THE HISTORY OF THE BIBLE

I started my daily bible study today and right off got side tracked on just what exactly was the first "real" bible?  So many people believe the King James Version of the bible to be the 'true' translation but I wondered how that could be considering that the bible was written by people way back in biblical times who didn't speak English.  I was using the New International Version and I wanted to know which one, if either, was closer to the original text so i did some research and got my answer.  Using the internet and a couple of  books I already had I was able to piece together a basic history of the beginnings of the bible.  The books I used are;  Fascinating Bible Facts: People, Places, & Events which I really like because of the tidbits of interesting information it has and the easy way it's laid out to find things, and the second one; Collins Atlas of the Bible which is not as easy to read but does offer some valuable information.  I also read the introduction to the making of the Zondervan NIV Study Bible which explained where and how they came about their translation.

Anyways, the end of my search actually revealed something interesting to me.  I had always considered the KJV of the bible the one to fall back on when in doubt.  I no longer do.  After researching, I would actually say the the KJV is definitely not as reliable a translation as the NIV translation and here is why.

Originally writings were carved in stone or maybe pottery or on animal skins and were written in Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic starting with the earliest known writing which is the ten commandants in 1400 B.C.   They didn't have printing presses of course and those writings were rare and important.  Eventually people started to gather them together to compile a group of books we now know as the Old Testament and was pretty much together by the time Christ was born.  Later, after Christ died, the New Testament was put together in much the same way from letters and writings of people at that time and were mostly Greek.  At some point these two were joined together to make a complete book they called "The Bible" which literally means "a collection of books".  And because the books are considered holy this collection is known as the "Holy Bible"

From here it starts to get nasty.  By 500 A.D. the Bible had been written in over 500 languages.  By 600 A.D. the Catholic Church decided to restrict the use or reproduction of all other languages of the Bible to only Latin, their language.  Anyone caught with another translation could be, and some were,  killed!  This gave the Church exclusive power and control over what was taught.  They also decided to make some changes to the Bible and they removed some books originally included in the Bible and who knows what else.

In the late 1300's the protestant reformation took place and eventually the Bible was brought back into circulation in other languages.  In 1384 the first ever complete copy of the Bible in an English version was produced.  The only problem was that they used the bible that the church had 'tweeked' so much that it didn't really resemble the original  works and so was not necessarily accurate.  Every Bible revision since then down to the KJV was an interpretation used from at least part of that changed Bible.  

In 1965 a group of over one hundred scholars got together to put together a modern day English translation of the Bible working directly from the best available Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek texts.  This group was made up of people from the US, Britain, Canad, Australia, and New Zealand and were from at least 12 different denominations.  Their main concern was to provide an accurate translation of the original texts and to avoid denominational preferences or personal interpretations, (basically to correct and avoid what had already happened the first time).  This was not meant to be so much a word-for-word translation as it was an accurate translation of the original intent of the writer. (Think of how words change their meaning throughout history, ie:  coke, the drink vs. coke the drug).  This new translation was called the New International Version and was  published in 1979.     .

So, I now feel confident using the NIV bible for study but I also like to remember that the supreme author is in fact the Lord Jesus Christ, that He is alive and well and that my main source of reference comes from Him.