The B-I-B-L-E. Now that’s the book for me! Today we talk about choosing the Bible. Why do we keep reading and turning to this book whose last stories were written about 1,900 years ago? What is this book to us?
Before I get to those questions, let’s look at what this book is. First of all, it’s not really a book. It’s a library – that’s what the name Bible really means. It is composed of 66 books – 39 in what we call the Old Testament and 27 in the grouping called the New Testament. .....
As the first Christians got more organized, they started talking about what they might gather together for authoritative scripture. Groups of bishops who gathered talked about this. Individuals, who were considered the top theologians each proposed their list of books to form the Christian Bible. Some books were highly debated for inclusion. The Gospel of John and the Book of Revelation were two that almost didn’t make the cut. The listing of books that closest matches what we have today wasn’t decided until 382 AD.
The questions that the bishops and scholars asked when deciding upon which books to include were these:
Who said it & how close were they to Jesus?
How good is it & is it widely recognized and accepted?
How weird is it? Is it consistent with our understanding of Jesus?
Those first disciples of Jesus spoke, Aramaic, a dialect of Hebrew. The first Christian writings were in Greek – the standard language of communication in the first century. In 383, a Latin translation of the books now considered to be the standard or canon was done – the Latin Vulgate; and for centuries, scripture was always read in Latin in church, even if people didn’t understand Latin. They had to rely upon the priest to tell them what they had just heard. (And they had the beautiful carvings and stained glass windows in the cathedrals – that was the Bible for illiterate and non-Latin speaking people.) Being allowed to translate the Bible into the languages that people read and spoke was one of the driving forces behind the Protestant revolution.