How Did We Get the Bible? ***Theology from a Golf Cart***

I'm Keith Foskey, and this is Theology from a Golf Cart. Why am I doing Theology from a Golf Cart? Well, when I was a kid, any time my dad wanted to talk to me about something serious, he would take me on a ride in his truck.

I loved those rides, and I enjoyed those conversations, and so I'm doing this sort of in reminiscence of that, and I'm bringing you guys along for the ride. Today we're talking about the subject of how we got the Bible.

On my last episode of Theology from a Golf Cart, I referenced the importance of scripture, and I asked the question, if anyone would like to hear me talk about how we got the Bible, and several of you left comments saying you wanted me to talk about it, so that's why we're doing this today.

This may end up turning into a multi-part series. I'm actually considering doing an entire podcast on the subject of the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, which is a very important historical document on what we mean by the inerrancy of scripture, and so if you're interested in that, please put that in the comments as.

Well.

I've been thinking about it, talking about it for a while. I've got the Chicago Statement actually sitting on my desktop. I've been reading through it, thinking about it, and I'm seriously considering doing that podcast, so if that's something you're interested in me talking about, please let me know in the comments.

Inspiration: God-Breathed Scripture

But today we're going to talk about the four-step process of how we got the Bible. Now each of these four steps could end up being its own golf cart ride, so today we're just going to talk about the four steps overall, and then later we might come back and talk about each one of these a little bit more specifically on a golf cart ride, especially again if there's interest.

The four-step process to how we got the Bible is these four things, inspiration, canonization, transmission, and translation. So if someone were to say, okay, how did we get the Bible? It's simple enough to simply say, well, the Bible is God's word.

God gave it to us. But the question is how? What is the method that God used? And so when we ask that question, we answer it by saying, okay, there was essentially a four-step process, and I'm going to break down what those four steps are.

The first step is called inspiration. Inspiration comes from the second letter of Timothy, where it says that all scripture is given by inspiration of God, or in the more modern translation it says all scripture is God-breathed.

And it comes from the word theopneustos, theos which means God and neustos which means breath. And so the idea is theopneustos, it's God-breathed. That is how we believe scripture came from God to the writers.

This is where we get the doctrine of inspiration. We say the writings themselves come from the breath of God. They were inspired by God. Actually, the idea is God breathed them out. And so he did that through the medium of the individual biblical writers.

And so when we consider what inspiration is, it's God giving us his word through the medium of a writer. And each one of those writers was not simply a dictation machine, but rather was used by God with his own personal vocabulary, his own personal style, his own personal way of.

Writing.

God used that to bring us the scriptures. And so we talk about Moses as writing the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. I believe Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible. And so we say Moses was given that by God, and those writings are inspired by God.

That is inspiration. And the original writings, what Moses originally wrote, we say those documents are inspired. And because they're inspired, they have two qualities, and again I could do another video on this, but the two qualities that we assign to them are the qualities of inerrancy, meaning we believe they do not err, and infallibility, meaning we believe they cannot err.

That's the distinction between inerrancy and infallibility. And so we talk about the scripture is inerrant and infallible. And again, the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy helps flesh out what we mean when we say that, and how do we understand inerrancy and infallibility.

So that's number one. We talk about the scriptures as inspired. That's how they came from God to the original writer. Now the next step in the process is what we call canonization. Now canonization is the act of the people of God recognizing what God has inspired.

Canonization and the Recognition of the Canon

So a canon is, as many of you know, a canon is a measuring rod or a standard. And so there are certain books that God inspired, and God didn't inspire all other books. And so the canon is in existence as soon as the books are written, because God knows what he inspired and what he didn't.

The canon exists as soon as it's inspired, but it's not immediately recognized. And so I taught a class on how we got the Bible, and I talked about the fact that there are different stages of recognition, particularly with the New Testament canon.

We could talk about the fact that the canon is in place as soon as it's written, and that is the ontological canon. It is canon by virtue of the fact that God inspired it. But then we have the functional canon.

In the first few hundred years of the church, the church is functioning, and not every church and every place had every book in the New Testament. And some recognized some books that other churches didn't recognize, and there was debate and conversation within the church about which books were inspired by God.

And again, the church wasn't determining that, but it was discovering that. And that was the role of the church in that. And by the way, I didn't make this up. This comes from Michael Kruger, who wrote tremendous works on the canon, and he talks about this threefold usage of the term canon.

He says there's the ontological canon, which is the canon as it is, as God wrote it. It came into existence as soon as it was written. And then there's the functional canon, as the church is recognizing these books.

And then, of course, there is the final canon, which he refers to as the exclusive canon. That means it's these books as exclusive to all other books. And this is where we end up with the New Testament canon.

And so that's canonization. The church, the people of God, recognizing the books that God himself has given to us. So we have inspiration, canonization, and then the next step is transmission. Transmission is those original autographs, the original writings, being copied and passed down through the ages.

Transmission of the Text and Textual Variants

And we call that transmission. This is where there is the introduction of variation, and this is where we get things called textual variance. Because in these handwritten copies, because, again, there was no printable, movable type for hundreds of years.

So when these things are written, they're being copied by hand, and they're being transmitted by hand. And there was a process for the scribes of the Old Testament. They had a process that was painstaking, and it was a very meticulous way of trying to ensure that no errors made their way into the text.

Even to the point that I've read that they had a way of measuring what letter was supposed to be in the center of the page, and as they were writing, they would measure it out, make sure that was the letter at the center of the page, and if it wasn't, it was an indication that there was an error that had made its way into the text, and that text would be discarded.

So those were some of the methods of meticulous copying that were used in the Old Testament. Now the New Testament, because the church had a different way of allowing the manuscripts to go out freely, be copied freely, there's many more New Testament manuscripts than there are Old Testament manuscripts.

But because there are more manuscripts, and many of the early ones were not copied with such a meticulous attention to detail as was happening in scriptoriums, many of them were not copied in scriptoriums, so there are variations in those manuscripts.

Now quickly, in church history, scriptoriums did begin to develop, and we see the beginning of more meticulous and more specific manuscripts coming, and again, we could do an entire show on this if you guys are interested on the transmission history of the manuscripts.

I know that's a huge conversation people are talking about right now because of guys like Wesley Hough, who are reminding everybody of the importance of understanding the history of the transmission of the text, and by the way, I'm so thankful for Wesley Hough and what he's doing.

My son has just absolutely become very enamored with Wesley Hough. He's watching his videos. He came to me this morning and said, Dad, I want to learn to read Greek so I can look at old manuscripts, so I began to teach him the Greek alphabet.

It's really cool, so I'm thankful for guys like Wesley Hough because he's generating interest in things that are important. So that's the transmission of the text. Finally, we have what's called translation.

Translation and the Septuagint

Translation is when you take a text that began in one language and put it in another language, and this is an important part because many of us have heard the phrase lost in translation,.

Right?

There are things that sometimes seem to change or get lost when translations happen. The question comes, how should works be translated? Should they be translated literally? Should they be translated thought for thought or what's called dynamic equivalence, things like that, and that's how you end up with translations that vary so much, especially in English as you have word for word translations, thought for thought translations, and then you have what are called paraphrases, and so all of these things are just different ways that the Bible can be translated.

That brings us to how the Bible goes, and this is when I was in my class, I talked about this, how the Bible goes from Moses to me. The Bible goes from Moses to me, or you could say from the Holy Spirit of God to me, is Moses writes, the people of God recognize what has been written, it is then transmitted down through the ages, and then it is translated into a language that I understand.

Because I don't read and write fluently the original languages, I don't have an ability to go and say, okay, I can read directly from the original language and know what was said, but I can read a translation and get an understanding of the Bible, and this is something that we see in the New Testament.

The New Testament writers, many of them are making use of a Greek translation of the Old Testament called the Septuagint, so there's nothing wrong with using a translation. A translation can bring us the Word of God just as clearly and just as faithfully as the original, and so that's the process, four-step process for how we get the Bible.

Inspiration, canonization, transmission, and translation. Now, there's more that I could say about all of these, and again, if you're interested, I would be glad to do more videos on this. Just ask your questions, and I'll come hop on the golf cart.

Last thing, the next couple of days are going to be super cold, so I'm recording this probably a few days before it goes out, so that's just something that's on my mind right now. If I may go out and do a golf cart video in the freezing weather just to have fun, but ultimately this is probably going to be the last one for this week because it's supposed to be super, super, duper cold, and in Florida, remember, 50 degrees is cold for us, but we're supposed to have ice and snow and everything else, but again, I want to thank you guys for watching today.

Hopefully you enjoyed this video. If you're continuing to enjoy the golf cart videos, please hit the thumbs up button. If you didn't like this episode, hit the thumbs down button twice, as always. If you have not hit the subscribe button, please do that, and join us next time on Theology.

From a Golf Cart.

See you on the next ride.

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