God’s Word—Worth Dying For!

on January 11, 2025

The words of the Lord are pure words, like silver refined in a furnace on the ground, purified seven times Psalm 12:6.

In the ancient world, all copies of books were produced by hand-copying letter by letter. The materials were expensive as was the use of a scribe who was specially trained for the task. A book was a treasure—so much so that when Paul was giving instructions to Timothy, he asked him to bring his books when he came (2 Timothy 4:13).

Christians began copying the New Testament Scriptures, it seems, as soon as they were authored. If people in Lystra wanted a copy of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, they had to find an existing copy and someone who knew how to write to copy it. Textual evidence suggests that most of these early copies were created by amateurs not by expensive professional scribes. The texts were also not copied on expensive vellum (or parchment) scrolls but on cheaper papyrus that could use both sides of the page. It was probably very rare for someone to possess all 27 books of the New Testament during that time; more likely, the books were shared among house churches and propagated from one church to another.

Because Christians were also spreading the gospel to people who didn’t speak Greek, translations of Scripture began appearing very early in Latin, Coptic, and other languages. Eventually, the Catholic church determined that one version of the Latin Scriptures, edited by the scholar Jerome, was the authoritative version to be used by all Catholics—even those who never spoke a word of Latin in their lives. The Greek Orthodox church, meanwhile, used a certain family of Greek text they believed to be best copied.

With the advent of the printing press, it became possible to mass-produce books much more easily than before, and for the first time in history, those copies could be identical to each other. Translators risked and sometimes gave their lives to bring the Scriptures into the languages common people spoke.

Today, Bible translators still labor to produce texts of Scripture in the languages of people who do not yet have God’s Word in their language. Yet many English speakers have multiple copies of Scripture gathering dust on their shelves. Having a historical perspective on what it took to go from the precious papyrus copies of Scripture to the bound book we take to church today helps us understand what a precious treasure it is to have the Word of God.

Adapted from Answers with Ken Ham radio program.

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