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Where did we get the modern Bible? Who decided what went into it and what was left out? Why aren't all the Jewish texts included in the Christian Bible? The history of the canonization of Scripture and its translation to English is a fascinating look at the formation of our modern Bible.
The Christian Bible is not really one book at all, but a collection of books written over thousands of years. Many different authors contributed to the Bible and the process of selecting what books went into it is called the canonization of Scripture.
Canon comes from a Greek word meaning measure or rod. The process of canonization involved deciding what books measured up to a set standard. Certain selection criteria were used, and the criteria are the canon, or measure.
Canonization didn’t happen all at one time or by one committee. The acceptance of the Bible texts used by Christians started with the Old Testament. Our Old Testament comes from the Jewish canon of Scripture, which by the time of Jesus was trimmed down to three sections: The Torah, The Prophets and The Writings.
The Torah consists of the five Books of the Laws of Moses. These are Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. Tradition says that God gave Moses the information contained in these books on Mount Sinai.
The Prophets consists of Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1&2 Samuel (which are one book in the Jewish Scripture), 1&2 Kings (also one book in the Jewish Scripture), Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi. Hosea through Malachi are called the Book of the Twelve and are combined into one scroll.
The Writings consist of 1&2 Chronicles (one book in the Jewish texts), Ezra and Nehemiah (one book in the Jewish text), Esther, Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, and Daniel.
Earlier canons included books that are now called the Deuterocanonical books. These were trimmed from the Jewish canon of Scripture during the time of Ezra (around 450 B.C.). These books are now part of the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Bibles and are called the Apocrypha.
Since the books of The Torah, The Prophets and The Writings were canonized Jewish Scripture during the time of Jesus, these are the texts that have been used in the Christian Bible and make up the Old Testament.
The process of canonizing the New Testament took about 400 years. This process didn’t happen in any organized fashion. Groups of Christians collected different writings together and compiled them for the use in their churches. The first collection to be compiled was Paul’s letters. By 200 A.D. this collection was complete and being given Scriptural authority by other eastern Christian writers of the time.
The four gospels were another collection that was compiled about the same time as the Pauline letters. The remaining letters of the Bible weren’t added to the collections until 300 A.D. These remaining letters were called the ‘catholic letters’ because their messages were important to the entire church.
Acts and Revelation were the last books to be accepted. The eastern churches didn’t accept Revelation until the 4th century. The concerns of the churches were that the texts accepted as Scripture be attributable to Apostles or those closely associated with the Apostles. There was great concern that the New Testament Scripture be the accounts of the earliest Christians. By 405 A.D., the New Testament as we know it was widely accepted in most Christian churches.
Since one of the jobs Jesus left us with is to spread the Good News and witness throughout the world, it was necessary to start translating the Bible into a variety of languages. The Old Testament had been translated into Greek early on and was available in that form in Jesus’ time.
As early as the second century, translations of the various collections that would later become the New Testament were being made in Latin, the language common to the Romans. However, faulty translations were getting into circulation and by the fourth century, Pope Damascus commissioned Jerome to create a definitive Latin translation that would become known as the Vulgate.
Latin fell out of common use and within a few centuries of the Vulgate translation, only highly educated people could read the Scriptures. The less educated had to rely on the teachings of the clergy, a situation the Church sought to perpetuate. There was concern among Church leaders that if common people were left to read and interpret the Bible on their own, heresies would develop.
In 1382, Oxford educator John Wycliffe translated the Bible into English. As the first real reformer, he was ahead of his time. He was removed from his teaching position and his followers were persecuted. His movement was short lived but it was the first real move towards putting the Scripture into the hands of ordinary people.
In the 1520’s, language scholar William Tyndale translated the Hebrew and Greek texts into English. Soon, copies of his translation were turning up all over England. Inaccuracies were found in these copies and out of concern for this, King James I commissioned a group of Bible scholars to translate the Bible to English. This Bible is known as the King James or Authorized Version of 1611 and is still, arguably, the most popular English translation.
Since the King James Version, there have been numerous English translations of the Bible. Those descended from the King James Version include the Revised Standard Version, the New King James Version and the New International Version. More liberal translations like the Good News Bible, and the Living Bible were made with the goal of being highly readable.
When using any translation, it’s very helpful to have a Hebrew and Greek Lexicon such as Strong’s to refer back to the original language of the Bible. Bible study is greatly enhanced by this sort of comparison. Our Bible has come a long way to get to its present English form but the most accurate is still in its earliest available form.
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