Introduction to the Bible

Introduction and Overview

Welcome to the introductory seminar to the Bible Institute.  This is the first of a series of 12 seminars.  I developed this institute because when I first got into ministry after graduating from Seminary in 1998, I realized that I was dealing with what they call a post-Christian culture.  In attempting to minister to the church, I realized that I could no longer assume a base of knowledge about the Bible or some of the basics of Christian doctrine.  People just hadn’t grown up having been exposed to any of that—something that you used to be able to assume about at least the majority of the population.  So I developed this concept in order to get people to a base-line of knowledge that used to be achieved by growing up in Sunday School, but without taking 12 years to do it.  If you get through all of these seminars, hopefully you will be in a place in your knowledge of the Bible and Christian doctrine that, quite honestly, most people who grow up in the church never get to. 

I believe that the primary way that God has revealed himself to us and his will for us is through his word.   I also believe that it is his call on every one of our lives to make disciples.  So the primary goal of this institute is not to feed you information about the Scriptures, but to help you become people who can help others learn the Scriptures.  Because I believe that the best way to accomplish the goal of making disciples is to make disciples who in turn are equipped to make other disciples.  That’s what this is all about.  I am firmly convinced that the church does not require seminary graduates and ordained pastors to do ministry.  I am committed to the fact that you not only can, not only should, but must be doing this in your families, your community groups, your workplaces, your neighborhoods—anywhere God has put you, if the church is going to accomplish it’s mission of reaching all people with the Gospel. 

With that introduction to the institute, let’s move ahead with an introduction to the Bible.  Without any competition that is anywhere close, the Bible is the most widely read, published, distributed, and most influential book in the history of mankind.  The question is, so what?  That by itself does not necessarily recommend it as being worthy of not only our study, but our devotion.  I suggest that there are two issues that are critical to setting this book apart from all others, quite aside from it’s popularity. 

The Bible is the Word of God

The reason that we put this book at the center of our spiritual existence is that it is not just a word about God, but the word of God.  It is the ultimate revelation of God to humanity.  That means that we believe the writing of it is inspired by God.  Just what do we mean by that?  Well, there are various theories as to how God inspired the writing of the Bible.  One is the dictation theory.  This assumes that God basically used people like pens—he literally gave them each word to say and they just wrote it down.

Another is the limited inspiration theory. In other words, the Holy Spirit inspired the main ideas, but not necessarily the details.  Therefore, there is room for some error in historical details and other things.

The neo-orthodox theory, in a nutshell, would say that the Bible contains the word of God, but is not necessarily the word of God.  Hence, as God continues to reveal himself, we can add or subtract to the Scripture as becomes necessary. 

The most traditional and orthodox view and the one which this seminar endorses, is the theory of plenary verbal inspiration.  Plenary simply means full, or complete, and  the term verbal would refer to the notion that God’s inspiration extends to the words as well as ideas of the writers.  This doesn’t mean that they didn’t use their own language, idioms, and writing style, but God superintended the process to ensure this:  That the Bible is  without  error in it’s original form.  So we understand the Bible to be trustworthy in every aspect. 

The other core assumption that sets the Bible apart from any other book or set of holy writings, is that at the center of it is Jesus Christ.  The Old Testament prepares for and points to the person and work of Jesus Christ, and the New Testament begins with and continues that work to the end of history. Just as world history does, the Bible revolves around the person of Jesus Christ. 

Up to this point I have been calling the Bible a book.  It is actually a collection of 66 books. We actually don’t know all about who it was that wrote all these books, but it was written by approximately 40 authors, from all kinds of different backgrounds.   Again, we don’t have all the precise dates, but it was written over a period of approximately 1,500 years.   

There are three languages that the Bible was originally written in.  The Old Testament was primarily written in Hebrew, with a few passages in Aramaic, another Semitic language related to Hebrew.  The New Testament was written entirely in Greek.   Somewhere around 200-300 BC there was a Greek translation made of the Old Testament at the library in Alexandria.  This is called the Septuagint, a name that derives from the number 70, reflecting the fact that 72 scholars produced the work.  More information relating to how we got the texts that we have and how reliable they are, are contained in the seminar on apologetics, so we aren’t going to spend a lot of time on that here. 

One of most important things to recognize about the Bible is that it is written in various genres.  By that I mean, there are various types of literature in the Bible.  There is, for example, historical narrative, laws, poetry, proverbs, biographies, letters, prophetic oracles, and apocalypses.  We want to take particular care here at the Institute to underscore the nature of each of these types of literature.  Helping you understand the differences between these types of literature will be the key to helping you rightly interpret Scripture for yourself.  ___________________

What is it and where did it come from?

One of the questions that comes up is why and how did these 66 books become the Bible as we know it today?  These 66 books are what is known as the canon of Scripture.  That doesn’t mean that if you don’t follow it’s precepts that God will blow your head off with it.  I know that Ephesians calls it the sword of the Spirit, but that’s not the idea here.  The word canon comes from two different Hebrew and Greek words meaning a measuring stick.  This can mean two things, actually.  It can refer to a standard by which we gauge what we believe and how we live, or it can mean a standard by which we decide what is a part of Holy Scripture.  People have used it both ways.  The question for our discussion is the latter one, however.  The answer isn’t a simple one, unfortunately.  The fact is, we don’t precisely know.  But I would submit to you that is a good thing.  If we could trace the decisions as to what was in and what was out with precision to some committee somewhere at some point in time, then we would have a big problem:  the Bible would be the result of a committee.  I’m not saying that the Holy Spirit doesn’t work through committees—don’t get me wrong.  Unless it’s the ways and means committee in Congress.  I don’t think God has any part in that.  But if Scripture emerged naturally from the experience of God’s people and came to be understood and accepted as such by a wide variety of leaders over a vast period of time, then to my mind that has much more of a “God feel” to it.  That would almost require a movement of the Holy Spirit to even happen.  There are some things we can say, however.  In regards to the Old Testament, what became accepted as canonical was completed by 200 BC at the latest.  We know this because certain books that claimed authority were being excluded by then.  So it was completed at least a couple of centuries before Christ, and had a sort of official recognition by 100 AD.  That is in part because there were other Scriptures by then, the New Testament, that the Jews didn’t want perverting their own Scriptures, so for the sake of the Jewish community they had to formalize what at that point had long been recognized.  In regards to the New Testament, the job is a little easier.  All the books in our New Testament were completed by approx. 120 AD, and they received official recognition by 325 AD, at the council of Nicea.  In a sense, you could say this was a committee of sorts, but there is one essential thing to understand in discussing this issue of canonicity:  The church did not decide on what was canonical, it affirmed what was already recognized as inspired.  There are various accounts from various sources as to what sort of tests might have been used by leaders of the church in recognizing canonicity.  I’ve kind of boiled it down to three:

-Does it have authoritative authorship? 

            In regards to the Old Testament, that would mean a recognized prophet or man of God.  For the New Testament, they absolutely insisted on apostolic authority.  That is, the book must either be written by, or under the direct supervision and approval of one of the original apostles.

-Is it life transforming?

            Apparently the dynamic power of God to change people’s hearts became clear as certain books were widely read and used by God’s people.

-Has it been accepted and used by God’s people?

            Some writings that claimed to be authoritative were just simply discarded over time as not useful.  This is how the Holy Spirit worked through the ages.

-Is it consistent with previous revelation?

            There were many books that circulated in the church which were helpful, but contradicted at some point the doctrines of what were generally accepted as God’s revelation.

The Apocrypha

Just one final note is in order here, because there are some churches, most notably the Roman Catholic, that have a few extra books in their Old Testament, known as the apocrypha.  These are books that failed the tests of canonicity that we have discussed, but were adopted by the Catholic Church  in 1546AD as  a means of setting themselves apart from the reformer heretics.  They include historical as well as doctrinal inconsistencies with the rest of Scripture, and most notably Jesus and apostles quoted from just about every other Old Testament book but never mentioned these.  They are generally accepted a helpful reading, but not inspired Scripture. 

So, the canon of Scripture as we have it today, organized under the heading that we will be studying it here at the Institute is as follows:

The Old Testament

The Pentateuch: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy

The Historical Books: Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1&2 Samuel, 1&2 Kings, 1&2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah,                Esther  

The Poetical Books:  Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs

The Prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi

The New Testament

The Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John

Acts

The Epistles: Romans, 1&2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1&2 Thessalonians, 1&2 Timothy, Titus, Philemon, Hebrews, James, 1&2 Peter, 1-3 John, Jude

Revelation

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What’s it all about?

Now that we have some idea as to what the Bible is and where it comes from, it’s time to move on to the really important questions of what it’s all about.  Let me start with what many people seem to assume about the Bible:  That it is God’s instruction manual.   What some would call the “sayings of chairman God.”  This is certainly not incorrect.  There are plenty of instructions in there, as well as suggestions and some commandments.  It certainly does qualify as what many would say to be a “guide for faith and life.” But I think there’s a problem with this.  If we see the Bible as first of all an instruction manual, then we have to ask: what should I be doing?  Or not doing.  The primary role of the Bible: guide your behavior.  That’s not bad necessarily, but I don’t think it’s the best.  In fact, I think it tends to put us into a legalistic view of the faith that God did not intend.   I would ask if that is primarily what it is.  I would suggest that first of all, the Bible is a story.  It is the story that encompasses all of human history, from beginning to end, causing us to ask: what’s the plot?  In that case, the primary role of the Bible: to guide us into a relationship.  That, in my opinion becomes the end result of determining where it is that you fit into the  plot, because it is really the story of God’s interactions with people in order to be in a relationship to them. My suggestion: put the instruction manual into the context of the story.  Putting the ethical instructions contained in Scripture into the context of the plot of the story puts them, I think, into the proper perspective and they become a means to experiencing a healthy relationship rather than just a rigid set of guidelines.

A couple of things become important if you see the Bible as first of all a story.  One is that, like all stories, it has a geographic location.  The Bible chronicles events that actually played out in human history, making it unique among the holy writings of major religions.  And that’s what makes the geography so important.  Take a look at the map in your notes:

The other thing that happens in a real story is that it takes place in time.  These were real historical events in real historical place and time.   So, like any story, there is a plot line.  It roughly looks like this:

Old Testament

New Testament

One of the things that can be a little tricky in fitting the Bible into the time-line above is that the Old Testament in particular is not necessarily put together in chronological order.  Obviously, it starts at the beginning,  but as you get toward the middle and end of it you can get confused as to what period of time you’re reading about, so I’ve given you a brief run-down of which books fit into which general part of the story, so if you’re ever reading Habakkuk and find yourself wondering if this is in the context of the exile or during the divided kingdom, you can have a handy reference.  Hey—it could happen.

Early History  (before 1500 B.C.)     

            Genesis, Job

Israel from Egypt to the Promised Land (1500-1400 B.C.)

            Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua

The time of the judges to King David (1400-1000 B.C.)

            Judges, Ruth, 1&2 Samuel, 1 Chronicles, Psalms

King Solomon and the Divided Kingdom  (1000-605 B.C.)

            1 Kings, 2 Chronicles, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, 2 Kings, Joel, Jonah, Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Micah, Nahum, Zephaniah

The captivity in Babylon  (605-540 B.C.)

            Habakkuk, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Obadiah, Daniel, Ezekiel

The return to Jerusalem  (540-430 B.C.)

            Ezra, Haggai, Zechariah, Esther, Nehemiah, Malachi

The Life of Jesus (6 B.C.- A.D. 30)

            Matthew, Mark, Luke, John

The early Church  (A.D. 30-95)

            Acts, Romans, 1&2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1&2 Thessalonians, 1&2 Timothy, Titus, Philemon, Hebrews, James, 1&2 Peter, 1,2 &3 John, Jude, Revelation 

The big story:  God’s plan of redemption.

            -Creation to New Creation

            -Fall of Man to the Resurrection of Man

            -From the loss of fellowship with God to everlasting communion with him

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Interpreting the Bible

This is our final and perhaps most important section to this seminar.  Every seminar that is about the Bible itself rather than doctrinal issues of some kind will end with a section like this.  This will serve as some introductory comments that will help you get the most out of all the others. 

By way of introduction, maybe we should ask the question a lot of people ask.  Why do we have to interpret it at all?  Why not just read it and do what it says?  Well, the easy answer to that question is that interpretation is inevitable.  In reading this (or any other) book, we will always bring our own background, our own cultural context,  and many pre-conceptions to it.  The goal of this institute is to get all of you interpreting it correctly.  We firmly believe that the Bible was meant to be, and is, accessible for everyone in the church but we also realize that countless heresies and some really destructive things have happened because of bad Bible interpretation.  Since our number one goal is to equip you as disciples to make disciples, we’re committed to the importance of teaching you how to interpret Scripture correctly so you can teach others to do the same. 

One of the most important things you can do to rightly interpret Scripture is to understand the genre.  That’s a fancy term for a category, or type of writing.  The Bible contains all sorts of genres of writing:

Narrative history, laws, poetry, proverbs, prophecies, letters, biographies, apocalypses. 

The thing to realize is that all of these have different rules that apply in regards to correctly interpreting them.  If you try to figure out what a poem is trying to tell you by reading it as a law, for instance, or by making the same assumptions that you would make regarding a narrative history, you could end up in a really strange place.  But people do that.  And they do end up there.  This issue is so important that to a large degree, it is how the whole Bible Institute is organized.  It isn’t precise, of course, because there is some overlap.  There are poems and prophecies in the middle of narratives, for instance.  The book of Revelation is part letters and part apocalypse.  But broadly speaking, we have organized the institute based on genre, because the end goal of each seminar will be to get you to the place where you glean the correct information—the message that the Holy Spirit really wanted you to have—from each type of literature. 

The first task, then, in interpreting Scripture correctly is to know what it meant.  The fancy term for that is (exegesis).   If you can remember this one phrase, it will keep you from innumerable errors that have been made throughout the centuries:  A text cannot mean what it never could have meant.  So you always start with what the original authors meant to say to the original hearers.  If you think about it, that only makes sense.  If the Word of God was completely non-sensical to the people who originally read it, it probably wouldn’t have survived, for one thing, and it would be hard to see how we could legitimately call it the word of God.  In fact, that is widely regarded as one of the tests of canonicity—whether it spoke to all generations of God’s people, including the ones who were the original recipients.  We’ll look at specific examples of this as we get to succeeding seminars.

The key to understanding what it originally meant is to understand the context.  I cannot under-emphasize this point.  The worst habit that we can have, but the most common one there is in regards to Scripture, is to pull something out of it’s context and then interpret it.  You can literally make the Bible say anything you want it to say if you do that.  There are two aspects of  context that are important for you to place the Scriptures into.  The first is the historical context.  That has to do with two things.  One is information regarding the situation.  A lot of that can be gotten from reading the word, but here some outside assistance will be really helpful.  I’ll introduce you to a few sources in a  minute.  The other issue of context is perhaps the most important one of all:  what was the occasion?  In other, words, why was this written in the first place?  For every book of the Bible there was a reason that it was originally written.  If we can discover what that was, then we can get to the point where we’re asking the same questions that the text answers.  But asking questions of the Biblical text that it was never designed to answer can get us all twisted up in knots. 

The other contextual question to ask other than the historical context, is the literary context.  Words only have meaning in sentences and sentences only have meaning in paragraphs.  And paragraphs themselves are usually put into a larger context of a letter, or story or whatever.  This is one of the reasons for a good translation that recognizes paragraphs, and poetry as poetry, etc. 

Once you have understood the context, you are ready to understand the content. 

Once you’ve understood the context and the content, of course, then you can discover what it means. The fancy terms for this is hermeneutics.  In other words, interpreting the Scripture.  This is where most people begin and they come up with some kind of interpretation to be sure, but to get to the right interpretation, you have to start with exegesis—what it meant.  Then and only then can you get to the correct application to your own life and situation.

To wrap up this section on how to study the Bible, let me introduce you to some important aids.  Keep in mind, this is about Bible study, not simply devotional reading.  I would argue that the two are inevitably intertwined, but still this is more serious than what most people would think of as their “daily Bible reading.” 

First of all, you need a good translation.  Obviously, there are many to choose from these days.  We’ve got a lot more than the good old King James.  Literally hundreds, in fact.  So what’s the difference between them?  Translations of the Scripture into English basically fall into categories: 

Literal:  New American Standard, Revised Standard, New King James

            These are translations that try as best they can to take the words as well as the word order of the original text and translate it as directly as possible into English.  This may seem like an obvious best choice, but in reality it can get confusing since the early languages are so different from ours. 

Free: The Living Bible, The Message

Free translations, sometimes called a paraphrase, are always done by just one author and are that author’s attempt to translate the ideas or concepts into English without a lot of regard for grammar and syntax and things.  These can be very helpful, especially for devotional reading, but they are not generally considered to be great for study purposes. 

Dynamic Equivalent:  New International Version, New Living Bible

            These are translations that attempt to keep as much of the grammar and language of the original as possible while updating  the idioms and outdated grammatical constructions into what would be the most precise equivalent in English. I would recommend one of these as your primary Bible for study purposes, but you will find it enormously helpful to have one of each of the others handy, especially a literal translation.  In the Bible program I have at home in my computer, I always have the NIV together with the NASB up on the screen.  Actually, I also have the Greek text, but that’s not a translation. 

You really can get most of the way to where you want to be in interpreting Scripture with just a couple of good translations.  The more the merrier.  But there a couple of other tools that I think you would find handy as well.

One is a Bible Handbook.  I have one here by Halleys, a very well-respected and successful handbook that’s been around forever.  One of these will give you some of that background and contextual information that we talked about that you will find invaluable. 

Another option would be a good Bible Dictionary.   You can look up all kinds of topics having to do with the Bible in one of these and get some good solid information to start with. 

If you really want to get into it, you’ll have to take the next step to Bible Commentaries.  There are vast amounts of these coming from all kinds of different perspectives, but these are the kinds of things that will give you information about various ways to interpret some words in the original language, for instance, and what certain kinds of grammatical constructions could mean.  You can get really easy ones, like the Layman’s Bible Commentary or Barclays Daily Study Bible, up to a kind of “middle of the road” in regards to the scholarship, such as the Tyndale series, or all the way to something like the Word commentary with a lot of very technical information about the original languages and stuff.  I wouldn’t expect very many of you to get this far, but who knows?  One thing you can get these days is something they call a Study Bible, which has a lot of these kinds of resources built into it.  The NIV Study Bible has brief commentary on virtually every verse, and I think that it’s actually very good.  It also has some great cross references.  

These days, of course, another option you have available is a good Bible Study computer program: Quick Verse is very popular and has tons of great study helps, but there are others than range from just a simple search program that you can download off the internet for free to really advanced study programs for Bible teachers that costs hundreds of dollars.  Most of the ones you’ll find in the store will include a whole host of resources like Bible dictionaries, a few commentaries, etc.  In regards to the internet itself, there are, of course, massive amounts of resources regarding the Bible just like there are everything else.  What I’ve found is that they also require the same thing as everything else:  a lot of discernment.  There’s some good stuff out there, and a lot of really marginal material.  But the importance is magnified in this instance, and the consequences of using bad Bible material can be much worse than bad advice on which hair color to use or how to de-worm your dog.  Hopefully as we work our way through this Institute, you will be able to apply that kind of discernment to what you come across.  Until then, I guess my preference would be to stick with a good translation and handbook or dictionary, and practice applying the principles that we have discussed and will be learning how to apply as we move ahead through the Institute. 

Re: the internet.  Use portals rather than search engines which turn up the good with the bad.  A couple of good ones:  Biblegateway.com (from gospelcom.net), and crosswalk.com. 

Re: television.  I recommend against using the television as a source of your Bible instruction.  There doesn’t seem to be a lot of discernment used by stations as to what they allow on air, other than the ability to pay their fees.  One hour you can get solid teaching and the next some health and wealth gospel.  It’s very hit and miss.