Jeremiah 1:4-10
2 Timothy 3:14-17
           
Earlier in the service our 4th graders received their personal copies of the Bible as a gift from the church.  I thought today would be a good time to explore how we got the Bible, a book that has become so important that it is referred to as Scripture or sacred writings. The material in the Bible was collected and written over a period of 1600 years by at least 40 different authors and probably many more than that.  And it is impossible to know how many people have been involved in making copies of the Bible as well as translating the Bible into hundreds of languages and dialects. It is difficult to overestimate the value of the Bible to people over the course of hundreds of years.  Throughout the centuries, people have found wisdom and guidance from passages contained in the Bible.
           
One boy told his dad that he knew the meaning of the Bible.  He dad inquired, “What you mean when you say you know the meaning of the Bible.  The boy replied, “The Bible B-I-B-L-E means Basic Information Before Leaving Earth.”  There is truth in the boy’s understanding. 
           
We are so familiar with seeing books at home and in libraries, schools, and in the sanctuary we cannot imagine there not being books anywhere.  I guess it is possible at a time in the future when everything becomes so electronic that the only way books will be available will be on line with our computers.  We are already moving in that direction, aren’t we, with Kindle? Some of us reveal our age when we talk about the time when there were no computers.  Eighteen years ago at dinner one evening a comment was made about a typewriter and our son very innocently asked, “What’s a typewriter?” After a moment of thought he answered his own question, “Oh, I know.  That’s that thing that doesn’t have a screen.”
           
There was a time hundreds of years ago when there were no books.  Before there were books there were pieces of parchment—thick paper, and before that there were animal skins on which a few people wrote stories. And before that pictures telling stories were drawn on rocks and the walls of caves.  When people began writing down these stories, they were collected and scrolls were made, the parchment or skin was rolled up for storage and unrolled to be read.  And before stories were written on rocks or animal skin or parchment, the stories were told by one person to other people and from one generation to the next generation. 
           
This is actually how the Bible got started.  Stories were told about God creating the world and the storytellers used the days of the week to help people remember the story, naming things that were created on the first day of the week and the second day and so on.  People kept repeating that story and finally someone wrote it down and then it could be kept as well as shared with others. 
           
The stories were written down in the language of the people who were telling the stories.  The people were the Jews and they spoke and wrote in Hebrew.  Since most of us speak and write in English, if we were going to write down a story we would write it in English. The people writing down the stories that became the Bible collected all kinds of stories—stories about creation, stories about being slaves and being set free, stories about moving into a new land, settling down and making their homes there, stories about how the people learned to get along with each other, the rules they developed that helped them treat each other fairly and to be honest with each other.  They told and wrote stories about becoming a nation and having a king as their leader and when that king died another person became king.  Through many, many years these stories were collected.  They were collected in groups—creation stories, exodus and wilderness stories, tribal or family stories, and stories about selecting a king and becoming a nation. There also was a collection of rules that the people lived by, the Ten Commandments, and explanations of those commandments and rules about diet, what to eat and not eat and why.  These were collected in a group called The Law.  Then, there were stories that told about individuals who challenged the people to live more like God expected and identified what the consequences would be or what would happen if the people did not live as God wanted.  These stories were collected in a group known as The Prophets.  Much later, there were materials collected that were good instructions about life and how to live.  These were collected together and known as The Writings.  Many of the stories had different versions collected by different people and even though there were differences in what seemed to be basically the same stories, all of them were kept and put together in what eventually became the Hebrew Bible, referred to by some people as the Old Testament.  About 2500 years ago what became known as Jewish Scriptures were arranged by councils of rabbis (Jewish teachers), who then recognized the complete set as the inspired and sacred authority of God (Elohim). At some time during this period, the books of the Hebrew Bible were arranged by the topics I mentioned earlier-the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings.  These were all written in Hebrew and when a new copy was needed, a scribe copied a scroll by writing in long hand. Although the Jewish Scriptures were copied by hand, they were extremely accurate from copy to copy. The Jews had a phenomenal system of scribes, who developed intricate and ritualistic methods for counting letters, words and paragraphs to insure that no copying errors were made. These scribes dedicated their entire lives to preserving the accuracy of the holy books. A single copy error would require the immediate destruction of the entire scroll. In fact, Jewish scribal tradition was maintained until the invention of the printing press, more than five hundred and fifty years ago. As far as manuscript accuracy, the recent discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has confirmed the remarkable reliability of this scribal system over thousands of years.3
           
The reading from 2 Timothy that was read earlier in this morning says, “All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching the truth, rebuking error, correcting faults, and giving instruction for right living, so that the person who serves God may be fully qualified and equipped to do every kind of good deed” (2 Tim. 3:16-17).  The writer had the Hebrew Scriptures in mind and the statement clearly expresses the value and use of Scripture.  Of course this statement does not refer to the New Testament because it had not been written yet. 
           
As the world changed, Greece became the leading nation in the world.  The Hebrew Bible was translated from Hebrew into Greek about 2200 years ago. 
           
After approximately 400 years of scriptural silence, Jesus arrived on the scene.  Throughout his teaching, Jesus often quoted the Hebrew Scriptures, declaring that he did not come to destroy the Jewish Scriptures, but to fulfill them. In the Book of Luke, Jesus proclaims to his disciples, "all things must be fulfilled which were written in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms.”4
           
Jesus lived about 2000 years ago.  His life made such a difference in the way many understood God as well as how people ought to treat each other that about 30 years after Jesus died, different people began writing down stories about Jesus’ life and ministry.  They started with what they considered to be the most important, the end of his life and the way he died.  Then, they wrote about what he said and did.  Some of them wrote what they had heard about his birth.  These stories were collected and written down by people with the names of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.  Their writings are the first four books of the New Testament and are known as the Gospels. There was a man named, Paul, who wrote a lot of letters to different churches and these became important to those individual congregations and to other congregations as well.  They became known as the Epistles or Letters. These authors quoted from 31 books of the Hebrew Scriptures, and widely circulated their material so that by about 150 of the Common Era early Christians were referring to the entire set of writings as the "New Covenant." During the 200s, the 3rd century, the original writings were translated from Greek into Latin, Coptic (Egypt) and Syriac (Syria), and widely disseminated as "inspired scripture" throughout the Roman Empire (and beyond).5
           
The Gospels and the Letters were written in Greek and eventually around 385 of the Common Era or about 1625 years ago 27 of these writings were selected by leaders of the church to be put together in what we now call The New Testament.  In 397 of the Common Era, in an effort to protect the scriptures from various heresies and offshoot religious movements, the current 27 books of the New Testament were formally and officially confirmed and "canonized" in the Synod of Carthage.6 By this time the Roman Empire ruled the world. Latin was the language spoken and a man by the name of Jerome translated the New Testament (382) from Greek into Latin.
           
Starting twenty years after Jesus’ death and continuing for nearly forty years, several who lived during the time that Jesus lived, including Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, James, Peter and Jude, wrote the Gospels, letters and books that became the Bible's New Testament.
           
Dramatically, when the biblical manuscripts are compared to other ancient writings, they stand alone as the best-preserved literary works of all antiquity. Remarkably, there are thousands of existing Hebrew Scripture manuscripts and fragments copied throughout the Middle East, Mediterranean and European regions that agree phenomenally with each other.1 In addition, these texts substantially agree with the Septuagint version of the Hebrew Scripture, which was translated from Hebrew to Greek some time during the 3rd century before the Common Era. 2 The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in Israel in the 1940s and 1950s, also provide astounding evidence for the reliability of the ancient transmission of the Jewish Scriptures in the 1st, 2nd and 3rd centuries Before the Common Era.3
           
The manuscript evidence for the New Testament is also dramatic, with nearly 25,000 ancient manuscripts discovered and archived so far, at least 5,600 of which are copies and fragments in the original Greek.4 Some manuscript texts date to the early second and third centuries, with the time between the original autographs and our earliest existing fragment being a remarkably short 40-60 years.5
           
The only places you could find a copy of these Scriptures in those earliest days were in the synagogues and then later in the churches.  The only people who could read the Scriptures were the rabbis and ministers.  As people began to learn more and began to be able to read, they became more and more interested in the Bible.  By this time England was the ruling nation in the world and English was the primary language.  So people began to translate the Bible into English.  John Wycliffe translated a hand written copy of the Bible into English in1384.  The only way to produce a copy of the Bible continued to be one copy at a time written out by hand.  Then, in the middle of the 1400s, John Gutenberg did an amazing thing.  He invented the printing press and the first book printed using the printing press was the Bible, known as the Gutenberg Bible. That made it possible to produce copies of the Bible quickly and then to print more than one copy at a time.
           
Since the invention of the printing press printing of the Bible and translations of the Bible into many languages has exploded.  The American Bible Society is noted for its work in translating the Bible or portions of the Bible into various languages and dialects in the world.  To date some portion of the Bible has been translated into 1185 different languages or dialects.  Wow!  Isn’t that amazing?
           
Isn’t it amazing that the Bible you hold in your hands started out as stories that people told each other?  Then people began writing down the stories and collecting them around topics like creation, commandments, and kings.  Then to make copies someone had to sit down and copy by hand word for word.  In order for people in other places who spoke different languages to understand what was in the Bible people had to translate from Hebrew or Greek into another language, still writing out by hand.  Eventually, with the invention of the printing press it was possible for virtually anyone anywhere to have a copy of the Bible.  And now you can go to your computer and read any part or the entire Bible online.  If you want, you can download and print your own copy of the Bible from your computer.  Each Sunday in our worship service the lector reads passages from the Bible.  And the passages are printed from a copy of the Bible from a website accessed with a computer in the church office and sent to the lectors so they can practice reading the passage before they read in worship. What an interesting, amazing story of how we got our Bible.  I hope all of you 4th graders, and the rest of us appreciate the commitment of thousands, perhaps millions, of people through the centuries who have made it possible for us to have the Bible to read, study, and learn about the love, justice, peace, and grace of God. God has been touching lives with these gifts from the beginning of people living on the earth.  This is the purpose of the Bible, to help us know about the love and grace of God.  We are indebted to people through the centuries who told the stories, wrote down the stories, translated and printed the stories.  May knowing how we got the Bible help us appreciate the treasure that the Bible is and encourage us to translate the wisdom from the Bible into the lives we live.  This is how the Bible, identified by many as the written word of God, is translated into the living word of God.  You and I are today’s translators and the translations that we provide is how many will get the Bible today.   

Notes
1 Henry H. Halley, Halley's Bible Handbook, 25th ed., Zondervan Publishing House, 2000, 1071.
2 Ibid.
3 Various, Zondervan Handbook to the Bible, Zondervan Publishing House, 1999, 64-65.
4 Luke 24:44, The Holy Bible, New King James Version, Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1982.
5 F.F. Bruce, The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? 5th rev. ed., Intervarsity Press, 1960, 21-28.
6 Ibid., 27.