How We Got Our Bible

        It is not uncommon, in modern western civilization, to have people express doubts about the Bible with questions like,

How can we trust or believe the Bible, since it has been changed so many times and translated so many different ways since it was originally written?

How can we build our faith upon a book that everyone interprets differently?

    Although these are valid questions and both deserve serious answers, we should not forget that these same people, after refusing to trust in the inspiration and infallibility of the Bible, will often not hesitate to then quote and trust something said by a current “expert” as though they were inspired and infallible.  Of course, experience has shown us that human experts  clearly change their opinions from time in time and commonly disagree with each other, whereas the Biblical text has remained pretty constant over the centuries.  Interpretation differences may arise from ambiguous texts, but more commonly these arise from the readers who bring their own assortment of presuppositions and preconceived agendas with them to the text!

    However, those who place their hope in a piece of literature need to have some idea as to how that literature came into being, how well it accords with reality, and how to read it so that it conveys the meaning it was originally intended to have.  The Bible did not simply “fall out of the sky,” but claims to have come to us from God through selected human writers.  The purpose of this series of articles is to offer an overview of the steps by which God’s revelation came to us over the centuries and offer evidence in support of the Bible’s accurate transmission over the centuries.

        The Basics - The word "Bible" comes from the Greek word biblion, which referred to a roll of byblus/papyrus.  The Bible is a diverse library of 66 documents incorporating a number of different genres (types of literature) - law, history, poetry/wisdom, prophecy, genealogy, Gospel, letters, and Apocalyptic.  According to the conservative and traditional "divinely-inspired" view, the Biblical books were written between 1450 B.C. - 100 A.D. by 40 different authors, using three different languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, koine Greek).  The alternative "liberal/critical" view, arising from Enlightenment presuppositions and asserting a totally "human origin" for the Bible, will be discussed in the "Bible Evidences/Apologetics" section of this website under the title of "Bible Criticism."

        Six Basic Steps – One of the reasons for the difficulty some have in understanding God’s message is that, according to the conservative view, there are still a number of steps by which it has come down to us and each could potentially create an opportunity for problems.  It is these six steps that will be our focus in the following articles.  Briefly, these six steps are: revelation, writing, canonicity, transmission, translation, and interpretation.

A Ministry of Severn Christian Church (Severn, Maryland)

Unless otherwise noted, all material produced by Charles E. McCoy

All Scripture citations/quotations from the New American Standard Bible

To send a question to Chuck: chuck@severnchristian.org