Transmission……

The journey of the Bible from the 1st century to today

Transmission – what arrives should be as close as possible to what was sent...

Source Transmitter Receiver Sink

Noise

What sort of noise gets in the way of us receiving God’s Word as he intended?

Language and dialect

Culture

Politics

Incorrect theology

Desire to control what people hear or learn

Martin Luther (1483-1546)

Luther’s two reforming ideas…

Sola fide - The church had lost sight of the basic New Testament message that salvation is given by God as a gift, not earned as a reward

Sola scriptura – scripture alone is the foundation source of our faith, not bulls, edicts or church tradition and practice

Therefore….

The key to reform and renewal of the Church was to put the Bible in the hands of lay people, in their own language

But wait – there’s more: Celibate priesthood abolished

Katharina van Bora (Mrs Luther)

Worship services reformed

The power of a widely distributed printed Bible: the Reformation led directly to….

Work being viewed as a vocation – this idea simulated industrial and commercial activity and led to the rapid industrialisation of the western world

Intellectual liberation from the ancient world and the rise of scientific observation and experimentation – a technological revolution arising from a religious one

The emergence of the independent nation state, limitations to the powers of monarchs, and the start of the journey towards a universal adult franchise

…but the Reformation also led to The Thirty Years’ War

The most destructive conflict in European history until WW1

The English Civil War Puritan against Anglican, parliamentarian

against King’s man, roundheads against cavaliers

Puritan settlement of the New World as a refuge from persecution, and the eventual rise of the USA as a world power

But in England, Luther’s way was already paved….

John Wycliffe (c. 1325-1384) “the forerunner of the English reformation”

Wycliffe’s Bible was translated from the Vulgate, not the original languages

Jerome’s Latin Bible (the “Vulgate”)

By the late 4th C, Latin, not Greek, was the common language in the west, so the Vulgate was intended to be for the common person

This was around the time when the 27 books of the NT were finally accepted as canonical by the Synod of Carthage in AD397

Back to the Reformation: William Tyndale (c.1494-1536)

Tyndale’s Bible

Tyndale found that while Magdalen College provided an excellent education in Hebrew, Greek and Latin (and the ability to read Luther’s works in Latin), the idea of using that knowledge to translate the Bible into English was widely ridiculed by the academics

Influenced by Luther’s writings, he went to Germany and translated the NT and the Pentateuch into English soon after Luther had translated them into German

Printed in Germany and smuggled into England

Tyndale’s eventual betrayal & martyrdom

Mary Tudor and the suppression of Protestantism

The Geneva Church and Bible Many persecuted protestants fled to Geneva

(which had become a Protestant republic) including Jean Calvin, John Knox and John Foxe

The Geneva Bible, largely the work of William Whittingham, was based on Tyndale’s English translation a generation earlier.

It became the most popular Bible in England during Elizabeth the First’s reign (it was the Bible quoted by Shakespeare) – but it was not the “official” Bible Disliked by the authorities because of its

notes

Which leads us to the “authorised” version….

By the end of Elizabeth I’s reign, the dominant religious conflict in England was not between Catholic and Protestant, but between Puritan and Anglican

The Puritans initially welcomed James I/VI’s accession, but James disliked Presbyterianism (“no bishops, no king”) - and particularly the notes in the Geneva Bible, which John Knox had tried to have adopted as the authorised version of the Church of Scotland

James I/VI

James – beset on all sides

In 1582, counter-reformation Roman Catholic scholars in Douai and Rheims had published a new English translation of the NT, with the OT to follow in the early 17th C

Based on the Vulgate, and without the “distortions” of the Protestant translators

The one thing that united Anglicans and Puritans was their fear of Roman Catholicism

The big idea – one “authorised” version

Specific Translation Rules drawn up (e.g., eklesia not to translated as “congregation”)

Six separate “companies” of translators used

Modern access to older manuscripts and better academic understanding of ancient language usage has led to new translations (rather than only modernising the language)

Codex Sinaiticus – earliest complete NT, copied AD350, progressively made available from 1844 to 1975

Codex Alexandrinus, copied AD400, made available to western scholars in 1629

Codex Vaticanus - earliest and best (but incomplete) copy of the NT, dating from AD325, made available to scholars in 1889

Dead Sea Scrolls, found 1947 – oldest known copies of the OT