Did You Know?
The word Bible simply means ‘book’ in Latin and Greek. This word can be traced to the ancient Phoenician port city of Byblos, located 20 miles north of Beirut in modern day Lebanon. Byblos is one of the earliest inhabited cities in the world.This area exported papyrus throughout the then-known world, the material being used for making scrolls. The Bible came to be known by the name of the city exporting the raw material out of which “the Book” was made.
The Bible is a collection of 66 books recorded over a period of about 1500 years, by approximately 40 writers but with only one Author, God. This is what makes the Bible special. It claims divine authorship. In doing so, it claims absolute moral authority.
Scripture tells us in 2 Timothy 3:16 (NIV)
16All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness,
Sometimes this verse is rendered this way:
2 Timothy 3:16 (NASB)
All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness;
2 Timothy 3:16 (NLT) renders the text this way:
16 All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful to teach us what is true and to make us realize what is wrong in our lives. It corrects us when we are wrong and teaches us to do what is right.
However, theopneustos, the Greek word used here, means more than merely inspired. Man is inspired when he has a “light-bulb” moment, a new thought, a brainstorm. We claim inspiration when we surpass the usual limitations of our ability in writing a poem or a song, or paint a painting. Inspiration can have many sources: a person, a work of art, a beautiful day, even God.
The English dictionary definition of inspired is: outstanding or brilliant in a way suggestive of divine inspiration.
The French word inspiré sounds the same, but has slightly different connotations. It can indicate an excellent work of art, a wise choice, guessing correctly, or doing the right thing. It can even mean a visionary, a mystic, or in the pejorative sense, an eccentric person!
The word “inspired” is overused today, sometimes merely as a compliment indicating a better-than-usual performance or result. God does not get “inspired.” Neither is the Bible a result of 40 writers doing a better-than-usual job of expressing their gift.
This Greek word theopneustos used in 2 Tim 3:16 indicates the word of God was literally God [theo] breathed [pneustos]. In other words, God created His word in the same way He created the universe: He literally breathed it into existence.
Inspiration is a word more appropriately applied to man than to God.
If Scripture were merely the result of flashes of creativity, it would be no different from any other book, poem or song. What puts Scripture in a unique category is that it is theopneustos.
God cannot receive inspiration, because He already is All-Knowing. God never gets a new idea, or He would have limited knowledge, and by definition not be God.
Inspiration means to breathe in. Man is inspired. He receives inspiration. He breathes to survive. God breathes out. He does not breathe to survive, because He always was and always will be. He is complete in Himself, having no needs whatsoever. He breathes to create life!
Scripture tells us the writers who recorded the text were ”carried along” as God breathed His word into them. The language of the text implies they were borne by the Holy Spirit as a ship is carried along by the wind.
2 Peter 1:21 (NIV)
21For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.
Notice that this passage does not say the Bible writers were inspired. It says they were divinely enabled to deliver a message from God as they were carried along by the Spirit. There is a big difference.
Don’t let the word prophecy scare you. Rev 19:11 tells us that the testimony of Jesus is Spirit or essence of prophecy. The entire Bible can be seen as the testimony of Jesus Christ, God’s sinless Son. His heart beats on every page of this God-breathed book!
The Old Testament
A number of skeptics, and even some scholars, have suggested, without proof, that the Hebrew scriptures may have corrupted or embellished over the years. These hesitations are driven in part by the fact that until recently, the oldest copies of Old Testament (Hebrew) manuscripts dated from the 10th century AD, and the Greek translation of the Old Testament dating from several hundred years, BC. This was the version that was used in Jesus’ day.
Any doubts about the accuracy of the Hebrew texts evaporated with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1940s. These texts prove the Hebrew Masoretic texts have been preserved accurately.
To preserve their content for posterity, the Hebrew scribes copied aging texts by hand in rooms set aside for that purpose called Scriptoriums. They would count the number of letters in each line vertically and horizontally, to assure they had copied the texts accurately. Texts found to be inaccurately copied were burned to preserve accuracy.
Since these scrolls found in the 1940s predate the birth of Christ by one hundred to two hundred years, we also have the assurance the numerous passages foretelling the birth of Christ could not have been added after the fact, to embellish the text.
The New Testament
The New Testament was not originally created in one volume, but are rather a number of separate books, 50% of which were written by the Apostle Paul as letters to churches and leaders. These 27 books were only later assembled into the New Testament.
Of the 5500+ surviving manuscript copies of the New Testament, there are only 40 of the 20,000 lines of text showing any deviation from one another. Since these manuscripts were created nearly 1500 years before the printing press, they were necessarily copied by hand, and as such, are subject to some human error. However, the above statistic shows New Testament Scripture is 99.8% pure and accurate.
This compares well with the epic poem The Illiad, traditionally attributed to the ancient Greek poet Homer, although no biographical information about him exists. Some experts conjecture the author’s name may be an invention, and these verses simply be a distillation of centuries of Greek oral tradition. One of the oldest works of Western literature, it was probably written in the 8th century BC.
The existing copies of The Illiad have been found to contain 5% discrepancy in the text, or 25 times the errors discovered in the New Testament, a fact that does not hinder their acceptance and legitimacy in scholarly circles, in spite of the fact we do not even know for sure if Homer, the alleged author actually existed!
Contemporary archeological digs in the Holy Land continue uncovering more and more evidence to support the Bible’s numerous references to specific people, specified rulers, with their numerous and varied titles, geographical landmarks, population centers and the events that occurred there. The New Testament is by far the most accurately preserved, well documented verifiably accurate text of the ancient world.
“Behold the works of our philosophers; with all their pompous diction, how mean and contemptible they are by comparison with the Scriptures! Is it possible that a book at once so simple and sublime should be merely the work of man?”
– Jean Jaques Rousseau, French philosopher
“The Bible is no mere book, but a Living Creature, with a power that conquers all that oppose it.”
– Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821), Emperor of France
