The Bible in English, Introduction

This is the introduction of a four-part series, based on an Adult Bible-study series that I’m teaching at my church.

This series is about the Bible in English. The Bible holds a central place in our worship and our daily lives. We use it for doctrine and ethics. Baptists have always believed that each individual has the right and responsibility to read and understand the Bible to best of his or her ability. It’s my goal that this series will encourage you to read the Bible more often, and more intelligently.

The series is divided into four parts. I’m going to concentrate on the New Testament, since the issues we’ll discuss are substantially the same for both testaments. In parts 1 and 2, we examine where the Bibles we read come from. We’ll find it’s a two-step process. The first step is to determine what the biblical authors actually wrote, i.e., we must first recover the original text of the biblical books. (Later on, I’ll explain why I use the word “recover.”) The second step is to translate the recovered text into English. Part 1 is about how scholars recover the original text. Part 2 is about how scholars translate the text into English. In part 3 we will cover various ways that people have understood the Bible as an inspired text. We’ll pay close attention to the keystone passage, 2 Timothy 3:16-17, and see if we can work things out from there. In part 4 we’ll look at the various tools available to the average person to help make reading the Bible easier and more productive: commentaries, encyclopedias, and lexical aids.

Before I get into the first part of the series, I want to briefly cover two things I won’t be doing in this series. First, I won’t be telling you which translation of the Bible you should read. That decision is up to you. Hopefully, I’ll give you enough information to make a good decision about which translation will work best for your goals, and how to best understand the translation you own. Second, I won’t be telling you how to read the Bible. That decision is also up to you. But I do hope that by the end of the series you’ll have a good sense of the way God touches both our hearts and our minds through the Bible.

Finally, a brief note about my methods. As some of you know, in a previous life I was the news director at a small-town radio station (WPAQ in Mount Airy). I’m not an expert in journalism, but I learned the most important lesson of that noble profession: If your mother says she loves you, you need to get two independent sources to confirm it before you mention it on the air. (That’s an old journalism joke.) I’ve done my best to fact-check everything. You can find my references at the end of each PowerPoint presentation, but be aware that some of things I’ll share with you are common knowledge in the field of biblical studies.

Next: Part 1, Recovering the Original Text of the Bible