Don’t forget the prayer meeting on Thursday (12th November) at 7.30 p.m. We need to pray and connect with God – come along if you can!

On Friday, there is a ‘Breath & Life’ network meeting at Stocksbridge (at The Hub church) for all involved in music worship. See Garry and Julie if you’d like to go.

On Sunday morning, we will be at Cherry Tree Court for the morning service, starting at 10.30 a.m. and in the evening at 6 p.m., Kevin Horseman from Mission Aviation Fellowship will be speaking about the work of this missionary organisation. I’m sure he’ll have plenty of exciting stories (and resources available!), so this will be a great evening of encouragement and vision.

Looking a little further ahead…

1. There is a fitness session for the over 50s at church on Tuesdays from 10 a.m. until 11 a.m. throughout November. This is a ‘gentle exercise class’ run by Be Well Barnsley and all are welcome!
2. In December, there will be a Christmas market on Friday 11th December on Market Street from 4 p.m. until 8 p.m. We are hoping to be involved with this, along with other local churches, so watch this space for more details!
3. The church carol service will be on Sunday 20th December at 6 p.m.

This Sunday evening (15th November at 6 p.m.) we are having a guest speaker (Kevin Horseman) from the missionary society Mission Aviation Fellowship. This charity provides aviation, communications, and learning technology services to more than 1,000 Christian and humanitarian agencies, as well as thousands of isolated missionaries and indigenous villagers in the world’s most remote areas. It has three major operational centres, in the USA, UK and Australia, and these centres provide operational support in the Americas, Africa and Asia Pacific regions. In 2010, MAF served in more than  55 countries, flying 201,710 passengers with a fleet of some 130 aircraft.^[1]

This is an amazing charity, providing disaster relief services, air ambulance services and a whole host of practical help for missionaries and villagers in remote areas, focussing its mission work in the areas of evangelism and church nuture; medical assistance; disaster response; community development and training.

If you’re interested in aircraft and want to know more about what God is doing in other parts of the world, come along on Sunday to find out more! In the meantime, check out their website.

It’s one thing to be able to know about the Bible (the books of the Bible, the themes of the Bible and the way it came to be handed down to us), but God is interested in so much more than our head knowledge. The Bible is a living word, not just ink on paper. God still wants to speak to us today through His word. ‘In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways,’ the writer to the Hebrews says at the start of that book, ‘but in these last days He has spoken to us by His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, and through whom He made the universe.’ (Heb 1:1) God is still speaking to people today through His word, but the key thing for us is to have open, listening ears.

Ps 40:6 says ‘my ears you have pierced’ or ‘opened’; the Message version says ‘you’ve opened my ears so I can listen.’ In the Hebrew, the words literally say ‘you have dug ears for me’, as though they have been dug out of clay, fashioned into the ability to hear by God Himself. It’s not enough for us to believe in the accuracy and reliability of the Bible if we disregard its life-giving power or ignore what God wants to say to us through this word. We need to understand that we read the Bible not simply to know facts about God, but to know God; it’s not enough to have knowledge and understanding if we don’t have those dug-out ears that hear what God is actually saying to us. After all, the Pharisees and Sadducees had a good head knowledge of Scripture but consistently failed to understand what God was saying to them.

The children’s song says ‘listen, obey and be blessed.’ That is the key for us all: to listen and hear what God is saying, to assimilate those words into our lives, chewing them, eating them, absorbing them into our very beings and then obeying them. James says ‘do not merely listen to the word and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says.’ (James 1:22) It really is that simple. God told Noah to build an ark. He built it and was saved from the flood. God told Naaman to dip into the river Jordan seven times; when he did that, he was healed. When we listen to God’s word and obey it, we will be blessed. ‘The one who has an ear, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches.’ (Rev 1:7) Let’s be people who listen, obey and receive God’s blessing.

The Bible was originally in Hebrew and Greek, so there will be errors made in translation.

Anyone who has used Google Translate or tried to decipher a menu literally translated into English will understand that the fact the Bible was not written in our native language brings another set of problems to us: the problem of translation and interpretation. (My personal favourite was a pupil who wrote that a pop star was married to ice cubes, a misinterpretation which came from looking up ‘on the rocks’ in a dictionary and failing to understand that this referred to a drink with ice, rather than to a failing marriage…) There is a difference between literal word-for-word translations (which we often may find difficult to understand) and paraphrases (which try to convey the gist of a passage but which may not be totally accurate), but all modern translations of the Bible go back to the original manuscripts and by comparing different versions of the Bible, we can seek to find out not only the exact words but the meaning behind those words.

Jesus said ‘not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.’ (Matt 5:18) The ‘jot’ and the ‘tittle’ (as they are referred to in older versions of the Bible) were small symbols in the Hebrew alphabet which could alter the meaning of a word considerably (think of the English p and q or b and d, for example.) For us to really understand another language, we have to be able not only to understand the actual words, but also what they mean: in the example about ‘jot’ and ‘tittle’, for example, those words are meaningless to us unless we understand what they meant to a Hebrew writer. The NIV gives us a meaning for those words rather than simply using the translation ‘jot’ or ‘tittle’: ‘smallest letter’, ‘least stroke of a pen.’ We don’t need to know any Hebrew at all to get what that means, but it’s not a literal translation of the words. A paraphrase might go even further, talking about ‘minding your ps and qs’, a phrase which shows any English speaker that a small difference in letters can make a big difference in meaning! These kinds of things explain why different versions of the Bible sound different, even when they are all in the same language. Nonetheless, all modern translations of the Bible and even most paraphrases have gone back to the original manuscripts and the original languages to work out what was originally written, and therefore we can have confidence that what we read in English is an accurate representation of what the original Hebrew or Greek said.

If prophecy is one of the gifts of the Spirit, why can’t we keep on adding to the Bible now as people are ‘God-inspired’ when they prophesy?

Scripture in the form of the Old Testament as a revelation from God through the prophets ended around 450 B.C. with the close of the book of Malachi. This was the Bible of Jesus and His disciples, and it was precisely the same in content as our Old Testament. By A.D. 240, Origen from Alexandria was using all our 27 New Testament books as “Scripture,” and no others, and referred to them as the “New Testament.” He believed them to be “inspired by the Spirit.” But it was not until A.D. 367 that Athanasius, also from Alexandria, provided us with an actual list of New Testament books identical with ours.

Although we believe God still speaks to us through prophecy, we believe that the Bible as we have it is God’s inspired, revealed word to us and therefore all modern-day prophecy has to be subject to that written word. Rev 22:18-19 reminds us that nothing must be added to or removed from that word of prophecy; we also see that there has to be some objective ‘measure’ by which prophecy can be judged, which is the Bible. Prophecy is, we believe, still important today, but God-inspired prophecy will never contradict what is revealed to us in the Bible. Paul says ‘two or three prophets should speak, and the others should weigh carefully what is said’ (1 Cor 14:29); he also wrote ‘Do not treat prophecies with contempt but test them all; hold on to what is good, reject every kind of evil.’ (1 Thess 5:20-22) We need to test and weigh prophecy carefully against Scripture.

There are bound to be errors in copying that make it impossible to know what the original meaning was

The Bible as we know it today contains 31,173 verses and even if scribes (the people who copied it) were extremely careful, it’s inevitable they would make simple copying errors. People say we can place no reliance on the infallibility of the Bible and many go even further, dismissing it as inaccurate and unreliable.

Jesus said ‘not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.’ (Matt 5:18) The ‘jot’ and the ‘tittle’ (as they are referred to in older versions of the Bible) were small symbols in the Hebrew alphabet which could alter the meaning of a word considerably (think of the English p and q or b and d, for example.) Clearly, a scribe had a difficult job when copying words when such tiny marks could alter the meaning of a word radically. Nonetheless, the most common mistakes (haplography, when a letter, word or phrase is missed out; dittography, when a letter, word or phrase is repeated and metathesis, when something is inverted by mistake) were generally quite easy to spot by those checking work (as indeed any proof-reader nowadays would say.) Because of the great reverence the Jewish scribes held toward the Scriptures, they exercised extreme care in making new copies of the Hebrew Bible. The entire scribal process was specified in meticulous detail to minimise the possibility of even the slightest error. The number of letters, words, and lines were counted, and the middle letters of the Pentateuch and the Old Testament were determined. If a single mistake was discovered, the entire manuscript would be destroyed.

As a result of this extreme care, the quality of the manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible surpasses all other ancient manuscripts. The 1947 discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls provided a significant check on this, because these Hebrew scrolls antedate the earliest Masoretic Old Testament manuscripts by about 1,000 years. But in spite of this time span, the number of variant readings between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Masoretic Text is quite small, and most of these are variations in spelling and style (like the difference between the American spelling of color and the English spelling colour.)

The fact that we have more than one manuscript of the whole Bible and lots of manuscripts which have parts of the Bible means that we can compare the manuscripts and if there are copying errors, we have enough manuscripts to work out what the correct version is likely to have been. The Old and New Testaments enjoy far greater manuscript attestation in terms of quantity, quality, and time span than any other ancient documents and since the Scriptures continually refer to historical events which are verifiable, their accuracy can be checked by external evidence as well.

Last night in our series ‘The Bigger Picture’, we looked at how the Bible actually came to be handed down to us. We believe that ‘all Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.’ (2 Tim 3:16-17), but the process by which God gave us His word often seems to us mundane and even confusing. Why couldn’t He just write it out for us, word for word, to ensure there was no dispute about it? Why entrust fallible humans with such an amazing job? As Casting Crowns say, ‘The Bible was inscribed over a period of 2000 years in times of war and in days of peace by kings, physicians, tax collectors, farmers, fishermen, singers and shepherds. The marvel is that a library so perfectly cohesive could have been produced by such a diverse crowd over a period of time which staggers the imagination. Jesus is its grand subject, our good is designed and the Glory of God is its end.’ (‘The Word Is Alive’)

Not everyone believes this, of course, and many people say that the Bible is full of contradictions and errors and therefore can’t be relied on. How did people decide over the years what books to include in the Bible and what books to leave out? How can we be sure that what we read today hasn’t been corrupted or changed?

The first Bible[1] containing both Old and New Testaments ever to be printed was an edition in Latin published in Mainz, Germany in 1456 known as the ‘Gutenberg Bible’, but the Latin version printed in that edition had been circulating in Europe for more than a thousand years. Jerome completed this version (known as the ‘Vulgate’, because it was the ‘common’ edition) in 404 AD.

The three oldest, fairly complete, manuscripts of the Bible known to be in existence are not in Latin, however, but in Greek and it’s thought that two of them were written probably at least two generations before Jerome was making his Latin version. Latin and Greek were, of course, the key languages of the world at those times, for the Romans and the Greeks were the conquerors of that day, in much the same way that English has become the lingua franca of the world in the 20^th and 21^st centuries because of the spread of the British Empire in Victorian times.

Those 3 manuscripts are now:

• In the Vatican library in Rome (‘Codex Vaticanus’)
• In the British Museum in London (‘Codex Sinaiticus’ & ‘Codex Alexandrinus’)

The Greek version of the Old Testament (known as the ‘Septuagint’) was done at Alexandria in Egypt, but the Old Testament was written down long before this and even before it was written down was handed down orally so that by the time Jesus lived, there was a recognised order to the Old Testament. The books in the New Testament were named by Origen in AD 240, although it was not until AD 367 that Athanasius provided us with an actual list of New Testament books identical with ours. However, long before we have that list, the evidence shows that the 27 books, and only those, were widely accepted as Scripture.

For books to be accepted as ‘God-breathed’, several criteria had to be fulfilled. These are often referred to as the ‘5 As’:

1. Authorship (who wrote these books? The authority of the writers was paramount to accepting the authority of what was written)
2. Authentic (did the writings have the ring of truth about them – ‘This is what the Lord says’ is the prophetic ring of Scripture.)
3. Ancient (most of the New Testament, for example, was written by eyewitnesses in a relatively short time after the life of Christ)
4. Accepted (Jesus said He came to fulfil the Law and the Prophets, and the Old Testament was widely accepted by all Jews in the form we know by the time He was born; with regard to the New Testament, it took time for letters to circulate among the churches, so it is all the more significant that 23 of the 27 books were almost universally accepted well before the middle of the second century. When tradition carries the weight of the overwhelming majority of churches throughout the widely scattered Christian communities across the vast Roman Empire, with no one church controlling the beliefs of all the others, it has to be taken seriously.)
5. Accurate (did it conform to the general teaching of the church overall?)

Although this process may have taken a long time and may seem rather ordinary to us (where’s the inspiration in debating and discussing?!), it shows us how God is willing to work with people. 1 Cor 3:9 says we are God’s fellow workers, His co-workers. There is no need for God to include us in His work at all. He has the power and authority to do whatever He likes, but somehow He chooses to use us, a mystery that combines our imperfections with His perfection, another example of His completely undeserved grace

[1] See ‘The Making of the Bible’ (Geddes Macgregor), P 2ff