The History of the Bible: How Did We Get the Bible We Have Today?
Our history of the Bible begins with Moses writing the Torah (the first five books of the Bible), around 1500 B.C. During the following 1,250 years, many notable things took place—the Israelites settling the land of Canaan, the period of the Judges, the reigns of King Saul, King David, and King Solomon, the division of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, the exiles of Israel to Assyria and Judah to Babylon, the eventual return of Judah to the land of Israel, and the beginning of the Hellenistic period, which led to the Maccabean revolt in 167 B.C. It was over this lengthy time span that the Writings and the Prophets were then written.
However, it wasn’t until the time of Yeshua and up until the beginning of the 3rd century that the actual canon for the Tanach was set, and the text itself standardized.
Paul’s words to the Romans, “the Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God” (Romans 3:2), have remained true throughout the centuries. From the time of Ezra up until Yeshua’s day, those who transmitted the holy Scriptures were simply called the “scribes.” These Jewish scribes were intensely meticulous to ensure that no corruption would enter the text—faithfully preserving it for all those who were to come after them.
The 6th century brought with it a group of scribes called the Masoretes. H. Robinson said of them, “everything countable seems to be counted!” The Masoretes were incredibly particular and checked their work in every way imaginable. It was from this diligent group of scribes that we got the Masoretic text. This became the base text for the Tanach and remains so until today.
By the early 20th century, the earliest text we had was a Masoretic text from the 11th century. Naysayers began to arise, stating that it was impossible for this document from the 11th century to have been accurately transmitted for two thousand years. Were our Bibles really trustworthy, or were the texts they were based on as faulty as the naysayers claimed?
Then in 1947, the first of the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. After a series of archaeological excavations, fragments of more than 900 manuscripts were discovered. Atheists were sure that these manuscripts, dating back as far as 250 B.C., would prove the Masoretic text to be full of errors and fables. It took some time for the manuscripts to be carefully examined, but by 2001, the majority of the official editions had been published and were located in academic libraries. The results overwhelmingly confirmed the Masoretic text as extremely accurate.
The transmission of the Apostolic Scriptures was much different than the Tanach. The books of the Tanach took place and were compiled over 1,500 years. The events in the New Testament took place in less than a hundred years. The words of Yeshua were most likely shared orally—a common and reliable method in those days—for around thirty years before being written down.
With the message of the gospel spreading like wildfire throughout the nations, it became necessary to document the accounts in writing in order to maintain their accuracy. As the word continued to spread, thousands of manuscripts were copied and distributed in a very short amount of time.
It is important to note that the Gospels were written during the lifetime of eyewitnesses. Embellished stories would have been easily discredited. It is also traditionally understood that all of the Apostles were martyred for their faith. No one would choose to die because of their faith in an account they themselves had fabricated. These two elements lend much credence to the accuracy of the New Testament.
At the beginning of the 5th century A.D., Church Father Jerome translated the Bible into Latin. This Bible, known as the Vulgate which means “the common one,” became very popular and was the text used in the Gutenberg Bible, printed in 1456—the first Bible printed on a printing press. The first Hebrew Bible was printed in 1488. However, a Greek Bible was not printed until 1514. This was due to the difficulty in printing Greek fonts and because a Greek Bible could challenge the Vulgate—the official Bible of the Latin Church.
The first Greek Bible to be printed and made available to the general public was compiled by a man named Desiderius Erasmus. The primary manuscripts Erasmus used for the Gospels and Apostolic Letters dated back to the 15th and 12th centuries, respectively. His manuscript for the book of Revelation was missing the last leaf (6 verses), so he translated the Latin Vulgate back into Greek for that section. There are several other places in Revelation, the Gospels, and Acts where Erasmus used the same method. These sections of Erasmus’s Greek have no witness in any other manuscripts.
Erasmus was competing with the compiler of the Complutensian text to finish his codex first and therefore did not take time to gather all the available Greek manuscripts. Erasmus himself said that his final product was “precipitated rather than edited.” Another scholar said concerning typographical errors, “It is in that respect the most faulty book I know.” Despite these facts, Erasmus’s Greek text became known as the “Textus Receptus” or the “Received Text.” Meaning, this text contains the words that we have received from God.
Many scholars have debated the accuracy of the so-called Textus Receptus, but surprisingly, it has held its own, even into modern times. The King James Version, for instance, uses the Textus Receptus as its base. In the mid-1800s, there was a significant move to consider all the Greek manuscripts available, and great efforts were made to recover the original text.
Today, we have English translations that are based on the Textus Receptus (KJV, NKJV, YLT, etc.) and others that are based on a more eclectic text that has continually been updated as more manuscripts have been discovered and put through the process of textual criticism (ESV, NASB, MSG, NIV, etc.).
Over the past 3,500 years—from the time the Torah was written until now, manuscripts were carefully handed down from generation to generation. With the launch of the gospel to the nations, came the need for translations. Those who copied and translated understood that they were doing holy work and took it very seriously. The journey that the Bible has taken through history is unlike any other book. Clearly, if it were the work of men, it would not have persevered. Much like the Jewish people’s supernatural preservation, God has preserved His word. We should be very thankful to Him and all those He used throughout the centuries in that preservation process.
If you’d like to go deeper into this topic and the amazing history of the English Bible, download the PDF with helpful visuals and the full essay here:
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