Mystery Question
• Clue 1: It was sometimes used to burn people at
the stake.
• Clue 2: It was sometimes used by William
Shakespeare.
• Clue 3: People who were not careful with it
sometimes had their hands cut off.
• What is it?
The History of the Bible
Introduction to the Bible
• The Bible is the number one best selling
book in the world.
• Many faiths view it as the inspired work of
God, meaning that they believe that God
told man what to write and so it is literally
the word of God.
Three Types of Bibles
• The Jewish Bible is made up
of the old testament, or 39
different books.
• The Christian Bible is made
up of both the old and new
testaments for a total of 66
books.
• The Catholic Bible is the
longest one with both the old
and new testaments, and
fourteen other books called the
apocrypha or deuterocanonical.
Bible Manuscripts
• There are no original
manuscripts of the Bible in
existence today.
• The earliest known http://www.greatcommission.com/israel/
manuscript are the Dead
Sea Scrolls, discovered in
1947 in jars in caves bordering
the Dead Sea.
• The Dead Sea Scrolls contain
portions of the old testament, http://www.greatcommission.com/israel/
including the book of
Isaiah.
Translations of the Bible
• By the end of the first century A.D., all of the
manuscripts of the Bible were complete.
• The Bible was written in Hebrew, Aramaic,
and Greek.
• In 315 AD, the Bishop of Alexandria made the
canon of scriptures, complete with the new
testament, official.
• In 382 AD, the Pope commissioned a man
named Jerome to translate the entire Bible
into Latin. It took him twenty years. This
version is now adopted by the Catholic
church as the “Vulgate” or common version.
Translations of the Bible
• In 1384 AD, the first hand written
English language Bible was
produced by John Wycliffe. This
made the Pope so mad that 44 years
after Wycliffe had died, he ordered http://www.whatsaiththescr
the bones to be dug up, crushed, and ipture.com/Stories
scattered in the river.
• The Catholic church threatened
anyone who possessed a non-Latin
Bible with execution.
• In 1415, a follower of Wycliffe, John
Hus, started handing out Bibles in
English. He was burned at the stake
with Wycliffe Bibles used as kindling
for the fire. His last words were “in http://www.whatsaiththescr
100 years, God will raise up a man ipture.com/Stories
who calls for reform that cannot be
suppressed.”
Translations of the Bible
• In 1517, almost exactly 100 yrs.
Later, Martin Luther nailed
his 95 theses on the church
door at Wittenberg.
• Martin Luther was the first
man to print the Bible in http://www.whatsaiththescr
German. In the same year, ipture.com/Stories
seven people were burned at
the stake for teaching their
children to say the Lord’s
Prayer in English rather than
Latin.
Translations of the Bible
• In 1525, William Tyndale was the
first to use the new printing press
invention to print the Bible in
English.
• Because of this, he was hunted by
bounty hunters for 11 yrs. and the
church burned every copy of his
Bible they could find. Only two
known copies of the first edition of
the Bible are known to exist today.
• In 1536, William was betrayed by an
Englishman, imprisoned for 500
days, strangled and burned at the http://www.whatsaiththescr
stake. His last words were “Oh Lord, ipture.com/Stories
open the King of England’s eyes.”
Three years later, Henry VIII
allowed and even funded the
printing of an English Bible called
the Great Bible.
Translations of the Bible
• In 1560, the Geneva translation of
the Bible was published. It was the
first Bible to add numbered verses
to the chapters and have marginal
notes.
• William Shakespeare used the
Geneva version of the Bible to quote
from in his plays.
• In 1611, the King James Version of
the Bible was published after seven
years of work. King James I
appointed 54 scholars to translate
the Bible into English. http://www.whatsaiththescr
ipture.com/Stories
• It was and still is the most popular
version of the Bible because of its
character and language. It is the
only book with one billion copies in
print, the most printed book in the
history of the world.
Curious Bibles
• These are Bibles that had
typographical errors in them
and had disastrous
consequences for those who
printed them.
• The Adulterous Bible: It read
“Thou shalt commit adultery.”
The penalty for this error was http://www.whatsaiththescr
ipture.com/Stories
death.
• The Unrighteous Bible: It
read, “Know ye not that the
unrighteous shall inherit the
kingdom of God?” The penalty
for this error was death.