The Transmission of the Biblical Writings – Part 2

In these blog posts, we have been looking at how the Bible came about. We have seen this initially happened through the process known as inspiration. As we have seen, inspiration refers to the process through which God spoke His Word through human beings, doing this in such a way that the things they wrote down were the very Word of God. The next stage we looked at was canonization. This refers to the process by which God’s people recognized which writings had in fact been inspired by God and were therefore authoritative to guide the life and doctrine of His people.

However, even after this had been done, how do I get a copy of these inspired, authoritative writings that comprise the Bible? Obviously there are are billions of copies of the Bible – how did we get them from that original writing of Moses, David, John, Peter, or Paul? The first step in this process is transmission – the copying of the biblical texts.

When we think of making a copy we usually think of a copy machine or making a digital copy. These wonderful technologies enable us to make perfect copies and to make many copies fast. However, in the ancient world, there were no copy machines or computers. Therefore everything had to be copied by hand. Furthermore, the literacy rate in the ancient world was much lower than it is in a modern nation like the United States. Therefore, the copying of important writings was handled by special individuals known as scribes. We read about these people in the New Testament. Sometimes the word is translated as “teachers of the law” in modern translations, but the older translations generally used the word “scribes”. We meet these individuals often in the Gospels. They were held in high esteem both because they were very literate and because the specific task they did was to copy biblical texts. It was people like this who copied the Old Testament writings that were used in the times of the New Testament.

During the era of the Church, this task was originally done by unknown individuals but eventually came to be done by monks. These monks would labor for hours on end to carefully hand-copy an older copy to create a newer one. In fact, these copies are often referred to as “manuscripts” because they were scripts written by hand (from the Latin word ‘manus’ which means ‘hand). This was arduous difficult work. Imagine sitting for hours copying out of a large book to make a new handwritten copy! We should be very thankful for these amazing individuals who did this work to preserve the Word of God.

In Christ,

Bret