History of the Bible<\/b><\/p>\n
If someone asked you where to find the Bible verse that begins, \u201cFor God so loved the world\u2026you\u2019d probably know he was asking about John 3:16. If you had a Bible, you could find it for him in no time. But there was a time when no one could find a single verse in the whole Bible. There was no John 3:16, Genesis 1:1 or any other verse because the Bible wasn\u2019t divided into verses or even chapters. Worse yet, there were hundreds of years when there weren\u2019t even any word divisions. Punctuation marks, capital letters and even vowels were omitted. In those days, if Genesis had been written in English, it would have started: NTHBGNNNGGDCRTDTHHVNSNDTHRTH.\u201d You would have had to spend hours or days just to find your favorite verse.<\/p>\n
Words were divided by Jesus\u2019 time, but vowels weren\u2019t used in Hebrew Old Testaments until the sixth century A. D. Gradually, capitalizations, punctuation and paragraphing worked their way into the Old and New Testaments. But Bible chapters such as we have today didn\u2019t come into being until the 13th century. They were the work of Stephen Langton, the Archbishop of Canterbury.<\/p>\n
For the next 200 years, the Bible, now divided into chapters, continued to be copied by hand. Then in 1448, Rabbi Nathan startled the world by breaking the Old Testament into verses. The New Testament wasn\u2019t divided into numbered verses until 1551 when a French printer, Robert Estienne did the job. He was planning a study Bible that would have side-by-side columns in three translations when he got the idea. He was so rushed for time he decided to do the dividing on a trip from Paris to Lyons. Some people have suggested he did the work on horseback and his sometimes awkward divisions resulted when his \u201cjogging horse bumped his pen in the wrong places.\u201d Yet, with a few exceptions, Estienne\u2019s divisions provide us with the verses we have today.<\/p>\n
So just as number of people were used in writing of the Bible over a period of centuries, it was the contribution of countless scribes, hundreds of years, and three men in particular\u2014a Catholic archbishop, a Jewish rabbi and a Protestant printer\u2014who turned \u201cNTHBGNNNGGDCRTDTHHVNSNDTHRTH\u201d into Genesis 1:1.<\/p>\n
Campus Life, March, 1981, p. 40, Miller Clarke<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
History of the Bible If someone asked you where to find the Bible verse that begins, \u201cFor God so loved the world\u2026you\u2019d probably know he was asking about John 3:16. If you had a Bible, you could find it for him in no time. But there was a time when no one could find a … Continue reading “Bible (history of)”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sermons"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=370"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}