Lesson 5: One Bible, Two Covenants

Kootenai Church

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All right, let's pray together before we begin.

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Father, we desire that our time here this morning would be spent in your honor and in your glory.

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We're grateful for your word, and we pray that you would give to us an understanding and a knowledge now of how we got it, how we have come to have your revelation in our hands, in our own language.

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And as we begin to study this in the weeks ahead, we just pray that your blessing may continue to reside upon this body, and that you would help us to think clearly, to think accurately regarding your word, and we pray that this time may be spent here in a way that is edifying and equipping for us and honoring and glorifying to you.

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Watch over us, we pray, today through this time study as well as the worship service that is to follow for your glory and for your sake, we ask it in Christ's name, amen.

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All right, so if you're in your lesson book, we are on page 15 in lesson five, titled

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One Bible, Two Covenants. And last time we did this was back in February and to early

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March when we were talking about some of these subjects, and we're looking in a series of how we got our

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Bible, a series of lessons on how we got our Bible, and some of the issues that surround textual transmission and textual variance and various language issues with our

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Bible. We started off with studying the doctrine of inspiration. I'm just gonna quickly give you a brief overview.

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The study of inspiration, verbal and plenary, verbal meaning the words themselves were inspired, given by God, plenary meaning all parts of Scripture were inspired by God.

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Then we looked at what the Bible claims of itself regarding its own inspiration. And then we looked at the doctrine of inerrancy and infallibility and how those are related.

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And then we talked about how God has promised to preserve His word, the doctrine of preservation. And so then we took a break and that was back in March and now we're resuming that again, feels like it's been forever.

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And I hope that that brief recap is sufficient to kind of remind you of what we talked about. We wanted to lay the foundation of what

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God has promised and said concerning His word. Because if we understand that He has promised to give us

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His word, He's given us a revelation of Himself, He has inspired it. And so that which God has spoken is inspired and everything that God has spoken is inspired.

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Everything that God speaks is infallible and everything that God speaks is inerrant. And we talked about how all of those doctrines are related to each other.

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And then we briefly described what the doctrine of preservation is. If God has spoken and He has inspired something that is infallible and inerrant, then

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He has also promised to preserve that for us. So what we're looking at in the weeks ahead is how it is that God has preserved that for us.

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So let's begin with a question. Actually a couple of questions. How many of you, anybody know off the top of your head how many books there are in your

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Old Testament? 33? Wasn't it,

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Clark? 39 books of the Old Testament, yeah. 39 books in the Old Testament. Does anybody know how many books are in the

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Jewish Hebrew Old Testament? I'm gonna tell you something that's gonna shock you.

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They only have 24 books in their Old Testament. And we have 39. And I'm gonna explain why that is here in just a minute.

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Because you might be wondering where did we get our extra 15 books and why did we put 15 books in there? Hold that, keep that in the back of your mind.

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Let's talk for a moment about the arrangement of our Bible. Now some of this I know is going to be a bit pedantic for you, kind of basic, fundamental, foundational.

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You're gonna know a lot of this stuff already if you've been in Christian circles and in churches for a while. Some of this

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I'm gonna tell you right up front is not going to be new. There might be a few people for whom some of this is new information. And we're starting off with some foundational stuff so that we can kind of go over this, make sure that we all understand this.

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I'm not gonna assume that everybody here knows everything that I'm about to cover. I think you'll learn some new things today. But some of this is just gonna be review of stuff that you probably learned in Sunday school when you were eight or nine or 10 or 12 years old.

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So know that going in. So at the end of today you're not like, man, I didn't learn anything. I hope next week is better.

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It will be. But we're just gonna cover some basic foundational stuff today. So let's talk about the arrangement of our

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Bible. Our Bible contains two Testaments. You notice that? The Old Testament and the New Testament. You know what the word Testament comes from?

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Testimony, yeah. And it comes from the Greek word diatheke, which is the word we use for covenant. So our Bible actually has two covenants, an old covenant and a new covenant.

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So the writings of the Old Testament are the writings of the old covenant. They are the writings that tell us how those old covenants were made.

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Now, it's not that the Old Testament only reveals one covenant. You remember the Old Testament talks about different covenants.

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It talks about the Noahic covenant, the Abrahamic covenant, the Davidic covenant, the priestly covenant, as well as the old covenant, the

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Mosaic covenant given to Moses. But those Old Testament books, Genesis through Malachi, are predominantly the books that were written under the administration of the old covenant.

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So those are the books that describe the old covenant. Now, in the New Testament, we have the new covenant, which is a series of books written that surround the giving of the new covenant.

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And we've talked in the book of Hebrews about the relationship between the old covenant and the new covenant. So the old covenant in your

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English Bible has 39 books. And if that's too far away for you, if you can't read that, you should move up closer or you can just turn over a page in your notebook because the same thing is there.

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So this is how our English Bible structures the books of the Old Testament. You'll notice that there are the books of the old covenant.

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You'll notice that there are basically four divisions. We have the law, we have history, we have poetry, and we have prophets.

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Under prophets, we have major prophets and minor prophets. Now, I happen to like this structure of Old Testament books. It's very easy to memorize.

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Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy are the books of the law written by Moses. Then you have the history books, which basically begin with Joshua and go through Esther that tell the story of the nation of Israel from the time that it came out of or was about to go into the land of promise.

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That's the beginning of Joshua. And of course, Exodus is a historical book, but we don't think of Exodus as being a historical book.

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We consider it as part of the law. We group that together with the law. All right, so then we have our history books there, and some of those history books are a little bit overlapping.

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For instance, 1 Samuel and 1 Chronicles both talk about the reign of David and Solomon, so some of them, some overlap there.

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And then we have poetry books, which is Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon. And then at the end of our

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Old Testament canon, we have prophetic books, 17 of them. Major prophets, there are five of them there, and then minor prophets, and there are 12 of them there.

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And that's how we have structured our Old Testament. Now, the Jews have structured it a little bit differently.

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I'm gonna read to you Luke 24, 14. Here is the structure of the Old Testament in a

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Hebrew Bible. Now, listen to what Jesus said, or what Luke writes in Luke 24, 44.

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Now, he said to them, these are my words which I spoke to you while I was with you, that all things which are written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the

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Psalms must be fulfilled. The law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms.

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The Hebrews had a threefold way of viewing their Old Testament canon. They would divide it up into the law, the prophets, and the writings, sometimes called the

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Psalms, because the book of Psalms stood at the top, the head. It was the first book of that third division.

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So the Torah, the Nebuchadnezzar, and the Catholic, you have to say that if you're doing Hebrew, you have to get that.

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Sound like you smoke two packs a day, or that you're trying to expel something. That's how Hebrew is pronounced. Okay, so the law, the prophets, and the writings, and the writings, the first book of that was the

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Psalms. So when Jesus said to the disciples on the road to Emmaus in Luke 24, these are my words which

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I spoke to you while I was with you, that all things which are written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the writings, or the

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Psalms, this must be fulfilled. What he was doing was he was basically giving all three divisions of the Old Testament of the

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Hebrew Bible. Now, there's a little bit of a different structure, you'll notice, between what we have in English, we have a threefold division, the law, the history, the poetry, and the prophets, and the

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Jews have a threefold division. They have the law, the five books, those are the same, but then they put the prophets next, and you'll notice that there are four prophets,

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Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings. Then they have what they call the former prophets, and then they have the latter prophets,

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Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the 12. Then they have the writings, which include some prophecy books, and then they have what is called the five roles,

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Song of Solomon, Ruth, Lamentations, Esther, Ecclesiastes, and the historical books, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Chronicles.

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Now, why do the Jews only have 24 books, and we have 39, can you tell why? We know more?

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No? Well, you'll notice that we count the former prophets, or sorry, we count the latter prophets, the 12, that refers to all the minor prophets,

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Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi, those are the minor prophets, we have 12 of them, they consider that one book.

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Also, we split up Samuel into 1 Samuel and 2 Samuel, they don't split that up like that, nor do they split up Kings or Chronicles in that way, like we do.

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So the bottom line is the Hebrew Old Testament and the English Old Testament have the exact same content and the exact same books, we just structure them differently.

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Now, personally, I prefer our way of structuring the books, maybe it's just because I'm used to that, but I don't know, five roles, what does that mean?

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Putting Ruth in the middle of that, I don't even know what that's about. So we have 39 books, they have 24, but it's the same books, it's just a little bit of a different structure.

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By the way, let me go back to the way we structure it so I can illustrate something here. You'll notice over here in the history section here that the history section ends with Nehemiah and Esther right before you get to Job and the poetry books.

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Your Old Testament chronology ends with Nehemiah and Ezra. Did you know that? You have a whole bunch of books after Nehemiah and Ezra, you have the prophets, the major prophets, the minor prophets, you have

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Psalms. But in terms of chronology, in terms of the history of the Old Testament, it ends at Ezra and Nehemiah, that's after the

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Babylonian captivity and the Jews come back to the land of Israel, then there's 400 years of silence. Ezra and Nehemiah end, their books chronicle the events that happened only 400 years before Christ came.

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And so when you get to the end of Ezra and Nehemiah and Esther and you're reading through the Bible in a year, by the time you get to that, you have already read about Isaiah and Jeremiah, Ezekiel fits into there,

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Daniel fits into there, Daniel preceded in his writings, Ezra and Nehemiah, the minor prophets all plug into First Chronicles, Second Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah, Malachi wrote during the time of Nehemiah, Haggai wrote during the time of Ezra.

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So you could take all of those minor prophets, the major prophets and the Psalms and push them all into that first column because all of those books were written before you get to the end of the book of Nehemiah.

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Yeah, Peter. Am I gonna, the question is, am

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I gonna cover whether Bibles laid out chronologically are worth reading or not reading? There are chronological

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Bibles where you will read through, well, I'm not sure exactly how they're laid out. I do something of a chronological

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Bible reading myself in the own way I structure my own reading through the Bible but there is benefit to a chronological, there's a benefit to the chronological

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Bible that are laid out, where the books are laid out chronologically and the benefit is this, is you're reading through the history section then you'll also read the chunks of Isaiah that were written during that period of time or Haggai that were written during that period of time.

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So it helps take the book of Haggai and put it sort of in a historical context so that you understand a little bit like that.

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So you might be reading through, let me see to give you an example of that. You might be reading through the book of Ezra and in the middle of that have chunks out of the book of Haggai in the middle of reading the book of Ezra.

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That can be helpful because we need to think of Haggai writing during the time of Ezra but the drawback of that is it breaks up Ezra's book.

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So the benefit is that it puts things in its historical place so that we're kind of understanding how everything falls together.

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The drawback of it is that you read part of Ezra and then you're in Haggai, you're a different author with a different emphasis and then you're back into Ezra and it kind of breaks it up.

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And for me, I like to read books that I'm covering, I'm seeing the author's development of what he's been saying from verse one all the way through to the end of the book.

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So I'm reading everything because that author is writing with that in mind and not necessarily what

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Haggai wrote. When Ezra wrote his book, he has a point in writing his book and he's unfolding something from the beginning to the end and he doesn't have in mind that okay,

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I've got to fit Ezra or Haggai in here somehow. That's not how he's writing. So that's the drawback of reading chronological

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Bibles. But that drawback can have its benefits. Though that process has drawbacks, it also has benefits.

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So keep that in mind. So there's pluses and minuses to it. So when I read through my

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Bible in a year, I usually read all of the books of Moses, Genesis through Deuteronomy. Then I jump into the New Testament, I read the book of Matthew.

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This is basically my pattern. Then I go back into the Old Testament and I'll say like the first 50 Psalms and then

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I'll do the Gospel of Mark. And then I come back in the Old Testament, I do Joshua, Judges, and Ruth because all of those are kind of historically in a very close period of time.

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And then I'll go read the Gospel of Luke. And then so I'm back and forth between Old Testament and New Testament. And then when I get into the

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Old Testament, I read 1 and 2 Samuel together, 1 and 2 Kings together, 1 and 2 Chronicles together. And usually when

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I'm done with that, I'll go grab one of the prophets that have been mentioned in one of those books. Normally Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Ezekiel.

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And I will, sorry, not Ezekiel, that would be post -exilic. Jeremiah or Isaiah, and I will read one of those prophets, usually somewhere in the midst of those books, historical books, the 1 and 2 books.

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Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles. So that's the pattern that I take, and it keeps it somewhat chronological, but also somewhat grouped by author and intention.

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All right, any questions about that? Okay, let's talk for a moment about the appearance of our

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Bible, the appearance of our Bible. You'll notice in your

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Bible, and I make reference to this, that we have chapter divisions and verse divisions that were not part of the original manuscripts. And it's important to keep that in mind, that the chapter divisions and verse divisions are artificial.

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Sometimes the way that we quote Scripture, right, we quote a verse, John 3, 16, we quote that verse as if it stands alone from its context.

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And sometimes the verse divisions can give us that impression that these verses are sort of standalone maxims.

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And really, the only book that has standalone maxims is the book of Proverbs. Everything else has a context. Everything else has a literary context, a historical context, it falls into something, and all of those things determine how it is that we understand

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Scripture. And so the verse divisions can be helpful in helping us to find passages of Scripture.

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I mean, imagine if I just said to you, on a Sunday morning, turn in the book of Hebrews to the part that talks about Melchizedek, where it says, where it says we have a high priest after the order of Melchizedek, turn to that.

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Now, if you didn't have chapter divisions and verse divisions in your Bible, how long would it take for us to find a Scripture reading on a

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Sunday morning doing that, right? You'd be thinking, okay, I remember last week it was on the left -hand side of the page, but I'm not sure exactly where it was at in all of this.

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It would be difficult to find things. So chapter divisions and verse divisions can be really helpful for quickly finding things and referencing things, and we know where things are at, we know what things say, we know that when we're talking about a passage, we're all talking about the same passage, that's helpful.

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But the drawback of chapter and verse divisions is it truncates these things in our minds so that it's all divided up.

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And we get to the end of a chapter of Scripture, and we think, okay, that's the end of the author's point or his thought or his idea there.

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It's not necessarily. Sometimes those ideas of the authors go through, so chapter divisions are not inspired, and we need to remember that when we're thinking about chapter divisions.

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Chapter divisions were added in 1227, 1227 by somebody named Stephan Langton.

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He was a professor at the University of Paris. He later became the Archbishop of Canterbury. And he divided it up, not because he was trying to alter

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Scripture in any way, but because he was trying to make citing and referencing portions of Scripture easier.

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So chapter divisions in 1227, and then verse divisions were added in 1551 and 1555, and I think that those refer to the

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Old Testament and the New Testament, 1551. To put that in historical perspective, our Bibles, or the

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Bible, Scripture, did not have verse divisions until after the Protestant Reformation. Sometimes we think of chapter and verse divisions as being there since the time of Jesus, right?

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That Jesus had chapter and verse divisions in the Old Testament. He didn't. And neither did the early

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Christians, and neither did the middle -aged or medieval Christians. Neither did

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Martin Luther. Chapter and verse divisions were not added until after the Protestant Reformation. Verse divisions were added by Robert Stephanus, who was a

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Paris printer, and then Jewish scholars later adopted the same chapter and verse divisions that we have for our

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Old and our New Testament. What's amazing about chapter and verse divisions is it took us 1 ,500 years to figure out that that was a good idea, right?

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And it is a good idea. What's amazing is it took that long to get chapter and verse divisions. All right, any questions before we move on to the next section?

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Yes? So, which is our...

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Yeah. And did they have to be in the 1550s?

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1550s, when verse divisions were added? Yeah. So, does it have to be?

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No, I'm not talking about when the Bible was printed in the mid -1500s. I'm talking about when somebody took the text and divided it up into chapters and verses, just in terms of having a schematic for reference.

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That's all I'm talking about. That I don't have to know.

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I'd have to look into that. That seems late to me, the Gutenberg Bible printing 1 ,500 or 1 ,400s.

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I'll have to... Oh, well then I'll take your word for it. No, I should.

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If you read it last night, I wasn't reading that last night, so. The question was, am

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I talking about the 1 ,500s? Am I talking about the printing of the Bible? I'm just talking about when verse divisions were added to Scripture, not in terms of when it was printed, but just as a term of reference.

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It could have been printed before that, and I know it was copied before that without any kind of verse divisions. Would have had chapter divisions, but not verse divisions, even on the printed work itself.

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Okay, let's talk about the language of the Bible for a moment. Oh, let me see, I forgot something here.

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No, that's the wrong direction. I'll figure this out before the weeks are up. All right, the books of the New Testament. We divide our

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New Testament up into history. We have four biographies of Jesus, and then of course the book of Acts is the history of the early church from 30

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AD to just roughly about 60 AD. The book of Acts ends with the apostle Paul in prison in Rome, which would have been about 60

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AD. So Paul would have been converted within three to five years after the resurrection of Jesus, and that's in Acts chapter nine.

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And then we have a doctrinal section, which are the letters written to churches and to individuals that compose what we call the epistles.

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You can think of it as history, epistles, and prophecy, and we have one book of prophecy at the very end. And I like that three -fold division, that's handy.

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You'll notice that even inside of the doctrine, you could divide that up into Paul's epistles, which is typically how it is arranged,

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Romans through Philemon. Some people regard Paul as the author of Hebrews, so there are early collections of books, and we'll get into this later, where Hebrews is included with Paul's epistles.

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I don't think Paul wrote Hebrews, that's a different subject, but anyway, you have Paul's epistles there, Romans through the book of Philemon, three pastoral epistles, 1

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Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus. You see how we kind of grouped these things together? Those epistles are not chronological, by the way, that's something to remember.

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Galatians is probably the first of those books written. Neither are the Gospels chronological.

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They're not written, those are not included in the order in which they were written. Mark was probably the first gospel written, then

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Matthew, I think, and then Luke, and then followed by John. So under Paul's epistles in the doctrinal section, there,

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Galatians was probably the first one written, and then you have 1 Thessalonians and 2 Thessalonians, and if memory serves, 1

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Corinthians is after that, and then either Romans and then 2 Corinthians.

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The prison epistles, which are written at the end of the book of Acts, would have been Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, that's it,

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Philemon, yeah, yep. And then after Paul's release from prison, some of those books were written after the events in the book of Acts are recorded.

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1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus were all written after the book of Acts ends, after Paul's release from that first imprisonment before he is imprisoned a second time.

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Yeah, Rick? Yeah, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus all fall after the book of Acts.

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Some have argued that the book of Hebrews probably was written after the events in the book of Acts.

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1 Peter, 2 Peter, 1 John, 2 John, 3 John, June, Revelation, I think were all written after the book of Acts.

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Some of those dates are a little unknown. Paul's epistles, you can fit, when we study through the book of Acts, I don't know if some of you who were here for the book of Acts might remember this, but when we spent three and a half years preaching through the book of Acts, when we would get to a point where I would say this book was written here,

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I'd say like between verse 17 and 18, right in Galatians, that's where this book was written, and between verse six and seven of this chapter, right in 1

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Thessalonians, we did that, and we plugged all of the books that we could into the timeline, the chronology of the book of Acts.

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So if you were here for that, you have in the margins of your Bible when the various books, epistles of the New Testament were written, but some of those we can't do that with because they were written after the book of Acts was completed.

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By the way, and this is on a separate note, I would make an argument that every New Testament book was finished before 70

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AD. That doesn't make me an amillennialist. Makes me somebody who dates the books of the New Testament early.

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There are schools of amillennialism and preterism that, those are eschatological views, that require that those books be written before 70

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AD. They might have been written before 70 AD. I think a good case could be made for all of those books being written before 70

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AD. Some people try and put the Gospel of John way back into 90 or 95 AD. I don't think that that's justified.

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I think that John also was written before 70 AD, but you don't have to, I've had people, I've had amillennialists ask me that.

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When do you think all the books of the New Testament were written? I think the case could be made that all 27 books were written before 70

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AD. Oh, so you must be an amillennialist. No, it doesn't. Just because they're written before 70 AD doesn't mean all those things have to be fulfilled by 70

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AD. All the prophecy. All right, so that's the

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New Testament. Now let's talk for a moment about the languages in which our Bible was written. There are three of them, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek.

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Hebrew comes from a language group called the Semitic languages. It's much like Aramaic, Syriac, or Arabic.

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Hebrews is written backwards. This is Hebrew script. It's written backwards from right to left, like that.

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I have no idea what that says. That could be a recipe for roasted lamb. I don't know. It could be a verse from Scripture.

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I don't know, but that's what Hebrew script looks like. Hebrew has no vowels in the

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Hebrew language. Yeah, right. Guarantee it ain't roasted pig, that's right.

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That's not a pork chop recipe. Or a bacon brine. Hebrew has no vowels in its alphabet.

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So a lot of the vowel sounds, you can't pronounce a word without a vowel sound, obviously. So how did the

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Hebrews have vowel sounds in their language? You see all these little marks, the dots?

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Those are called vowel points. So originally, when Moses wrote the 10 Commandments, there were no vowel points.

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It was just consonants. So the word that we have for God, Yahweh, is actually

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Y -H -W -H in Hebrew. We add the A and the E in the word Yahweh so that we can pronounce it.

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We don't know exactly what vowel sound that was when God originally said to Moses that that was his name.

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We don't know what that would have sounded like. But we say it Yahweh, we add the vowel pronunciations to it. What's interesting is that if you go to the

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Creation Museum in Kentucky, they have an animatronic

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Moses that is there. He's holding the 10 Commandments, and on the tablets of the 10 Commandments are the 10 Commandments written out, but they have the vowel points underneath of that.

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That was a very expensive mistake because those vowel points didn't exist when Moses got the 10 Commandments.

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There's a little oversight there by the design committee. That I don't know.

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I think it was much later. I don't know, that's a good question. When were they added?

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That was the question. I don't know that. I'm gonna say something off the top of my head.

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I think it was sometime between the time of David and the exile,

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I think, if memory serves. I'll try and get back to you on that, yes.

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All right, so most of our Old Testament is written in Aramaic. It's a cousin language or a sister language, if you will, to Hebrew.

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Aramaic would look just like this. You wouldn't be able to tell by looking at that whether that is Hebrew or Aramaic unless you were able to read

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Hebrew or Aramaic. Just as if you had no exposure to the English alphabet and I threw up a passage in French or in English, you wouldn't be able to tell if you couldn't read either.

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I'd never seen the English alphabet. You wouldn't be able to tell whether those words were French or English because we use the same alphabet and the cadence and the structure of the words looks the same.

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Same thing it is with Hebrew and Aramaic. Aramaic is a kindred language to Hebrew at the time of the exile, which was 500

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BC. It had become the common tongue of Palestine, the land of Israel. In fact, in Nehemiah 8 .8,

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after the exiles returned back to the land of Israel, Nehemiah 8 .8 says they read from the book, from the law of God, translating it to give the sense so that they understood the reading and that was probably because the generation that had grown up in the captivity of Babylon had not learned to read well the original

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Hebrew and so they would have spoken Aramaic. And so when Nehemiah read the law of God, he would have had to give the sense or to translate that into the language of the people, which would have been

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Aramaic. There are some sections of our Old Testament that are written in Aramaic. Genesis 31 .47

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has a place name that contains two words in Aramaic. Jeremiah 10 .11 is in Aramaic.

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Daniel 2 .4 through Daniel 7 .28 is written in Aramaic.

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So there are five chapters, almost six chapters of the book of Daniel that are written in Aramaic. And then Ezra 4 has some passages in Aramaic and Ezra 7 has some passages in Aramaic.

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The Aramaic would have been the language of the Babylonian captivity, that sister language to Hebrew, would have been sort of the language of the

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Babylonian captivity, which explains why much of Daniel's written in that language and it would explain why Ezra would have spoken that language and used

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Aramaic in his writings. Because Ezra had come out of the Babylonian captivity. Remember, Ezra went back to the land of Israel, leaving the

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Medo -Persian Empire to go back to Israel to rebuild the people, to shepherd the people. There, after Zerubbabel had rebuilt the wall, or sorry, the temple and Nehemiah rebuilt the wall.

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So the sections in Aramaic appear no different from Hebrew. They look the same to the eye and it continued,

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Aramaic continued to be the vernacular of the Hebrew people for centuries after that. There are

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New Testament expressions that preserve some Aramaic words. For instance,

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Mark 5 .41, talitha kumi, which translates to little girl, get up. Remember when Jesus raised the little girl from the dead?

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He spoke in Aramaic to her, that command, and the New Testament records the Aramaic phrase that Jesus would have used.

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You say, why would Jesus have used that phrase in Aramaic instead of Hebrew or Greek? Because the language of the first century

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Jews was Aramaic. That was the language that they spoke. And Hebrew would not have been something that they all would have been proficient in.

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Many of them were. Jesus probably spoke Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, three different languages.

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Mark 7 .34, fatha, which means be opened. Mark 15 .34,

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iloi iloi lama sabachthani. Remember what that translated means? My God, my

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God, why have you forsaken me? So actually, Jesus' statement on the cross was in Aramaic and not Hebrew or Greek.

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Romans 8 .15 and Galatians 6 .4 used the word abba for father. That's an

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Aramaic word. And 1 Corinthians 16 .22, the word maranatha, maranatha, is actually an

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Aramaic phrase. All right, any questions about Hebrew and Aramaic before we move on to Greek?

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Yeah, Bryce. Vowel points, wow,

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I was way off. I was a millennia off, okay. Seventh century after Christ. Vowel points added to the

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Hebrews, seventh century after Christ, according to Bryce. We'll just take your word for it, Bryce. Bryce said it, right?

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All right, let's talk for a moment about Greek. The New Testament was written in Greek with the occasional exceptions of those

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Aramaic phrases that I just mentioned. Greek was considered, and here's a picture of Greek script.

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Greek was considered, and I'm just showing you this. By the way, I'm not fluent in any way in either

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Greek or Hebrew. Can we get that off the table? I can read and pronounce all of this and I can tell you where that's from, but I can't translate

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Greek. I know just enough Greek to stumble my way through a number of study helps, and that's about it.

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But Hebrew, I couldn't pronounce a Hebrew word if it, to save my life, yeah. No, that's not a bacon recipe either, no.

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Greek, and I'm showing you the script just so you have an idea of what these looked like on the actual manuscripts, and you'll see some pictures of manuscripts a little bit later on.

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Greek was considered a universal language, much like English is today. I haven't traveled a lot overseas.

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I've been overseas to Vienna and to Israel, only two trips overseas, but when you went to Vienna or Israel, people would speak to you in, like in Israel, for instance, in Hebrew or Aramaic, or not

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Aramaic, Arabic, Arabic, yeah. Hebrew or Arabic, and if you didn't understand what they were saying, they would try

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English with you because almost everybody over there spoke English to some level of proficiency. Even our

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Arabic cab drivers and Uber drivers, well, not Uber, we didn't even have a cab, it was just cab. I don't know if they have

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Uber over there. They would pronounce it Uber if they did, but even our cab drivers, Arabic cab drivers and Jewish cab drivers spoke

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English fluently. So English is a universal tongue. We just happen to be, you happen to be blessed by learning the universal language and not learning another language than having to learn the

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English language. So people sometimes say it's very arrogant for Americans to think that they shouldn't need to learn any other language.

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Well, we don't need to learn any other language because we speak the universal language. In the first century, it was very much the same with what's called koine

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Greek or common Greek. It was the language of the day. It was the language of the realm. It was the language of commerce.

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If you went down into the marketplace and you didn't speak Aramaic and you didn't speak Hebrew and you didn't speak Syriac or Egyptian or Medo -Persian or whatever

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Persian language or any of those other languages, Sudanese, Greek. You could speak

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Greek and have commerce with almost anyone because it was the common language. And this, by the way, the fact that the

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New Testament was written in Greek allowed for the rapid copying and rapid distribution of New Testament documents, which is one of the ways, as you'll see in weeks to come, how

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God preserved the New Testament documents from corruption and error. Rapid and widespread copying and distribution of those documents.

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So koine Greek is what our New Testament is written in. It was called the common Greek. It was the language of the marketplace, the language of the people.

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It wasn't the same as classical Greek. So our New Testament, oh, by the way, does anybody know what verse this is before we get into that?

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It is John 1 .1. Who knew that? How did you know that? The Jehovah's Witnesses, yeah.

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No, that's all right. No, so you can, it is John 1 .1. In the beginning was the Word, and the

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Word was with God, and the Word was God. See, this is archaic. Here's the word for beginning, logos. In the beginning was the logos and chi.

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The logos was toward the God, theon, and theos was the

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Word. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was toward God, and God was the

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Word. We translate it the Word was with God because the preposition can be translated either way, but it actually means that the

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Word was facing or with God in a sense of being intimate, which John later describes in chapter one, verse 18, where he says that no man has seen

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God at any time, but the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, he has declared him. So John is there describing this intimate relationship between the

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Father and the Son. That's why he uses the term pros. It means face -to -face. The Son was face -to -face with God, and God was that Word.

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He was the Word, which was manifested to us. So that's John 1, 1 there. Yeah. No, these, the question is, are the little markings vowel points?

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They're not. These are, sometimes these things stand in for contractions.

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Sometimes they stand in for pronunciation. So like this one here, you'll notice how this one here is this way.

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That is an, that means an H sound. So they don't have an H there at the beginning of that. So that would be hoh logos.

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And this one here, you see, it's the exact same mark than this one, but it's the opposite direction. So this is a huh sound, and that means that that's not a huh sound.

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It's ein. There's no hh, ein at the beginning. I'm pronouncing it like it's Hebrew. There's no H at the beginning of that, so it's just ein.

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So the vowels are, that's a vowel. A is a vowel. This is a short A, RK. This is a long

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A. That N is a long A. So you have it at the beginning here, which is why I had ein. That's a long A sound, long

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A. So here's the exact same word with the same pronunciation of it up here. So at the beginning, you have to have a similar,

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Greek is a little similar to English in that at the beginning of a word, in a word that would, many words that would begin with a vowel would have to be known whether it was a huh, like a huh or an ah sound.

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And that little thing going one direction or the other would tell you whether you pronounce it with an ah sound at the beginning of it or not.

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So no, those are just an accent. Multiple words have accents, and they would accent different syllables of a word depending on how the word was structured and everything.

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I learned that at one time in Bible college, and it was tedious, and I hated it. But some of those are accent to tell you which syllable to put the accent on.

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And some of them are pronunciation marks, but not vowel points. The vowels are, Hebrew has vowels. They have a long

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O and a short O. There's two different vowels. Sorry, the Greek has vowels. The Greek has 22 letters in their alphabet.

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They have a long A and a short A that are both two different letters in their alphabet. So we just have one A that we pronounce either

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A or ah. They have the N, which is the long A, and the A, which is the short A. They do the same thing for the

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O sound. That O that you see there is ah, so it's logos. And then the long

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O sound is the omega, which is the last letter of their alphabet, and it looks like a W. Any other questions about that?

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Ask me, did she say? No? Okay. All right, we're almost done. So one last thing.

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The New Testament is a Greek text written by Jews. Our New Testament is a Greek text written by Jews, largely.

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There are books of your New Testament that are not written by Jews. Does anybody know what one of them is? I'll give you a hint.

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It's one of the Gospels. One of the Gospels was not written by a Jewish man. It was Luke. That's right,

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Luke was a Gentile, right? Paul picked Luke up in Acts chapter 16. Did Luke write another book?

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The book of Acts, right? Luke and Acts are a two -volume set. They go together.

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Where Luke leaves off at the end of the book of Luke, he picks up at the beginning of the book of Acts and continues the story.

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The Gospel of Luke, covering, other than the birth narrative at the beginning, basically three years, the book of Acts covering 30 years.

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And there is a reason why those books are divided, and we'll get into that probably in a future lesson.

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So Luke and Acts, and here's a little fun fact, Luke and Acts constitute 25 % of the text of your

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New Testament. 25 % of the text of your New Testament was written by a non -Jew, a

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Gentile named Luke. And here's another fun fact. It was written to somebody that we know nothing about other than his name,

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Theophilus. And in Luke, he's called Most Excellent Theophilus. A quarter of your

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New Testament was written to somebody that we know nothing about other than his name, and that he might have had some sort of a dignified position in the

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Roman government, because Luke calls him Most Excellent in the Gospel of Luke, but just refers to him as Theophilus in the book of Acts, suggesting that perhaps at some point, he went from being the most honorable one to my brother, that I just call him

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Theophilus now. Let's call him Most Excellent, because in the kingdom, we just do away with those titles and distinctions.

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So people have speculated that between Luke and Acts, Theophilus might have got saved, because of his evangelistic books.

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Luke and Acts are evangelistic books. So your New Testament has a lot of Semitic idioms and a lot of allusions, because the authors were familiar, obviously being

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Jews, who wrote most of the books of the New Testament, and most of the New Testament, they were familiar with Jewish concepts and very steeped in the

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Old Testament. So in our New Testament, we have a lot of references to Old Testament things. You've seen this in the book of Hebrews, obviously.

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The Old Testament is alluded to and quoted and referenced and implied all over the New Testament. Every page of your

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New Testament is steeped in Old Testament theology, expectation, prophecy, references, it's all over the place.

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The authors of the New Testament gave distinctively Christian meaning to some of the words that they used. So rather than coining new words, they actually coined new or unique meanings to many of the words that were common in the day, and I'll give you an example of them.

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Our New Testament took words that were already familiar in the first century amongst Greek speaking peoples of all religions and backgrounds.

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They took words and made distinctively Christian meanings for those words and used them inside the church. An example of that is the word church or ecclesia.

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They would speak of called out ones all the time, but in the New Testament, the idea of an ecclesia is uniquely a

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Christian idea or definition. So those definitions for some of those words were coined by our New Testament writers.

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They took words that everybody's familiar with, but used them in a distinctly Christian way. Words like love, grace, peace, faith, humility, life, gospel, fellowship, apostle, justification, church.

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Those are all words that had meanings in the first century, but they're distinctively Christian usages in the

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New Testament. The Christians of the first century took some of those words and we had a whole, we raised the meaning of that and the significance of those words to a whole other level, a whole other level.

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All right, any questions about any of that? All right, our time is over, so I'm gonna close this closing prayer.

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Father, we're very grateful for your blessings and your word and we're thankful for how it is structured and how you have preserved it for us, for all that it contains.

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Its depth is beyond our ability to comprehend and to appreciate even in our fallible and fallen states and we're just grateful that you give us your word and you have preserved it how you have.

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You are to be praised for this and honored and we pray that we would cherish your word for the glory of truth that it is, the wisdom it contains, and all the knowledge that it gives us.

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By knowing your word can be wiser than all of our enemies and all of our teachers. We can know all things that you have revealed to us in your word and we're grateful for that treasure of truth.