History of the Bible
“The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever” (Isa. 40:8). The Bible makes that claim for itself, and the history of the Bible is the long record of God keeping it. Mark Galli once observed that the Bible “is not only a history of divine action in the world, it is also a divine book with a history of its own, a sometimes violent and controversial history.”1
That history may be traced along a single chain. Norman Geisler and William Nix describe it as the chain of communication “from God to us,” and they number four links in it: inspiration, by which God gave His Word; canonization, by which His people recognized it; transmission, by which it was copied and preserved; and translation, by which it was carried into the tongues of the nations.2 Every Bible on a shelf today hangs on all four links. This page follows the chain from the prophets to the present. The story of the English Bible in particular is told on the History of the English Bible page and its companion pages, and the work of translation is considered on Translation of the Bible.
God Has Spoken
The history of the Bible begins where the Bible itself begins: with God speaking. “God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son” (Heb. 1:1–2). What He spoke He caused to be written. “All scripture is given by inspiration of God” (2 Tim. 3:16), literally breathed out by God, and “holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost” (2 Pet. 1:21). Geisler and Nix put the two texts together: “in biblical terminology, inspiration is the process by which Spirit-moved writers recorded God-breathed writings.”3
The result is a library of sixty-six books, “written over a period of some fifteen hundred years by nearly forty authors using several languages and containing hundreds of topics,” and yet possessing “an amazing unity of theme—Jesus Christ. One problem—sin—and one solution—the Savior—unify its pages from Genesis to Revelation.”4 The Old Testament was written in Hebrew, with portions of Ezra and Daniel in Aramaic; the New Testament was written in the common (koine) Greek of the first century. The writers used stone, papyrus, and parchment, and from about the second century A.D. the church embraced a new technology for its Scriptures: the codex, the bound book of leaves, from which every Bible since descends.5
None of the original manuscripts—the autographs—survives. That is not the embarrassment it may first appear. It is the setting for one of the most remarkable stories of preservation in the history of literature, and it is why the remaining links of the chain matter.
Which Books? The Canon
The word canon began as a reed or measuring rod and came to mean a rule or standard, and then the list of books that are the church’s rule of faith. The decisive point is who made the list. Geisler and Nix insist on the distinction between the determination of canonicity, which is the work of God, and the recognition of it, which is the work of His people: “a book is valuable because it is inspired, and not inspired because men found it to be valuable.”6 The Reformers said the same thing in their own way. For Calvin, as F. F. Bruce summarizes him, the authority of Scripture “rested not on any church decree but on the self-authenticating quality of what was written, attested in the receptive heart by the inward witness of the Holy Spirit.”7 The Westminster divines confessed that the authority of Scripture “dependeth not upon the testimony of any man or church, but wholly upon God, (who is truth itself,) the author thereof.”8
The Old Testament. The Old Testament canon was the Bible of the Lord Jesus. He spoke of “the law of Moses, and … the prophets, and … the psalms” (Luke 24:44), and He called the Scriptures the word of God that “cannot be broken” (John 10:35). Geisler and Nix judge that the Old Testament canon “was probably completed about 400 B.C.,” its books having been received, collected, and preserved by the people of God as they were written.9 The once-popular notion that a “Council of Jamnia” closed the Hebrew canon about A.D. 90 has not survived scrutiny: the gathering at Jamnia was a session of elders at a rabbinic academy, its discussion concerned only whether Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs were inspired, and its decision was not regarded as binding. As Roger Beckwith concludes, “any inference that the canon was decided by councils must be abandoned.”10
The New Testament. The apostolic writings were received as Scripture from the first. Peter already places Paul’s letters alongside “the other scriptures” (2 Pet. 3:16), and Paul quotes Luke’s Gospel together with Deuteronomy as “the scripture” (1 Tim. 5:18). The apostolic Fathers cite all the New Testament books within about a century of their writing, and “all but a very few books were generally recognized as canonical before the end of the second century.”11 Outside pressures sharpened the church’s recognition. About 140, the heretic Marcion issued a mutilated “New Testament” of his own; during the persecution of Diocletian (303–306) the authorities hunted down and burned Christian Scriptures. In 367 Athanasius of Alexandria, in his Festal Letter, listed the twenty-seven books of our New Testament, and the African councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) acknowledged the same list.12 The councils did not create the canon. They bore witness to what the churches had already received.
The Apocrypha. The Greek Old Testament used by many early Christians carried additional books, written mostly between the Testaments, which the Jews never received as Scripture. Jerome, the great translator of the Latin Bible, rejected them, and Augustine was “the single significant voice of antiquity” to receive them; for centuries they held an uncertain place. Then, in 1546, the Council of Trent pronounced them canonical. Protestants did not follow. The Westminster Confession declares that “the Books commonly called Apocrypha, not being of divine inspiration, are no part of the canon of the scripture,” to be used only “as other human writings.”13
Kept Pure in All Ages: Transmission
Between the autographs and the modern Bible stands the longest link in the chain: fifteen centuries of copying by hand. A simple outline, used in Trinity Bible Church’s teaching on the history of the Bible, divides the story into three stages: the autographs (c. 1500 B.C.–A.D. 100); the manuscripts (c. A.D. 100–1600); and, from about 1600 to the present, the printed critical texts and the translations made from them.14
The Old Testament text. Jewish scribes copied the Hebrew Scriptures with extraordinary reverence. From about A.D. 500 to 1100 the Masoretes, the custodians of the “tradition” (masorah), added vowel points and accents to the consonantal text and surrounded it with marginal notes designed to safeguard it from error. They hand-copied the Hebrew text for more than a thousand years before the printing press, “and yet it has remained extremely accurate.”15 Until 1947, however, the oldest complete Hebrew Old Testament available to scholars was the Leningrad Codex of A.D. 1008. Then came the discovery in the caves along the Dead Sea. Since 1947 some six to eight hundred manuscripts have been recovered there, dated between about 250 B.C. and A.D. 135; about a quarter of them are biblical, and Isaiah alone is represented by twenty-one copies.16 At a stroke the manuscript evidence for the Old Testament was carried back a thousand years, and the great Isaiah scroll from Qumran, though it differs from the medieval text at many points, confirms it remarkably: as Wegner notes, “the vast majority of changes are in orthography (i.e., how the words are spelled) and do not affect the meaning of the text.”17
The New Testament text. The New Testament is the best-attested book of the ancient world. Daniel Wallace counts more than 5,600 Greek manuscripts and some 20,000 handwritten copies in all, including the ancient versions.18 By comparison, Geisler and Nix note that Homer’s Iliad survives in 643 manuscripts, Caesar’s Gallic Wars in nine or ten good ones, and Tacitus in two.19 The oldest New Testament fragment, a scrap of papyrus bearing verses from John 18, is dated about 125.20 The Chester Beatty and Bodmer papyri preserve much of the New Testament from the late second and third centuries, and the great parchment codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus preserve nearly complete Bibles from the fourth century.21 The story of Sinaiticus has never lost its romance: Constantine Tischendorf first found leaves of it in 1844 in a basket of scraps at St. Catherine’s monastery on Mount Sinai, and in 1859, as he was about to leave empty-handed, the steward showed him a nearly complete copy of the Scriptures.22 Add to these the quotations of the early church Fathers, so numerous that, as J. Harold Greenlee wrote, “the New Testament could virtually be reconstructed from them without the use of New Testament Manuscripts.”23
The variants. Copyists made mistakes, and the manuscripts differ. Critics sometimes quote the number of variants—some 400,000—as if it settled the question. Wallace answers that the number is meaningless apart from the number of manuscripts, and he sorts the variants into four classes: spelling differences and nonsense errors; minor differences that do not affect translation; differences that affect the meaning but are not viable; and differences that are both meaningful and viable. “Less than 1 percent of all textual variants” are both meaningful and viable, that is, both affect the sense and have a real claim to be original.24 Geisler and Nix add that none of the significant variants affects “any basic doctrine of the Christian faith.”25 The abundance of copies is precisely what allows the original wording to be recovered. The Reformed churches confessed that the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures, “being immediately inspired by God, and by his singular care and providence kept pure in all ages, are therefore authentical.”26 The manuscripts are the record of that care.
Into Every Tongue: The Ancient Versions
The Bible was translated before it was finished. In the third century before Christ the Jews of Alexandria, who had largely forgotten their Hebrew, produced the Greek translation known as the Septuagint. Bruce Metzger calls it the first translation ever made of the Hebrew Scriptures, the medium through which Israel’s faith reached the wider world, and “the Bible of the early Christian church”: “when the Bible is quoted in the New Testament, it is almost always from the Septuagint version.”27 The translators of 1611 saw the hand of God in it: the Greek Old Testament “prepared the way for our Saviour among the Gentiles by written preaching, as Saint John Baptist did among the Jews by vocal.”28
As the gospel went out, the Scriptures followed it. The Syriac church had begun its Peshitta in the second century, and Tatian’s harmony of the Gospels, the Diatessaron, dates from before 170; Coptic, Gothic, Armenian, Ethiopic, and other versions followed, so that “the early existence of the Ethiopic, Coptic, Sahidic, Bohairic, Gothic, Arabic, and other versions provides ample evidence of the presence of the entire Bible during the second, third, and fourth centuries.”29 Yet Metzger’s honest judgment is that the church was slow: by A.D. 600 the Gospels had been rendered into only a handful of languages.30
In the West, Old Latin versions existed before 200, multiplying and diverging until, in 382 or 383, Pope Damasus commissioned Jerome to produce a reliable Latin text. Jerome’s version, later called the Vulgate, “reigned for nearly a thousand years before it was challenged in the sixteenth century.”31 It was meant to be the Bible in the common tongue; the word vulgate means “common.”
A Lamp Under a Bushel: The Middle Ages
What began as a Bible for the people became a Bible for the clergy. As Stephen Nichols explains, “as the centuries rolled on, … fewer and fewer people could read or speak Latin,” and this language barrier, “coupled with the sheer expense and difficulty of book production, resulted in the tragic fact that only a few people had access to God’s Word.”32 In the 1300s a Bible might cost a priest’s whole yearly income.33
There were lonely exceptions. Caedmon, the poet of Whitby who died about 680, turned portions of Scripture into Old English song; Bede translated the Gospel of John about 730; King Alfred is believed to have rendered the first fifty Psalms; and the Wessex Gospels, completed about 990, gave the four Gospels in Old English.34 In the thirteenth century Stephen Langton, a lecturer at Paris and later Archbishop of Canterbury, divided the Bible into the chapters still used today.35
But the drift of authority ran the other way. In 1229 the Council of Toulouse, aiming at the Albigenses, forbade the laity the Scriptures in the vernacular.36 When John Wycliffe and his followers gave England its first complete Bible, translated from the Latin between 1382 and 1395, the response was the heresy statute of 1401 and Archbishop Arundel’s Constitutions of Oxford, and in 1428 Wycliffe’s bones were dug up and burned. Fairness requires a qualification here. Christian History notes that the medieval church did not object to every translation, and that by the early 1500s there were Bibles in most European languages; what it opposed in Wycliffe and Tyndale was their “radical” theology.37 That is true as far as it goes. The “radical” theology was the gospel, and the Bible that the people could read was the very thing that would show it.
Back to the Fountains: Printing and the Reformation
Three developments, Nichols writes, “would forever change the story of the Bible in church history”: the printing press, the publication of the Greek New Testament, and the Reformation.38 The first great book from Gutenberg’s press at Mainz, about 1455–56, was a Latin Bible. When printing began, only thirty-three languages had any part of the Scriptures.39
In 1516 Erasmus published the New Testament in Greek, and the humanist cry ad fontes, “to the sources,” became a reforming cry. (In his haste Erasmus could find no Greek manuscript of the last six verses of Revelation, so he translated them back into Greek from the Latin; some printed Greek Testaments carried his reconstruction for centuries.)40 His preface longed that the farmer might “sing snatches of Scripture at his plough” and the weaver “hum phrases of Scripture to the tune of his shuttle.”41 See Greek New Testament.
Luther, hidden at the Wartburg, translated the New Testament into German in a matter of weeks; it appeared in September 1522, the whole Bible in 1534, and he went on revising it to the day of his death.42 In 1526 the first printed English New Testament, William Tyndale’s, came from the press at Worms, translated from the Greek; Tyndale had seen “how that it was impossible to establish the lay-people in any truth, except the scripture were plainly laid before their eyes in their mother tongue.”43 The English story that followed—Coverdale, Matthew, the Great Bible, Geneva, the Bishops’ Bible, and the King James Version—is told on the History of the English Bible page. Along the way the Bible acquired its modern shape: Robert Stephanus introduced verse numbers in his Greek New Testament of 1551 and in a Latin Bible of 1555, and the Geneva New Testament of 1557 brought them into English.44
The printed Greek text that grew from Erasmus through the editions of Stephanus and Beza came to be called the Textus Receptus, the “received text,” from the preface to the Elzevir edition of 1633; it was the basis of the King James New Testament.45 The Reformation’s conviction about all of this was settled and simple: because the original tongues “are not known to all the people of God, who have right unto and interest in the scriptures,” the Scriptures “are to be translated into the vulgar language of every nation unto which they come.”46
Discovery and Abundance: The Modern Era
Geisler and Nix divide the history of the New Testament text into four periods: reduplication (to about 325), standardization (about 325–1500), crystallization in the printed Received Text (about 1500–1648), and, since then, criticism and revision.47 The modern period brought the great discoveries: Sinaiticus, the papyri, the Dead Sea Scrolls. On that wider evidence the critical editions of the Hebrew and Greek texts were built, and from them came the Revised Version (1881–85), the American Standard Version (1901), and the many twentieth-century versions.48
It must be said plainly that the dispute between the Received Text and the critical text is not a dispute about the faith. Geisler and Nix conclude that there is “no substantial difference” between them: “their differences are mainly technical and methodological, not doctrinal, for the textual variants are doctrinally inconsequential.”49 The question of which text and which translation is taken up on Translation of the Bible.
Meanwhile, the work of translation has accelerated beyond anything the Reformers could have imagined. Metzger records that in the nineteenth century more than four hundred languages received some part of the Scriptures, and more than five hundred more in the first half of the twentieth; by the year 2000 the entire Bible was available in 371 languages and portions in 1,862 others.50 Nichols, writing more recently, counts Scripture in whole or in part in some 2,800 of the world’s roughly 6,900 languages, with work under way in some 1,500 more, and adds: “The church should not rest until God’s Word is available and proclaimed to all the nations.”51
A Brief Timeline
| c. 1500–400 B.C. | Old Testament written in Hebrew (and portions in Aramaic) |
| 3rd century B.C. | The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament, begun at Alexandria |
| c. A.D. 40–100 | New Testament written in Greek |
| c. 125 | Earliest surviving New Testament fragment (John 18) |
| c. 140 | Marcion’s truncated “canon” prompts the church’s response |
| before 170 | Tatian’s Diatessaron; Syriac and Old Latin versions follow |
| 303–306 | Diocletian orders Christian Scriptures seized and burned |
| 4th century | Codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus copied |
| 367 | Athanasius lists the twenty-seven books of the New Testament |
| 382–405 | Jerome’s Latin translation, later called the Vulgate |
| 393, 397 | Councils of Hippo and Carthage acknowledge the New Testament canon |
| c. 500–1100 | The Masoretes preserve and annotate the Hebrew text |
| c. 1227 | Stephen Langton’s chapter divisions |
| 1229 | Council of Toulouse forbids vernacular Scripture to the laity |
| 1382–1395 | The Wycliffe Bible, from the Latin |
| c. 1455–56 | Gutenberg prints the Latin Bible |
| 1516 | Erasmus’s Greek New Testament |
| 1522, 1534 | Luther’s German New Testament and Bible |
| 1526 | Tyndale’s English New Testament, from the Greek |
| 1546 | Council of Trent declares the Apocrypha canonical and the Vulgate authentic |
| 1551, 1555 | Stephanus’s verse divisions (Greek New Testament; Latin Bible) |
| 1560 | The Geneva Bible |
| 1611 | The King James Version |
| 1633 | The Elzevir Greek text named the Textus Receptus |
| 1844, 1859 | Tischendorf discovers Codex Sinaiticus |
| 1881–85 | The English Revised Version |
| 1947 | Discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls |
Compiled from the Trinity Bible Church “History of the Bible” teaching outline, Philip W. Comfort’s timeline in Christian History 43, Stephen Nichols’s “Milestones in the History of Bible Translation,” and Geisler and Nix. Dates for the ancient period are approximate.
A Note on Dates and Claims
The sources do not always agree, and the differences are worth knowing.
The “Council of Jamnia.” Popular timelines, including Comfort’s in Christian History, still speak of councils at Jamnia that gave “final affirmation” to the Old Testament canon. The scholarship summarized by Geisler and Nix shows that there was no council in that sense and that it settled nothing; the Old Testament canon was received long before.52
Manuscript counts. The number of Greek New Testament manuscripts rises as new ones are catalogued: Geisler and Nix gave 5,366 in 1986, Wegner “over 5,400” in 2006, and Wallace more than 5,600 in 2011.53 The figure depends on the date of the source, not on any disagreement about the evidence.
Councils and the canon. It is common to say that a council “established” the canon. It is more accurate to say that councils acknowledged what the churches had already received. The distinction is not pedantic; it is the difference between a Bible that rests on the authority of the church and a church that rests on the authority of the Bible.
Small errors in popular sources. Comfort’s timeline credits the Great Bible to John Rogers and dates Coverdale’s Bible to 1537; the Great Bible was Coverdale’s revision under Cromwell, and Coverdale’s Bible appeared in 1535.54 Likewise, the verse divisions are dated 1551 in some sources and 1555 in others; both are right, the first for the Greek New Testament and the second for the whole Latin Bible.
The Word of Our God Shall Stand
The history of the Bible is finally a history of Christ. The Scriptures were written to testify of Him (John 5:39); the risen Lord opened them on the Emmaus road and, “beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27). That is why the prophets wrote, why the church received their writings, why scribes copied them letter by letter through the long centuries, and why men like Tyndale died to put them into the mother tongue.
The chain has held. Kings and councils, fire and neglect, have all been tried against it, and still “the word of the Lord endureth for ever. And this is the word which by the gospel is preached unto you” (1 Pet. 1:25). The fitting response to so great a providence is not merely admiration but reading, obedience, and thanksgiving. Soli Deo gloria.
Bible History of the English Bible Next: Translation of the Bible
