The Origin of the Bible - Flipbook - Page 20
10
THE ORIGIN OF THE BIBLE
quickly circulated among the churches—first a shorter corpus of
ten letters and soon afterwards a longer one of thirteen, enlarged
by the inclusion of the three Pastoral Epistles. Within the Pauline
corpus the letters appear to have been arranged not in chronological order but in descending order of length. This principle
may still be recognized in the order found in most editions of the
New Testament today: The letters to churches come before the
letters to individuals, and within these two subdivisions they are
arranged so that the longest c omes first and the shortest last. (The
only departure from this scheme is that Galatians comes before
Ephesians, although Ephesians is slightly the longer of the two.)
With the Gospel collection and the Pauline corpus, and Acts
to serve as a link between the two, we have the beginning of the
New Testament canon as we know it. The early church, which
inherited the Hebrew Bible (or the Greek version of the Septuagint) as its sacred Scriptures, was not long in setting the new evangelic and apostolic writings alongside the Law and the Prophets,
and in using them for the propagation and defense of the gospel
and in Christian worship. Thus Justin Martyr, about the middle
of the second century, describes how Christians in their Sunday
meetings read “the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the
prophets” (Apology 1.67). It was natural, then, that when Christianity spread among people who spoke other languages than
Greek, the New Testament should be translated from Greek
into those languages for the benefit of new converts. There were
Latin and Syriac versions of the New Testament by a.d. 200, and
aC
optic one within the following century.
THE MESSAGE OF THE BIBLE ______________________
The Bible has played, and continues to play, a notable part in the
history of civilization. Many languages have been reduced to writing for the first time in order that the Bible, in whole or in part,