Translations And Twbts Series

Translations and T.W.B.T.S.

#UnderstandingTheBible

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God… - John 3:16-18

Prayer…

OKAY… - let’s do this…

We have a lot of awesome ground to cover today.

NOW - we are in this series on understanding the bible.

AND – it has been a really good time so far – if I do say so myself.

• In week one we talked about how the bible is unique, accurate, supernatural and transformational.

• In week two we talked about how the bible has one overriding theme purpose and storyline… ‘the coming of Christ.’

• In week three we talked about the canon of the bible ABOUT - why we can be totally confident that our bibles contain the books that God intended. In other words, there are no books that are missing and there are not any books in there that should not be in there.

• Last week we talk about the transmission of the text, ABOUT…

o How we have so many manuscripts – almost 6,000 in Greek and 15,000-20,000 translations in Latin and other languages… that’s 20-25,000 hand written manuscripts (that is a lot – in contrast to the average classical Greek writings that have only about 15 copies)

o And we talked about how the time gap between (when the original was written) and (the first copy that we have) is so much smaller with the NT…

UNDERSTAND - in a few decades we have fragments (P52) – and in ~ 100 years complete NT books and in ~ 225 years the entire NT… where Classical Greek waits at least 500 years for it’s first fragment and writings like Homers Iliad wait 1900 years for it’s first full copy.

o And we talked about how - because we have so many manuscripts that this leads to a lot of variants (differences between the various manuscripts)…

HOWEVER - over 99% of those variants are things like word order, and spelling differences… AND LISTEN - of the less than 1% of variants not a single one comes even close to touching any of the core doctrines of our faith.

The bible has been copied so much and so early that we cannot hide the original text.

B/L – what we have seen in the last 2 weeks of this study is that… WE CAN - be extremely confident in our bible… CONFIDENT THAT - we have the right books in here…

AND CONFIDENT THAT - we have what Matthew, Paul, Luke….etc wrote. And that is good news, right?

AND AGAIN - all of these messages are online and if you would like my notes just let me know.

Also don’t forget the resource sheet that I put together.

OKAY

THIS MORNING… we are going to talk about 2 things…

Translations and T.W.B.T.S.

We will start with a brief discussion on Translations… and then wrap up our time on T.W.B.T.S…

This week we will complete part one of our study on Understanding The Bible… which was all about achieving my first goal for this series…

Goal #1 – To take a look at the overwhelming evidence that demonstrates (contrary to the onslaughts of modern culture) that The Bible is not just another book or mere ink on paper, but that it really is from God, the Maker of heaven and earth.

AND LISTEN – we will begin part 2 where I will be teaching some principles that will you interpret and understand the bible better, in a few weeks when I get back from a mission trip Laurie and I are leading for CIY to Northern Ireland…

And as always I have some great guest speakers lined up for you when I am gone.

Translations…

OKAY – here’s the deal…

SINCE - I am pretty sure that none of us are fluent in Hebrew and Greek, we read from English translations….

Quick side note, it was not until…

• The early 13th century that chapter divisions were added (Stephen Langton).

• The late 14th century (1382) that we had our first English Bible (John Wycliffe) translated from the Latin (You see, Wycliffe felt that the bible should be in the language of the common man – Now the church was not happy). In fact, years after his death he was declared to be a heretic and his body was dug up and burned.

It was not until…