. His words were written "in the book of the law of God". This must surely mean that his book was an inspired addition to the law of God-to the canon of Scripture.

A little later another prophet added to the sacred collection:

"Then Samuel ... wrote it in a book (Hebrew, "the book") and laid it up before the Lord."23

(To "lay a thing up before the Lord" meant, in Hebrew parlance, to deposit it in the tabernacle.)

Several centuries later a new king of the Jews was crowned:

"They (the priests) brought out the king's son, and put upon him the crown, and gave him the testimony, and made him king."24

What was this "testimony" they gave the new king? Certainly a copy of the Scriptures; probably the official standard copy, from which he was commanded to write out a copy for himself (see the passage [note 17] quoted on p.161.)

Prophet by prophet, book by book, the official collection grew. By the time of Jeremiah the earlier prophet Micah had been dead for a hundred years. But his written word had been immortalised in the sacred canon: Micah's book was quoted by Jeremiah as a "Thus saith the Lord."25

A hundred years later still, and Jeremiah's own book had joined the great collection. One of the last of the prophets was quoting Jeremiah as a writer of "the Word of the Lord":

"I, Daniel, understood by books (Hebrew, "the books", presumably meaning the inspired books) the number of the years, whereof the Word of the Lord came to Jeremiah the prophet."26

Not very long after this, Malachi gave his book to the priestly custodians and the Hebrew Word of God was complete. The day long foretold by Micah had arrived: the "sun had gone down over the prophets".27

But night does not last for ever. As Malachi finished off the Old Testament canon, in the last half dozen verses of this last book, he promised that one day another "sun" would arise and a prophet of God would walk the earth again.28

The New Testament Speaks for Itself

Four centuries passed by, four centuries of silence. And then Malachi's promised "sun" appeared. "I am the Light of the world",29 He cried.

He chose twelve men to be His intimate companions for three years. He taught them all He could, and after three years He went away. But as He said good-bye to them, He gave them work to do. They were to be His witnesses to the whole world. And He would fill them with the Spirit, so that their witness would be a faithful one.30

The magnitude of their task must have frightened them. Witnesses to the whole world! How could eleven men witness to the world?

Years went by before they realised the answer. Only through the written word. That could be copied and multiplied, and carried to every corner of the earth. Slowly the implications must have dawned upon them. After four hundred years God was going to reopen the canon of Scripture. There was going to be a New Testament, to follow the Old. God was going to inspire them to write it.

And write it they did, they and a few of their companions. They were evidently well aware that what they wrote was the inspired Word of God.

For one thing, they referred to each other's writings as "Scripture"

-a word that otherwise they used only as a name for the Old Testament. Paul quoted from the Gospel of Luke, bracketing it with the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy, under the introduction, "The Scripture saith".31 And Peter wrote of foolish men who mishandled both Paul's epistles and "the other Scriptures".32

On one occasion Paul declared that the book he was writing was the Word of the Lord: "If anyone claims to be inspired or a prophet, let him recognise that what I write has the Lord's authority."33

Look closely at that verse. It is interesting for another reason. It implies that there were some members of the early church who were endowed with a miraculous power. They were able to recognise a new portion of Scripture when they saw it.

There are several other references in the New Testament to this important power. It was obviously needed. How would banks get on unless they had men who could tell a forged banknote from the genuine article?

"In each of us the Spirit is manifested in one particular way, for some useful purpose. One man, through the Spirit, has the gift of wise speech, while another, by the power of the same Spirit, can put the deepest knowledge into words. Another, by the same Spirit, is granted faith; another, by the one Spirit, gifts of healing, and another miraculous powers; another has the gift of prophesy, and another ability to distinguish true spirits from false."34

That ability to distinguish true spirits from false-that is, to distinguish men truly inspired by the Spirit of God from impostors-must have been in very frequent use. Paul refers to some men who were even sending out forged letters in his name.35 Some men were pretending to speak inspired words and calling themselves apostles; John bluntly calls them "liars".36

With deceivers like this among them the churches were in danger. Both Paul and John urged them to be on their guard. The men empowered to recognise true prophets, and truly inspired books, were to keep busy:

"Do not stifle inspiration, and do not despise prophetic utterances, but bring them all to the test."37

"But do not trust any and every spirit, my friends; test the spirits, to see whether they are from God, for among those who have gone out into the world there are many prophets falsely inspired."38

Without these special people in the early Church, we should have no New Testament today. Unless they had been able to recognise true prophets, and true books of Scripture, the canon would never have been compiled. There would just have been a vast mountain of early Christian literature, and nobody would know which was Scripture and which was not.

In Chapter 10 we saw that there is a remarkable degree of harmony between all the books of the Bible. There are threads that run right through, telling one long consecutive story, as if one Master-mind behind the individual writers had planned it that way.

We now have another example of this. To build up the Bible's own explanation of how its canon came into existence we have had to bring together twenty-four different passages, like pearls on a thread. They come from nineteen separate books, by eleven different writers. And they all tell one clear, harmonious tale.

More than that. They also present us with a remarkable, and unexpected, parallel between the two Testaments.

In the Old Testament the writers of Scripture were the prophets.

Its guardians, however, were the priests. A book was admitted to the canon of Scripture as soon as it had been (1) written by the prophet, and (2) handed over to, and accepted by, the priests.

In the early Church the situation was exactly parallel. The writers of Scripture were the apostles and their immediate associates. It was safeguarded by those men who, by the power of God's Spirit, could detect an inspired book and reject the many forgeries that came their way. A book was admitted to the New Testament canon as soon as it had been (1) written by the apostle, or his associate, and (2) handed over to, and accepted by, the "detectors".

The Bible's own explanation rings true. It makes sense. It describes a system that undoubtedly would have worked. There are no definite facts of history that conflict with it. And there is no alternative explanation that fits all the facts.

What more could you want of an explanation than that?

Verbal Inspiration and Verbal Changes

Suppose that, for the moment at least, we accept the Bible's explanation of its Origin. God inspired it so that every word was as He wanted it to be. He overruled the men who collected the Biblical books together, so that all the inspired writings were included and the rest left out.

Then what? He left it to a great crowd of uninspired men to spoil everything, by copying it inaccurately and translating it inaccurately. We certainly don't have the inspired words now, so why should God have bothered to inspire the words in the first place? And if there was no point in His inspiring the original words, perhaps He never did anything of the kind...

Or so the argument runs.

Funnily enough, there is a rather similar problem to this in engineering. Let me try and explain it. It might help you to see the Biblical problem in a new light.

Have you ever wondered why it takes so many years to design and build a new type of aircraft? There are several reasons. One is that so many mathematical calculations must be done. A new aircraft means years of work for a whole team of mathematicians. The shape of every part of the wings must be just right, so that the aircraft will get as much "lift" from the air as possible. The exact thickness of each of thousands of metal parts must be worked out. These must be thick enough not to break when the aircraft hits a bumpy patch, but not too thick, or they will be so heavy that the aircraft will never take off.

Mathematics is called an exact science. A mathematician's answer to a question is always exactly right. Twice two is not "about four"; it is exactly four, 4.000000000, with as many zeros after the decimal point as you like to add.

But engineering is not an exact science. Cut yourself out a square of cardboard, 2 inches by 2 inches, and ask an obliging engineer to tell you its area. He will take it to a laboratory, make some very careful measurements, and then come back with an answer like this:

"Between 3.98 and 4.02 square inches."

Why not four? Because you were not able to make the sides of your cardboard exactly two inches long, or its corners exactly square. Your engineer friend was not able to measure the cardboard exactly-only as accurately as his instruments would allow. And in any case, the size of the cardboard keeps changing a little with the weather.

Now back to our aircraft. The mathematician starts to work out the forces exerted by the air on the metal surfaces of the wings. But he does not concern himself with real air. Real air is frightfully complex stuff. It has dust particles in it. Sometimes there are raindrops, hailstones, snowflakes-and occasionally birds. The mathematician would go pale with fright if you asked him to calculate the exact result of flying through a flock of seagulls.

So our mathematician makes what are known as ''simplifying assumptions". He forgets about real air, and bases his calculations on "mathematician's air". Unlike real air, this is nice simple stuff, with clearly defined characteristics. The wings whose size and shape he calculates are not made of real metal, but of mathematician's metal. His engines run on mathematician's fuel. His imaginary plane carries no real people, just a bunch of mathematician's passengers, all the same size and shape.

When he has finished his calculations he hands the results to an engineer, who is delighted to have them. The engineer is not worried about all the assumptions the mathematician has made. He knows that they cause errors in the final answers, but that those errors will be small-too small for him to bother about.

But it would bother him very much if anything were wrong with the mathematician's mathematics. He is absolutely dependent on the mathematics itself being exactly right. If mathematics ceased to be an exact science the engineer could rely on nothing: the answers turned out by the mathematician could be so far wrong as to be utterly worthless, in that case.

So it is with the Bible. We can tolerate the few little uncertainties that have crept in through inaccurate copying and doubts about translation. But we could not tolerate the hopeless uncertainty of not knowing that behind our English Bible there was once an original that, like mathematics, was always "exactly right".

Luke 24: 42 supplies an illustration. It describes how Jesus ate some food with His disciples, after He was raised from the dead. We don't know exactly what He ate. Some manuscripts say He ate fish; some say fish and honeycomb.

It is a pity that we do not know for sure about the honeycomb. It would be interesting to know if He ate it or not. But it is not terribly important. The vital fact is that He did eat something. All the manuscripts agree on this. It is vital, because it shows that the disciples were not just "seeing things". Before the resurrected Jesus appeared there was some fish; afterwards there was an empty plate.

But if you once deny that the words of the original were inspired, you open the floodgates to a whole torrent of uncertainties: "Perhaps He never really ate anything-perhaps the disciples just made the whole thing up-perhaps Jesus never rose from the dead at all." And so you could go on, until the whole Bible had crumbled away in your shaky hands.

It is the same with the occasional problems of translation. They only introduce small uncertainties, that have no real effect on the Bible's teaching.

Take the important Greek word, diatheke; which occurs thirty-three times in our New Testament. Nobody can be sure how to translate it. Ordinary Greeks generally used it to mean a "testament" (a will). Greek-speaking Jews often used it to mean a "covenant" (a contract), especially when they spoke of God's covenant with his people in Old Testament times.

So in our New Testament, diatheke is sometimes translated "covenant", sometimes "testament". In some places the translators admit their doubts, and give us one word in the text and the other in a footnote.

We have lost something by not being able to translate this Greek word by an exact English equivalent. But we have not lost much. Both wills and contracts-testaments and covenants-are solemn legal documents. They are among the most solemn kinds of promise that men can make. The use of diatheke~ shows that God's promise of eternal life to us, and our promise to serve Him, is as firm, as unbreakable, as any promise could be.

But if we did not know that the words of the original were inspired, we could not be sure that God had used this strong word, diatheki'. We should have no way of knowing that the promise of eternal life is as emphatic as words can make it.

Clearly, the uncertainties arising from faulty copying and doubtful translation matter a little. But only a little. We can be quite confident that our English Bible is not very different from the originals that God inspired. So we can be very thankful that those inspired originals contained the actual words that God intended.

Thankful, because this means that our English Bibles are an extremely good approximation to the Word of God itself.

Interpretation

Is it really true that you can interpret the Bible to mean anything you like? And if so, is God to blame for having inspired a lot of ambiguous words?

There are two ways to look at this question.

There is a saying, based on a story in the Gospels, that the devil can quote Scripture to serve his own ends. This is perfectly true. But whose fault is that-the devil's, or Scripture's?

If some men want to play devil, and misuse Scripture to further their own ends, then let them. They have nothing to lose by it-except their hope of eternal life! But there is no reason for the rest of us to use their bad behaviour as a stick to beat the Bible with. We must put the blame where it belongs.

In the Middle Ages some men used Scripture to justify torturing what they called heretics, and burning them at the stake. As recently as the last century some men used Scripture to justify the slave trade. The arguments they used were quite absurd. It is hard to believe that any intelligent person could be taken in by them. Yet millions of people were deceived by them at the time. Why?

Partly because they wanted to be, and partly because they did not know their Bibles. The case for slavery was based on the verses:

"Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren . . . God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem, and Canaan shall be their servant."39

Now Canaan was the son of Ham. And Ham, said the wealthy slave traders, was the father of the black races while Japheth was the father of the white races. Therefore God intends the white races to enslave the black.

What rubbish! There is not a word in the Bible to suggest that all the black people are descended from Ham and the whites from Japheth. This is just a human fairy tale. In any case, the curse was not on Ham, but on his son, Canaan.

And the Bible tells us how the curse was fulfilled. The descendants of Canaan were the original inhabitants of the land of Israel, which was then called the land of Canaan. They were not black-skinned, or anywhere near it. After Israel had conquered them, "they put the Canaanites to forced labour."40

Yet millions of well meaning people were taken in by the ridiculous arguments of the slave traders, and of those bishops who, to their shame, supported them. They were taken in because they did not know their Bibles. Scripture-quoting devils do not deceive people who are well acquainted with Scripture. That is why the devil who quoted Scripture at Jesus got nowhere.

Admittedly, the slavery issue is an extreme case. The problem of the hundred-and-one denominations of Christendom is more relevant today. How is it that Catholics, Anglicans, Baptists, Lutherans, and the rest can all take their different beliefs from the same Bible?

The answer is that, even here, human prejudice and ignorance of the Bible are the major factors. Have you ever met a man who could truthfully say, "I sat down with an open mind and studied the Bible; then I joined that church whose beliefs were nearest to the teaching of Scripture"?

No; and you are never likely to. The usual reasons for choosing a Christian denomination run like this:

"I was brought up in it."

"When I got married I thought it would be better for the children if we both had the same faith, so I became a Catholic like my wife."

"Well, the Presbyterian church was just round the corner, like, and there ain't no point in walking further than you need, see what I mean."

Even the clergy usually choose their churches before they are old enough to know the facts. The boy at a Catholic school goes to a Catholic college, and ends up as a priest. The Anglican schoolboy goes to a Protestant college, and ends up as an Anglican vicar. Can you blame the Bible because these two men preach different doctrines? In all probability, they decided which religion they were going to preach before they had even read the Bible through once. Having made that decision, then they learnt how they could use the Bible to justify it.

Quite a large part of the Bible is perfectly straightforward, needing no more interpretation than any other non-fiction book. The first three Gospels are extremely easy to read and understand. They describe how Jesus worked many miracles, and told men how to live their lives. They tell how He was crucified, how He rose from the dead and ascended to heaven.

It may be difficult in the present intellectual climate to believe in Christ's miracles. It certainly is difficult to live as He said we should. But there is no problem about interpreting these Gospels. They interpret themselves.

So do the Acts of the Apostles, the historical books of the Old Testament, the Proverbs, and parts of the Law, the Psalms, the Prophets, and the New Testament Epistles.

From these parts of the Bible-much more than half of the total-any serious reader can easily learn the main outline of the Bible's teaching.

Some of the other parts of the Bible do need interpreting. Many of these gradually yield their secrets to the patient Bible reader. Some of them will baffle him to the end of his days.

But that is as it should be. If nothing in the Bible was difficult, men would call it "shallow". And they would be right. As it is, it forms a nicely balanced book. It contains milk for the simplest of God's children, and meat for the wisest of His servants to dig their teeth into.

Our English Bible

So this Bible of ours is not at all the book it was alleged to be, by the hostile gentleman at the start of this chapter.

We have good reason to believe that its parts were written under the guidance of God's Spirit. It bears the marks of having been gathered together into one book by that Spirit, too. Ordinary human hands have copied and recopied it, but they were very careful hands. A vast amount of labour has gone into recreating something very close indeed to the original text.

Whole armies of scholars have studied how best to translate it into our mother tongue. The final result is a book that is close to God's original words; close enough to bring His light into the heart of all who read it.

Interpreting it is no great problem, if only-and this is a big "if"-we manage to read it with a humble, seeking mind. Much of it interprets itself for us. The rest of it is profound enough to hold our interest for a lifetime.

No, those are not serious problems. The big problems are these:

(1) Deciding to read it diligently, and then sticking to that decision.

(2) Believing the wonderful things it tells us.

(3) Living up to the high standards it sets us.

Yes, these are real problems, aren't they?

But we can't blame God for them!