It's up to the Lord and we'll start from there. Father God, thank you again for bringing us here to Sunday School. Thank you for the opportunity to study the origin of your word and how we actually got these awesome Bibles that we hold in our hands this morning. And Father, we ask that you would help us to understand your word well and that we may follow it. We pray all this in Jesus name, amen. All right, so we've been looking at defending our faith and how we do that through apologetics. And really there's two main questions that we've been talking about over the last six months or so. And those philosophical or basic origin questions are, does God exist? And then has he spoken to his creation? And so the last few weeks we've been looking at the first question of does God exist? And we've shown that God is the creator and he left his fingerprints all over his creation. He's shown himself throughout creation from the, from its start and it's ample examples of his design in it. So now we're going to shift to the question from his existence to the next question is, has he spoken to his creation? Francis Schaeffer wrote several great books, but he always would say, you know, God does exist and he has spoken. So how has he spoken? And as Christians, we claim that God has spoken to us through the words contained in the Bible. So my question this morning is, is this a reasonable claim? Why isn't Mormonism considered God's word? Or what about the Quran? And so we start looking at these things and that's where we're headed. We're going to go to a place that says unequivocally that the Bible is God's word. And so we're going to start really by looking at origins. But to just set the tone over the next few weeks as we look at the Bible, we're going to show how the Bible was created and how we have accurate copies of the originals. And we're going to show that the Bible is historically accurate and reliable. We're going to look at the story of Jesus and how it's true, including the miracles that are described. especially the miracle of his resurrection that proved he is God. And then from there, we're going to look at what Jesus God has said about scriptures itself. And so from that, we're going to build a, a reasonable evidential look at, at the scriptures. And so it isn't that we're denying the presupposition that the Holy spirit puts in our hearts, that the Bible is the word of God, but we're going to see that there's evidences just like in creation that God has shown us That the Bible is indeed has evidences associated with it. Just like we look at creation. We say look at the evidences that God has left us. And so the Bible is the same way and that's kind of what we're going to be looking at this morning. All right, we got good front row seaters now so we can ask these questions. All right, so let's get going because we got to cover 2,500 years in 40 minutes. So here we go. All right, so first thing we're going to look at, just real quick, we're looking at the origins of the Bible this morning and then how the canon, which means list of books, of the scripture was determined. All right, so what's the Bible? The term Bible comes from Clement. He was an early church father around 150 AD, and he coined that term Bible, which is a collection of books. And so what is the Bible? What's in it, just from a big picture? So 10,000 foot level, we have 66 books that were written over a span of about 1,600 years. They were penned by around 40 men. written mostly in Hebrew and Greek. There's some Aramaic was in there in the Old Testament as well. It's the most popular selling book in history. It was the first book printed on a movable printing press. That was the Gutenberg press in 1455, where they reprinted the Latin Bible, and we'll talk about that, the Latin Vulgate. It has been translated into more languages than any other book. So that's just a big picture. of what it is, if we were describing what is the Bible. All right, so this is kind of our overview of a standard look at the Bible. So the Old Testament contains 39 books in it, from the Pentateuch, which is the first five books of the Bible, then you have a list of historical books, Then you have poetry and wisdom books. You have the major prophets and the minor prophets, and that makes up the Old Testament. Then there's 27 New Testament books. The first four are the gospels. Then we have Paul's epistles, of which there's 13. And then you have general epistles and Revelation, where there's nine different letters that are written there. So that's the Bible overview of big picture what's in it. All right, so let's look at the Old Testament. How did we get it? Around 1500 BC, Moses is told by God to write down the law for the people. The first five books of the Old Testament, the Pentateuch, are called the Law of Moses, and they were written in Hebrew by him. From 1500 BC to about 400 BC, the books of history, prophecy, and poetry are written by guys like Samuel, King David, King Solomon, Daniel, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and others. And so the scribes, as the books wore out, the scribes copied them very, very judiciously. And we're gonna see how the accuracy of their efforts shows forth when we get to things like the Dead Sea Scrolls. So the Old Testament canon, the collection of books really stems from the fact that you guys remember we're looking at the book of Isaiah as we listen to Logan preach and we're seeing that you have this exile. Well when they came back from exile Ezra collects all the old scrolls, and he puts together and arranges the books, and this makes up what is known as the Old Testament canon. And since 450 BC, before Jesus, that list has remained essentially the same. So all the people who use the Old Testament, even the Israelis and the Jews, they would say we have almost the identical same set of books that was established all the way back to 450 BC. And that was put together by Ezra, right? So around 250 to 100 BC, the Greek nations started coming forth. Alexander the Great, guy over here, Alexander the Warrior, he replaces a lot of the common language of the areas of which he conquered. And you can see this is all around the Mediterranean on the eastern side. all the way into this part over in the Eastern world is what he conquered. And in that he brought to, you know, this was all Greek speaking at this time, so a lot of the languages were supplanted by Greek, including the scriptures that the Hebrews were using. So the Hebrew scriptures were translated by 70 Jewish scholars, and that's known as the Septuagint. So the Septuagint meaning 70 scholars. So the Septuagint is what is being used when Jesus shows up on the scene, and we have him reading from the Septuagint is what he's using, which was a Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures. As a matter of fact, Jesus quotes from those scriptures 295 times in the New Testament writings. Refer back to those same, the Septuagint or the Greek scriptures that were Old Testament. All right, so we get into the New Testament now, where we have around AD 45 to 100, you have the, like the Old Testament prophet, the New Testament writers were inspired by the Holy Ghost or the Holy Spirit to write these scriptures down. Jesus even promised in John 14, he said, the Holy Spirit's gonna come upon you and he's gonna help you remember as you write these things down. And so that's where we got all of our New Testament was as God breathed into those writers. The New Testament was written in Greek. It was circulated to early churches. The text quote, those particular texts that they use quote from all but eight of the 39 Old Testament books. They're all pointing back to the Old Testament. And they're all using the same quotations that were in the Old Testament as they add to the word of God through the New Testament. So Christianity begins to spread after Christ rises from the dead and returns to heaven, and we see in AD 100 to 500 the writings of Jesus' followers are copied and translated from Greek into other languages, and they spread as far as India and China, but they were all over the Mediterranean area as well. And so you had lots of these letters, Paul's letters, the Gospels were all being copied meticulously and handed out. And so we don't have any of the original letters, but we do have fragments of letters that go back to 120 years after the birth of Christ, so you're looking at AD 120. So pretty close. So what's happening is these letters are going out, but then we see heresies start to show up. The Gnostics show up with their letters. You got the Book of Thomas and all these other things are going on. And so the church fathers decide they're going to accept the writings of the Gospels and Paul's letters as canicle and and so what they say here is they say the and this this word canons from Greek word referring to the the rule of faith or truth it's the list and so they have this this Council of Carthage where they they they decide that these 27 particular letters or books of the Bible are going to be the ones that make up the New Testament and those are the ones that we establish as as being the scriptures so how did they do that What methodology did they use to say, this is God's word, but this is not. And so these church elders, these church fathers had a a particular way that they went through and looked at these things. And so here's just a quick summary as they're looking. There's our Sherlock Holmes. Which one's the right one? So this was the idea that they used to determine this canonicity. So first of all, was the book written by a prophet or an apostle of God? Remember, even in Paul's writings, he says, I'm an apostle. He's claiming that, he's saying, I'm getting this directly from God. And so we looked at these things and said, did these writers, were they written by one of these apostles? Or were they written, obviously, by a prophet in the Old Testament, okay? And so was a writer confirmed by acts of God? What they were looking for there was, God throughout history has used miracles and particular things that he shows that who's ever speaking is speaking for him. And how does he do that? He does it by miracles. And we saw that a lot with the prophets. And you know, you look at the, uh, the new Testament writers, almost all of them had particular miracles that they were doing. So they're like, these guys were definitely speaking for God because we see God's supernatural powers in them. All right. Does the message tell the truth about God? And what they were doing there was they were comparing it to other parts of scripture, other letters. Were these things in accord with what had already been written, what had already been accepted? And so if it didn't, they threw them out. If they did, that was another saying to say, yep, maybe they're, maybe they didn't. And then did it come with the power of God? Was it affecting people? You know, look at the scriptures today. What's unique about them? There's tons of things unique about our scriptures, but the one thing that you can over and over and say, look at the people that is affected. Look at the nations that is affected. Look at what it has done. It is an amazing book when you look at not just what it says about Jesus and about God's plan, but it affects people's lives. You see it over and over as people go like, I'm gonna, like Lee Strobel, let's prove the Bible's wrong. And in the end, the Bible changes him. He doesn't change the Bible. And so we see this in the power of God through the scriptures. And so also part of the canonicity determination was whether or not it was accepted by the people of God. Were they using it? Did the church use it? Remember, they're trying to make this determination about 300 years after Christ, and they're looking at these things and saying, look, we gotta make sure we don't let the false things go in here. We're gonna determine these things. So was it accepted by the people of God? And then was it being used in public worship in the early church? So this was their criteria. that they used to then come together and say these are the 27 books of the New Testament. Now what's interesting to note though is today we have a question of who determines that? And so, or who's got the authority to determine what books are there? And so this is where we see a big difference between us and the Catholics. Who's in charge? And so you got the Protestants over here and Henry VIII is in the middle of this. This was just a funny thing I picked up, but it shows it right. You got, you got the Bible over here for Protestants, and then you've got some big things over here. They're really not important, but you have this battle that's going on around the time of the, the Renaissance and Reformations and the Protestants at the time said they rightly believe that God's the determiner of the canon and the church's job is to discover it. Where the Roman Catholic view is that the church determines what is in the canon and therefore is not subject to it in the sake of authority. And what I mean by that is They were adding, and they're still doing it today, when the Pope speaks in his official capacity, that is equal to what the Scripture says, regardless of whether it's contrary to the Scripture. And so this is what got the Catholic Church in so much trouble. got to the point where when we get to the Reformation time you see guys like like Luther who are saying this isn't squaring up anymore what you guys are doing and saying and what the scripture says so where's the authority and so we get sola scriptura which is one of the five solas of the Reformation that said it is important to understand that the authority of God's Word is in the scriptures not in the church the church the church discovers it, the church is not the one that says it is the authority. And so again we see this big difference between Catholicism and us. And this is a major difference. This idea that the Catholic Church is kind of close to the Evangelical Church is something that you see coming out in a lot of the Stuff that we see today on the internet and it's like, you know, we're all just lovers of Jesus. We're not okay There's a huge difference between the papacy and and the Protestant Church And a lot of guys died making sure that we went back to the truth of what the scripture said At the hands of the Catholics and we're going to look at that. So so this idea that we're all just you know Catholicism is the same as us not true. We could go through that in a lot of detail later so So this who's in charge, we would say God's always in charge. The church is discovering what his word is and they've done that. So let's keep going. So from Greek to Latin, right? So as the Greek language kind of went away, the scholarship language of the day was becoming Latin around 400 AD. And so at the end of the 300s, the Pope went to Jerome and said, we need to, A lot of our monks aren't speaking Greek anymore, they're speaking Latin, or they're using Latin as the intellectual language of the day. And so they went to Jerome and they said, can you take the Greek and put it into Latin? So now remember, this is before the printing press. So all of the scriptures that we're talking about here are handwritten at this time. It takes him 22 years to complete this effort to create what's known today as the Latin Vulgate. And vulgate means it was in the vulgar language. It was in the language that the people at the time were using, the intellectuals in particular. Now also, step back in history a little bit, big picture. Most people on earth at that time were illiterate. So there were very few that actually could read. There were very few that actually spoke these intellectual languages like Latin. They used local vernaculars and they were very ignorant in how they, you know, passed on information, they didn't write to each other, you know, there was no reading going on, and so you got to understand, so Latin was used by them, and that was an intellectual language that was used for a long time. Now this Latin Vulgate that Jerome writes, is used for the next thousand years within the church. It's not until the 1300s do we actually see that the Bible now is being translated from Latin into something else. And we're going to get to that next. So just a big picture. Christianity spreads up to Great Britain by then around 300 AD. It had already been up into Britain. It's already spreading through Europe. And then in 430 AD, we see that St. Patrick over here depicted in green. Imagine that. He starts to evangelize Ireland. His story is very fascinating if you ever get a chance to read it. And he's not just about a drunk Irishman, okay? So, all right, so let's keep going. So, Middle Ages, all right, around 450 to 600, we start to see that Rome declines and falls. And so from 500 to 900, the Jewish scribes, they're known as Masorites, they develop a very meticulous system of counting words to ensure the accuracy of each copy of the Hebrew scriptures. They were Old Testament guys. They were super meticulous. Also, you had monks that were doing the same thing. So a lot of times we, you know, we call this period the dark ages. It's kind of a misnomer. What was really going on was Christianity was saving civilization is what was happening this time. The Roman Empire and its tyranny had fallen and a lot of the barbarism was going around, but what was keeping society all tied together was Christianity. So the church was moving along. They were still taking the learned books that were written. Why do we even have Greek history? Why do we even have the understanding of Socrates and those guys? It's because the church was preserving a lot of this information. So this idea of the dark ages was because of the church is a misnomer. The dark ages was because of barbarism and paganism. And so what was really going on at that time was the church was actually preserving civilization. And so many of the literate and the learned from Britain and the continent fled to Ireland during this time where you had a lot of the goths were just ravaging people. So around 900 to 1200, Europe struggles to bring itself out of this barbarism again, and they build on what the church has done and had preserved. And so we established kings and the popes get together and they start to establish order within Europe. And so, and then we have this little thing called the Crusades where the Pope kind of decides we're going to go hammer the Muslims. So we fight, we fight them quite brutally during this same time period. Let's see what these guys are showing over here. We can go into that history at another time, but just giving you a big picture of what's going on during this timeframe. So remember the Bible at the time is still the Latin Vulgate. All right, so we have the rise of the papacy between 1200 and 1300. The church rises to really incomparable power and majesty. The church is the big power struggle because you don't have any particular country. As a matter of fact, the Roman Empire at the time, it had Italy in it, it had Germany in it. This was all kind of controlled by the church. So you don't have nation states arriving yet, but you do have the church in Europe has got this big hold over everything. And so in 1382, though, it starts to kind of fall apart. First guy to show up on the scenes that starts calling the church back is this guy here. So Wycliffe shows up and he creates a Bible again, handwritten, and he translates the Bible that's in Latin. back into Greek. And so he's going, look, we need to get this thing where everybody can understand it. And so he and another guy, a Czechoslovakian guy named John Huss, are calling for reforms during this time. They start looking at the scriptures and saying, what the church is doing doesn't correspond with what scripture is calling us to do. You know, they had started doing things that were, you know, of course, Martin Luther comes later and really calls it out. But these guys, he's known as the morning star of the Reformation. He's the first one that stands up and says, we got a problem. He was a bishop and kind of a priest guy, very, very learned man. He creates that first, I'm sorry, English Bible. He actually translates it into English, not Greek. And so he creates this Bible that he's saying, all right, now I'm going to start giving it to the people. The people need to understand God's word and this whole Latin thing that we're doing. And the church is like, nope, we don't want that. And so even though he calls for a reformation, it doesn't happen. And of course, Huss is another one that is also calling for reformation at the time. And the papacy is not going to have any of it. And so the church tries desperately, the Catholic church tries desperately to hold on to its power. And in 1408, it becomes illegal to translate the Bible into common English. And so most of my focus here is on the English Bible, because we'll see how it explodes into other languages through that. So the Wycliffe Bible's banned, and all the copies are burned. They're like, nope, not going to have that. We burn it. We ban it. They tell Wycliffe to shut up. And they actually take Huss, and they burn him at the stake. And so while he's being burned at the stake, he makes this prediction. He says, you may cook this goose, but a hundred years from now, a swan's going to come and you're not going to be able to do anything to him. Interesting prediction. Who's that swan? Martin Luther. So interesting prediction that he does there. All right. So along this same timeframe, we start seeing 1455, the Bible becomes the first printed books. And now we're starting to see distribution, but it's still a Latin Bible printed in still that Latin Vulgate. So we're still don't have it in in English yet. So in 1516, a guy named Erasmus, a very bright man, very knowledgeable guy, and a Greek scholar, he starts to publish a new edition, a Greek edition of the New Testament in this time period. What happens next? A guy named Tyndale shows up. So in 1525, Tyndale translates the New Testament from Greek into English. So again, he's building on what Wycliffe did, and Tyndale first approaches the church and says, look, if we could get this into the hands of the people, you'll start to see changes. This will really be good for the people. It's God, our creator, has given us his word. He wants us to go out. And the church says no. And so anyway, he goes into Europe, leaves England, and he smuggles books into England from Germany. And so they eventually catch him, and they strangle him and burn him at the stake in 1536 for the heresy of actually publishing an English Bible. And so if you ever wonder about that, what's like, how do they do that? So graphic history here. They tie him to a pole. They shove a rope around his neck, bring it up over the top of the pole. They build a big pyre of flammable stuff around him, and they choke him. And just before he's dead, they light him on fire. So that's how horrific this stuff was that they were doing to people just for trying to get the word of God in the hands of the people. But at about this time, you got the Reformation starting to gain steam. We're starting to see that Luther's calling for change. You see the church is starting to be there. You're starting to see people going, this is what you're doing is not right. They start to see that the Bible is getting out to the people. They're starting to read it. They're starting to see that we got problems here with the Catholic Church. And so the church and the kings at the time try to cover themselves. And so in 1535, the Coverdale Bible becomes the first English Bible to be printed. And it's kind of blessed by the kings. And then in 1537, the Matthews Bibles is printed with the king's permission. And it's kind of a combination of Tyndale's Bible and the Coverdale Bible. What's interesting to note about this guy is almost all of the translations up until probably the late 1800s were based on what his work was. So Tyndale was a very, very smart guy and did a great job in bringing about New Testament and Old Testament works, although he never completely finished it. But all these Bibles were based a lot on his work. As a matter of fact, in 1539, They produced what was called the Great Bible. And it wasn't great because it was great. Like, wow, it was great because it was big. But the problem was people were stealing it. And so it's also called the Chained Bible. See the chain on it? So people were stealing it, so they chained it in the churches. They said, don't steal these Bibles. But still, it's not widespread. We got a little bit here. The Pope was like, yeah, as long as one of these is in each church, we're OK. But nobody could have one on their own. We didn't want that. Don't let people read the word. And so we still had some problems here that still was not out to the people. So a quick summary of Henry VIII as we go in there now. So Henry VIII had how many wives? Six. Six wives, Henry VIII, okay? And so his first wife gives him a daughter. Nope, he wants a son. So he gets rid of her, kills her, gets another wife. She gives him a daughter, kills her. He gets a third wife. She actually gives him a son, Edward. So we got Mary Elizabeth Edward. I'm just giving you the string there. And then the next three wives don't do anything. He kills them all. So he's a real scumbag. And so, but he also pushed back on the Catholic church because Catholic church wouldn't let him divorce his first wife. So he said, I'm now the head of the church and we're going to create the English church. And so the Episcopal church is what came out of that. And so, so we start getting into what's happening after Henry the eighth dies. It becomes kind of interesting as who's going to take over the power. And so at the time, he kind of pushed away from the Catholic church, but his second wife was a Catholic and she had Mary. And so, I'm sorry, first wife was Catholic, she had Mary. And so when he dies, Mary ascends to the throne and she says, all this stuff we've been doing, we're going back to Catholicism, right? And this is what happens, we get bloody Mary. So she shows up and says, now I do not like the English church, but I certainly don't like the Protestants. And we want all this stuff to be stopped. So she starts persecuting the Protestants and the Church of England and martyrs like 150 of them, kills them, burns them at the stake, nasty stuff. And so what's interesting about that is a lot of the reform leaders at the time, Scotland and otherwise, guys like John Knox, they head to Geneva. They flee from England and what's going on. And again, in God's providence, we see a very interesting thing happen. When they get to Geneva, the reformers say, we need to make our own Bible. And we want notes in this Bible. Tyndale attempted to have notes, but in the sake of trying to get it printed fast and make small Bibles that could be smuggled, he took the notes out. But the guys in Geneva got together and said, we're going to create these theological notes. Matter of fact, if you own a reformed study Bible, that came out back in the 80s when it first came out. All those notes got its basis from the Geneva Bible. And so it's fascinating to look at how it transforms to us. So they create the Geneva Bible, it contains a lot of theological notes by the reformed scholars. This was the Bible, it was the most used English Bible for 150 years. It was also the Bible that the Puritans took to America. So most of the Bibles in early America, almost all of them were these Geneva Bibles. Okay. So in 1568, you know, we couldn't have this Geneva Bible because it had all these, what they called bitter notes in them. Catholic church was like, we don't like that. And so there was also something in that Bible that was very interesting too, that the Kings of England didn't like. Remember what it was? It was the right to rule. The Kings at the time believed they had a divine right of rule. And so the Bible doesn't say that. The Bible says Jesus is king. And so they said, you know, the king of England is as subject to God as we are. There's nothing special about him. He doesn't have a divine right of rule. no more than the Pope does. And so they started, the Geneva Bible clearly pointed that out. Matter of fact, they didn't use the word king, they used the word tyrant. Well, that kind of made all the kings mad, and so we're gonna get to what happens next. So Geneva Bible was one of the first attempts of it, or the Bishop's Bible was one of the first attempts of it to come on. So after After you have Mary, you have Elizabeth. She tries to bring back the Protestant thing. She's more sympathetic to them. And so, actually the order, I got it wrong. So Edward is the young guy. He's the youngest son of Henry, the youngest child. He dies pretty quickly. Then Mary comes in, then you have Elizabeth. Elizabeth has no kids. And so there's a problem. So now what are we gonna do? So this guy shows up. Okay, this guy was the, He was the great-grandson of Henry VIII's mother, I mean sister, sorry. Henry VIII had an older sister, and she was married off to one of the kings up in Scotland, and her great-grandson is this guy. He was King James VI of Scotland, and becomes King James of England, and he unites all three, Ireland, Scotland, and England under this guy. And so he's trying to appease everything, and so he says, all right, I don't like that the Geneva Bible has hammered the right of kings, so we're going to create an official Bible, and we're going to put out the King James Version in 1612. So he calls 54 scholars together. They translate it without those bitter theological notes. They're still bitter today. Just talk to anybody, and you say reformed, and they lose their mind. So the scholars used the Bishop's Bible and the Greek and Hebrew texts to put together the King James Bible. Now, what's interesting is they didn't have some of the proof texts that kind of showed up in 1881, and I'll talk about that in the paper. You have them funny, I'll talk about that in a second. And so it's revised big time in 1881 to incorporate some of the older texts that showed up and they were a little bit different from the ones they had originally used to create their Bible. And so all of a sudden they have this older copies of full Bibles and they said, maybe this, so they made revisions. So when people say, I'm a King James only, it's like, well, which one? Matter of fact, there's like about 60 freaking revisions of the King James Bible. So these guys that are jumping all over you about King James only, really, no. There's a lot of Bibles before then and been revised since then. But all of them tend to follow a pretty good translation to where we are today, because each one of these guys were trying very hard to create a very accurate, you know, it was God's word. The church was handling it very, very well. So even as they were trying to get rid of notes and they didn't like certain things, the overall scripts and texts they were using were very common. And so they were bringing all these things together. And so in the end, we're going to make a conclusion that we do have a very accurate version of the Bible, whether you're using King James or NIV or okay, now post NIV stuff, got to be careful. I'll talk about that in a second. ESV, the one we use comes out of the kind of the King James line as it moves in that direction. All right, so let's move on to the lots of translations. 1850 to present you had many new English translations and what's interesting is In here, 1947, the Dead Sea Scrolls are discovered. And what's interesting about it is they find a copy of Isaiah that's almost full, which is full. And they compared it to the Old Testament text that they had at the time, and they discovered how accurate it was. So the Masorites had written around 500 to 800 AD, had been meticulously copying. But it was still 800 years after Christ, Well, these are dated 150 years before Christ. So all of a sudden you got a thousand years, you're going back to, to really close and looking at what they did. And the amazing part they discovered was how accurate it was. Our copies compared to the Dead Sea Scrolls were almost perfect. And you see the, you know, the awesomeness of those scribes that were very meticulous and how they were making sure that we weren't sloppy and how we were bringing the Bible forward, especially the Old Testament in this case, right? so bible translations continue uh... and what's interesting is as the english bible did with it I can't say enough about how the Bible impacted Western civilization. There's a book out recently called The Book That Made Your World, and I'm reading it right now, a very fascinating book, and it goes through all the different things that the Bible impacted. And so one of the things that happened was when the people got the Bible in their hands, they discovered that it said, we need to spread the word. And so they took that very seriously. And so we started having evangelism and missionaries start to spread out. You know, before that time, you didn't see very much of that. But then when England gets in the game and everybody gets a Bible in their hands, they're like, wow, we need to spread the word. And so in order to spread the word, you have to have a word in their language. So Bible translation became a big deal. Matter of fact, it was so important. Remember, most of the world was ignorant. They didn't read. What created literacy was the Bible. As they went to these different countries and they created, first of all, they had to get there and figure out what the language was. And a lot of these languages were spoken language, they were not written languages. And even today, they have the same problem. You go to some tribe in wherever it is, and they have a spoken language, not a written language. So what did the missionaries do? They didn't teach them English. They said, we're going to take your language, we'll make it a written language, and we'll put it in the Bible, and they become literate. You think about the uniqueness about human beings. We transfer information back and forth to us through the word, how we speak to each other, but more importantly, how we write. I mean, the Bible is God's word. It's been given to us from 1500 BC on, and it makes us intelligent, creative, communicative, beings. That's what makes us unique. My dog, whatever he learns, doesn't write it down so the next dog that comes behind him can figure it out. This is how Jim likes to throw a ball. I'm going to pass that on to you. It doesn't happen that way. Human beings are different. We can look at our history, we can communicate with each other, very technological things, history, all those things because of language. And most of the language in the civilized world, including places like India, got their language from missionaries that were trying to get the Bible into their hands. Massive importance we have here and we just underplay it like it's no big deal. How many Muslim countries do you know that were literate? None of them were. They made small attempts at it, but that wasn't the idea behind the Muslim countries. Look at India and China. Were they literate at this time? No, they were illiterate. Remember, Buddha said, clear your mind of everything. What does the Bible say? The Bible says renew your mind. You know, it wants us to, God created us as thinking beings. God created us to communicate with us. You know, God communicates to us. We communicate with him through prayer and our worship. And you look at this thing, communication is super important. Bible is the center of it. And so let's just look at Bible translations here. Just a couple of statistics for you. This is as of 2025, the full Bible has been translated into about 781 languages. The New Testament, almost 1,800 languages, smaller portions in another 1,400 other languages, totaling about 4,000 languages currently with some part of the Bibles available to them. And this continues on. I mean, we see it all the time. We're translating, we're doing things as fast as we can, obviously computers and things have made it even quicker. And so we're seeing the Bible spread around the world and the impact of it is tremendous. All right, so let's go on here. So turn to the last page here of your handout I gave you. This is kind of a wild summary. Skip the first two pages, but this thing right here is kind of showing you some things about what's going on. The first two pages I gave you is kind of a big picture of how every big Bible, what they used to create the Bible itself. And so you see down here, you got the original manuscripts, And then from there we go up to these things called codexes. There's three main ones. What's a codex? Okay, a codex was a book. At the time, before then, they used papyrus and they used this other thing called vellum, which was animal skins. And they created copies of things. And most of it was in scrolls. And then they started doing what they called codexes, where they were taking the papyri. They were sewing it together and putting a hard cover on it. And so that was the invention of the book, again, around the Bible. And so you can see that a lot of these ideas or these codexes were used to create a lot of the Bibles that we have. But you can see here, there's the Latin Vulgate, there's Wycliffe, there's Tyndale, and it goes all the way up. And then we have a rediscovery in the 1800s of some of these early codexes, which impacts the more modern versions. Up there, see this one, this line that goes up, 1881, we get the revised version of the King James book from the earlier texts that are contained down here. So if you look at the first page, go back to the first page, this is kind of a summary. There's two sections of page one there for you. You have the originals, which is Bible history of the originals. None of them exist anymore. And then we go to New Testament to the right, Old Testament to the left. And this is trying to show you what we have currently that is available to us in the form of text that we use to create Bibles. So the A, B, C, D are all different versions of Old Testament or New Testament scripture. The big line then separates the section that says, all right, let's look at complete Bibles. And we start with the Latin Vulgate. And you go across and it tells you the date and then the text that were used to create it. In the form I used there was the ABCDE. And you can see as it moves down, down being, we're moving more toward modern history, this gives you a summary of what text were used as they created these Bibles. And then this is the, this picture here is the overall summary. So I thought it'd be interesting, you guys get a copy of that. One of these days I'll make it look even prettier. You'll have to excuse my writing. And what looks like a U is actually a V, so hang with me. All right, so we got these origins of the Bible, now we kind of see what's going on. as far as how we got our modern English Bible. And so most of the translations that came out all the way to about the 80s, ending with the ESV were very good translations. And then we got woke and we started doing stupid stuff to the NIV. We started gender neutralizing it and all sorts of terrible things. So be careful about what Bibles you have. Some of these living translations are, aren't as accurate in representing the originals as what we would want. Some of them are actually apostate. So we want to stay away from those. That's why I like the ESV. NIV is good. I like the new King James Bible too. Those three are my favorites currently. ASV, if you want to know really literal things, the American Standard, that's a, it's kind of a wooden interpretation, but it's very accurate in its word-for-word interpretation. I think the new King James and NIV and the ESV do a little better job of putting it more in vernacular that we can understand, but are still accurate. Anything after that gets a little bit wonky, so just Yates' opinion, take it for what it's worth. Now, message is out. And any gender neutral, anything is out. Okay, so just forget that. Right, the later translation of NIV kind of snuck in the gender woke stuff, so you got to be real careful with it. So 80s-ish NIV, good. Later NIV, not good. All right, so this is the big picture where I want to get to today. We understand the origins, but so what? Important part for us to recognize is in the Bibles I just mentioned You see that there is much evidence that the Bible that we have today is true to the original writings There's over 5,000 Greek manuscripts and fragments that are from the 15th century all the way to the early 80 120s they still exist today and we can look at them and say what we have in front of us we can be very reasonably assured that this is very, very, very, very, very close to the original documents that were written, which is what you would say. You know, God is very clear that he's going to preserve, he's going to preserve his word. And so we can see that. So quotations from the early church fathers from the second to the fourth century. If you just took the quotations of their writings, you could reconstruct the entire New Testament minus about 11 verses without even going to any of these other ones. And so these copies really provide us for a means to verify the accuracy of our translations. And of course, the Dead Sea Scroll confirmed the astonishing reliability of some of the copies of the Old Testament that were made over the years by the Mazarites. And so we're very, very confident that what we have is a very good and accurate translation of the original documents. And so just real quickly, remember this is kind of where they get the original documents for the Old Testament. It's the old copies of the Septuagint, the Masoretic texts that were from 500 to 1000 AD, and then compare them to the Dead Sea Scrolls that were picked up in the 1940s by herdsmen. And a very, very fascinating discovery they had there. So that's the Old Testament. And then you go to the New Testament. There's two new, the newer-ish, this is late 1800s, These two, these two Bibles were found. And so you had this one, the Vaticanus, which was interesting was the Catholic Church had it for years and only released it in the late 1800s for people to look at. And so this is what drove the revisions to the King James Bible. This was another one that was found, this copy was found down in here. This was St. Catherine's Monastery at Mount Sinai, or where they think Mount Sinai was. And they discovered one that goes back all the way, almost 350 years. Now remember, what's interesting to look at, you look at that and say, is that printed? Nope, those are handwritten. Pretty fascinating, it took years to copy a Bible. And so very, very interesting. So we can go all the way back to 300 AD with full Bibles. And a lot of the books that we have, a lot of our translations use these two, what they call codexes, which were their original or early Bibles. All right, so that's it. So next week, we're gonna look at. You know, we've looked at accuracy, now we want to look at reliability. How reliable in the New Testament? What is it that makes them reliable? We're going to dive into that next week as we march forward with our kind of evidential view of the Bible to get to that conclusion of the Bible is the Word of God, and it's only the Bible is the Word of God. Any thoughts, questions? Sorry it's so hot in here, or maybe it's just me. This corner is like four million degrees. Thank you. I have a letter written in 1914 from my great grandfather to my grandfather and reply to his request to marry my grandkids. My mother had that she had it framed she had it in her entry hall. I know from her that it is the original handwriting of my great-grandfather, and I still have it. It's over 100 years old. So I made a transcription of it and gave it to the grandkids and said, this is from one of your ancestors over 100 years ago. Imagine how much more treasure that they had of the early letters and how much care they would have taken to pass that on. No, we don't have the original of those, but I guarantee you they're accurate. Can you imagine Timothy's mother having a copy of Paul's letter to her son? Right, right, exactly. That's a good point. There's a lot of people running around saying that Yeah, it's anoxic stuff. Yeah, but as Christians, we're going to probably face it. Have y'all had dealings like that? Well, if you look at the historically how we came up to it, you go back to 300 AD, they threw them all out. They said these are not, these are not them. But people are trying to say that we're Christians today or hide it. Well, of course they are. It's all conspiracy theory junk, so. All right, so a good book that I use all the time, and I used this when I was teaching James about the Bible, my son. If you don't have one of these, I highly recommend it. It's Roe's book of Bible charts, maps, and timelines. For an engineer, this is like gold, because it's all in little graphs and things. I'm like, this is great. And it's a simple book that your kids can read. And look at, you know, once they start reading, they can look at these things. There's great timelines. There's a whole genealogy of Jesus all written out. These books are gold. Really, really good. I recommend them highly to you. Rose Book of Bible Charts. A lot of the stuff that I picked up. It's a good summary book. All right, let me wrap this up in prayer. Father God, thank you again for your word. Thank you that you are not only the great Creator God, but you have communicated with us your creatures. And Father, we ask that we would continue to recognize and understand the authority and the precepts you've given us in your word, and that, Father, we would go forth and be like Christ in all that we do. And we now ask that you would prepare our hearts as we go into our worship, and have those hearts understand what a worthy God you are of our worship. And we pray this in Jesus' name, amen.