This newsletter that you are reading was printed on a color printer that sits on our church secretary’s desk. Then it was copied on a very nice copy machine. This copy machine makes excellent copies. It never changes the position of any of the words in a sentences, and it never changes the order of the letters in any of the words.

It makes nearly flawless copies. It will even copy a smudge mark on the paper. In my humble opinion it is a wonderful invention.

The Apostle Paul didn’t have a color printer, and he didn’t have a copy machine. He didn’t have a typewriter, and he lived about 1,500 years prior to the invention of the printing press. He did not have a ball point pen, a lead pencil, or a notebook.

He wrote letters. He used ink. The people in his day wrote on papyrus, or on vellum. His letters were copied by hand many times.

The people who copied his letters by hand were very different from our copy machine. If Paul had misspelled a word of two, these people would have felt free to correct his error. If Paul had used a complicated phrase, these people would have felt free to clarify his words. They sometimes made notes in the margins of their manuscripts, which later scribes sometimes incorporated into the text of a later copy of the letter.

There are some very old copies of Paul’s letters preserved in some very safe places. They are most likely all copies. If one were an actual original, or if an archeologist were to discover an original some day, it would be difficult, if not impossible to prove that it wasn’t a copy.

Over the years, scholars have found and preserved many ancient manuscripts of Biblical texts. Some are nearly complete copies of the Bible, and others are fragments of a papyrus leaf containing only a few verses. Generally, the earliest copies are considered the most accurate. There are exceptions to that rule, but the copies that were made closer to the time the original letter was written were probably changed less than later copies.

The process of dating the text is interesting. Some have been dated using radio carbon dating, and others have been easy to date, because the person who copied the text may have simply written the date on the paper when he copied the text.

There are more that 5,000 copies of ancient manuscripts that have been found, cataloged, and preserved over the years. If you want to read more than this article contains on ancient manuscripts I recommend going to www.biblequery.org/ntmss.htm.

The Bible query web site describes the physical appearance of some of the more important manuscripts. One of these is called the Vaticanus manuscript. It is dated between 325 and 350 AD. Here is how the web site describes its physical appearance: “ It was written with brown ink on expensive vellum, with each leaf being 27-28 centimeters square. There were three columns per page and 40-44 lines per column. Today it is in Vatican City in the middle of Rome.”

Here is how it describes the Sinaiticus manuscript: “It originally had at least 730 leaves. Today we have 390 leaves plus fragments of 3 more leaves. (a leaf is two pages.) There are four columns per page and 48 lines per column. It is written on expensive vellum. There were no spaces between words and almost no punctuation. Old Testament quotes are shown as quotes. Today it is in London, UK. For more info and a photograph, see Manuscripts of the Greek Bible, p.76-79.”

As a youngster it never occurred to me that someone translated the Bible before Martin Luther did it in 1522. He translated the Bible into German. He didn’t think it made sense for the German people to listen to the Latin Bible being read by priests.

Since the Old Testament was written in Hebrew and the New Testament in Greek, someone had to translate it into Latin before Martin Luther translated it into German.

A scholar named Jerome, born in Italy in 331 A. D. was asked to translate the Bible by Pope Damascus. Jerome predates Luther by more than 1,000 years. The pope asked him to translate the Bible into Latin because he didn’t think any of the Latin translations that already existed at that time were any good. People have been translating the Bible for a long time. Some of the earliest manuscripts of the Bible are translations.

The first edition of the King James Translation of the Bible was printed in 1620. Once again, the king was convinced that the other English translations were of poor quality. He commissioned a group of more than 50 scholars to translate the Bible into English. The scholars were from four different universities, and each university was assigned a portion of the Bible. We don’t know all the scholars involved in the project. Some think that William Shakespeare was one of them.

Today, many people find the King James translation difficult to read. I am one of them. It was written in the 1600’s using the king’s English. We don’t talk that way any more. Still this translation has left an imprint on me from childhood. The 23rd Psalm doesn’t sound right in any other translation. It is a beautiful thing to hear it in the King James.

The scholars of the 1600’s simply did not have many of the manuscripts that are available to scholars today. The Greek New Testaments that scholars use today are undoubtedly closer copies of the original texts than the texts that were available to the scholars in the 1600s. In general, newer translations can be more accurate because they start using a more accurate Greek New Testament. Still, the King James translation used beautiful language and was recognized as a very balanced and literal translation in its day.

You can see that over the years many people have labored to preserve the writings of the law, the prophets, and the apostles. I believe the Bible is the inspired word of God. People devote their lives to translating it for us as well as they can possibly do it. We are truly blessed by their efforts.

Those who actually read their Bibles are more blessed by the efforts of the Biblical scholars than those who simply have their Bibles gathering dust on a bookshelf somewhere.

A New Year is upon us and I have a suggestion for those of you who like to make New Year’s resolutions. Resolve to read your Bible this year. It takes about fifteen minutes a day to read through the Bible in a year. I believe that reading the word of God is a blessing and I would like you to have this blessing in your life.

There are still copies of the daily reading plan on the table in the entryway of the church. If many people in the congregation keep current using the Bible reading plan, we will all be blessed by reading the same texts at about the same time all year long. I will do it again this year, and I hope that many of you join me.

May you all have a wonderful year in 2005. God bless you all.

Sincerely,

Pastor Birk