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10 – “Thus saith the Lord”
There used to be a time when people took the authority of the Bible for granted. If it said “Thus saith the LORD …” that was accepted as a message from God. Then everything changed. From the later Middle Ages onwards people began to treat the Bible as though it were any other book. They criticised its literature; analysed its form; traced its origins; challenged its historicity and concluded that they were a good deal cleverer than the people who had originally written it. Nowadays things have gone even further in that direction, for post-modernist man believes there is no such thing as absolute truth: everything is relative.
Biblical ignorance
This perverse scholastic approach to the Bible has now persuaded the man and woman in the street that the Bible is a collection of myths and fables. Coupled with the absence of Bible-based religious education in schools, there is both a deplorable lack of Bible knowledge and a complete ignorance about the evidence that upholds the claims made in the Bible – to be the word of God. So, on quiz shows and the like, contestants know much more about Greek mythology than about the simplest Bible characters or situations.
We can deplore this state of affairs and see it as another ‘sign of the times’, which of course it is, or we can try to set the record straight. As a community we aim to be ‘the people of the Book’ and as its upholders we need to be well informed ourselves about the origin and authority of the Bible. This is especially so if we are engaged in public preaching, perhaps at a Bible Exhibition or an ecclesial event, when people might ask us to explain why the Bible should be believed.
Bible versions
If you want to start from scratch, and find out how the Bible came to us, there are a lot of good books which trace the process. Brother Derrick Banyard’s God’s Living Word is a nicely illustrated volume which traces the entire process through from clay tablets to the New Revised Standard Version, dealing with the various codices and the Dead Sea Scrolls en route. There are several books about William Tyndale which are easy to read and very instructive, as he was the father of the King James Version. And if you want to delve further, F. F. Bruce’s two works titled The Books and the Parchments and The English Bible are very sound.
The process of translation is a fascinating subject, if you like that sort of thing and, as with everything else in Bible study, if you decide to make that a speciality there is plenty of scope.
Bible truth
F. F. Bruce also wrote a slim volume, which has appeared in many editions, called The New Testament Documents. He examines the evidence for their reliability, explains how the inspired books of the Bible were distinguished from other contemporary works, writes about the Gospels and the miracles of Jesus (which some people find challenging), and shows how the New Testament has stood the test of time, its historical notations proving reliable as recent discoveries have unearthed the past. W. C. Kaiser Jnr. has written a companion volume The Old Testament Documents which covers much the same ground as well as considering the preservation of the text, and the reliability of the history, prophecy and wisdom literature.
Both volumes give a good introduction to the general topic and will get you better informed. They also refer to many other works which relate to particular aspects of the subject and if you like the approach adopted, such recommendations can be helpful if you want to follow something up.
Old or new?
There is an interesting choice to be made at this point between older and more modern works. As a community we have been keen to uphold and defend the integrity of the Bible, so we have some useful writings to explore, like Brother Islip Collyer’s Vox Dei (1921) and Brother C. C. Walker’s The Word of God (1926). More recent works include Brethren John Carter’s The Oracles of God (1966) and Alan Hayward’s God’s Truth (1973). All of these are useful and are available in print or second-hand. If you find the style and content of the older works to your liking, the nineteenth century and early twentieth produced some formidable works in defence of Holy Scripture.
L. Gaussen’s Theopneustia was first published in 1841, with a long title which also read The Bible, its Divine Origin and Entire Inspiration, Deduced from Internal Evidence and the Testimonies of Nature, History, and Science. The title gives you a flavour of the writing style, but if you can cope with that it contains some good stuff. Internal evidence was the hallmark of J.J. Blunt’s Undesigned Coincidences, probably the only non-Christadelphian work to have been republished by the CMPA. Now out of print, it is still available second-hand from time to time, and there are plenty of other works, like William Paley’s Horae Paulinae which look at the internal continuity of God’s word as an evidence that it all holds together wonderfully.
There is much more information here about other works that could help if you want to explore this topic in depth and become an informed defender of the faith.
