Why?

I have something of a fascination with the Scriptures. I have been told that I am obcessed with them although I think I might have to deny that. No matter how much time we spend in Scripture…is it possible to classify that time as an obcession?

I guess one could be obsessed with Scripture if they did not hold with the beliefs of the Scriptures and therefore were spending time in them for some other reason but then…no, even that would not be an obsession.

I don’t think you could ever become obsessed with the Scriptures.

But anyway…that is a bit beside the point. I recently watched a documentary on the history of the Scriptures. It was truly fascinating and I found myself wanting to watch it again almost as soon as it ended. But I also found myself with more and more questions over the weeks after I watched that documentary.

It started with a need to understand more about those years in which the Scriptures were preserves by handwriting them. Oh, the monumental tasks those scribes and Christians had. In learning more about that I set out to write the Scriptures. I had no goal to write all of them. Had no plan beyond wanting to write them. I simply wanted to experience something of what the Christians and scribes of old experienced in their task of preserving, copying, and owning a copy of the Scriptures.

And learn I did.

It didn’t take me very long to discover that there is something infinitly different in the experience of writing out the Scriptures. There is a connection to them that we don’t get when we walk into a store, pick up a Bible, and lay our money or credit card on the counter.

But my interest, my fascination, my need to understand didn’t stop there. In truth I doubt it will ever stop. I hope it never stops.

As the Scriptures took on a bit of a different meaning to me…or at least as I began to understand a tiny bit of what it took for the Scriptures to be preserved so that we might have them today…I began to think about the Scriptures. To wonder. To need to know more.

My first question was exactly how and when did the Scriptures come to be called the Old and New Testaments? I don’t recall ever reading either of those terms in Scripture. And yet…today we define much of Scripture by those terms. We put great importance on those terms because they represent the Scriptures. But…are those terms in Scripture? And how did we come to have them?

So I began to research…

I quickly discovered that it’s pretty easy to find out what the Old and New testaments are but that it isn’t so easy to discover how they came to be called the Old and New testaments.

There seemed to be no end of places to find out that the Old Testament is the first section in the Bible and that it consists of 39 books. Well, yes, I already knew that. That wasn’t exactly what I was looking for. Nor was the information that states that the Old Testament is the history of God’s people. It didn’t help to read that the New Testament consists of 27 books either. Nor was it helpful to find article after article that said the New Testament is the written demonstration of the fulfillment of the prophesies in the Old Testament and letters that teach of the way a Christian should behave.

It also didn’t help to read that there is just over 400 years between the end of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New Testament. That 400 plus year gap in the Scriptures marks the line between what one might call part one of the Scriptures and part two. It is the dividing line between what we call the Old Testament and the New Testament.

That’s all very important information and we need to know it. It is a basic outline or summary of the Scriptures but it didn’t help any in my question as to how the Bible came to be called the Old and New Testaments.

We live in what they call the information age. Technology is literally at our fingertips pretty much 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And yet…I couldn’t seem to find the information I was seeking.

I am fairly certain that none of the writers of the books of the Old Testament called what they were writing the Old Testament. I’m fairly certain they did not even know to call them the Old Testament. Therefore…that is a man-made term, not an inspired term. How then did it come to be used? I know what the Old Testament is. I know some of how it was preserved and I know that it is speculated to have been completed as early as 3 AD, but…how did it come to be called the Old Testament?

I did find some very interesting information as I researched. Some of that information came from very anti-Christian sources. For instance one article I read said that most religions have a religious book and that the Bible is the religious book of Christians. It was lumped in with any other book falling under the label of religion. No more importance was given to the Scriptures than was given to any other religious book. It was just one of many.

And yet, even in that…secular?...source, I found much interesting and informative information on our very sacred Writings. I’m sure I could have found the same information in Christian sources if I had kept looking but I wasn’t looking for all the little facts and details…I wanted an answer to a certain question. How did the Bible come to be labeled as Old and New Testaments?

And I seemed to be finding everything but the answer to that question. I found out that the 39 books commonly labeled as the Old Testament were originally written in Hebrew and Aramaic, I knew that, and that they come from the 24 books of the Jewish Bible which is divided into three sections, I didn’t know that. Nor did I know that they are numbered and ordered differently in the Jewish Bible than they are in the Old Testament.

Okay, something new learned. But still not the answer to my question. I kept researching. And I learned more about the Scriptures…I did not know that the first five books of the Bible…Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy…are not only referred to as the Law but that they are also called the Torah. I have a tendency to try and avoid, at all costs, any understanding of other religions. I do not feel the need to prove or disprove what I believe and I do not feel the need to allow something that does not hold with my Lord into my head.

But there I was, learning things I did not know, some of it from other beliefs, in my quest to find the answer to a question that should be easily answered. How did the Scriptures come to be labeled as Old and New Testament?

And so I kept learning. Torah means ‘to teach’ and it is called that, I suppose, because it is the story of how Israel, or God’s people, came to be. I guess it is called ‘to teach’ because it teaches us about the beginnings.

At that point I was sure I was being taught but I wasn’t learning what I wanted to. Still…did I mention I have a fascination with the Scriptures? I was happy to learn more about the Scriptures even if I wasn’t learning the answer I sought. So I kept going.

Which took me into the prophets. The word, or term, prophet comes from the Greek word meaning ‘to speak on behalf of’. The prophets were men that spoke on behalf of God. They were preachers or teachers that shared the Lord with others. I found out that the books that fall under the label of prophets are separated into two catagories, the Former Prophets…Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings…and the Latter Prophets…Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, plus a section called the twelve, or the Minor Prophets, Hosea, Joel, Amos Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habukkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi.

All great information. Not the information I wanted. And so I worked my way through learning about the Writings…Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah and 1^st and 2^nd Chronicles. And then I learned about the books of Wisdom…Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes…and on to Ruth and Esther, and… well you get the idea. There seemed to be end to what I could find out about the Old Testament but where was what should be a very simple answer to how it came to be called the Old Testament?

There was much interesting information about the books of the Bible. Like reading of how Psalms were collected and compiled to be used in worship and how the books of wisdom were written in a way that was used throughout the ancient Near East. But…interesting as all that was…it wasn’t what I was looking for.

I kept looking and learned much about the New Testament. I read of the Gospels and how that term means ‘good news’, something I already knew.

I read of how it is believed that Matthew and Luke used Mark to write their Gospels. The New Testament places Mark second in the line of New Testament books but it was actually the first Gospel written.

I read of how those three gospels are the synoptic Gospels and can be compared, one to another, because synoptic means ‘viewed together.’ There are Bibles out there called parallel Bibles, they take two different versions of the Bible and print them side by side so that you actually have two different Bibles in one, and are able to read them side by side. I think it would be interesting to have the Gospels in a similar form.

I once tried comparing two different copies of the exact same Bible, turning between the Gospels in them so that I could mark the synoptic verses of the Gospel. That kept me busy for a while until I decided there had to be a better way. I was fairly sure that there must be something online where the work of figuring out which Gospel verses go together has already been done. I gave up the task of comparing them with full intention of finding that list…I have yet to even look for it. But I do think it would be neat to have a copy of the Gospels all written out side by side so that they could be easily compared to each other.

I do know that the Gospel of John is written to the believer whereas the other Gospels are written more toward everyone. And in my research I came across something that talked of the difference in John verses the other Gospels.

I read of how the Epistles were copied and circulated among the Churches and I thought of what it might be like to receive a letter…we’ll just say through the mail…that was even just one of the Epistles, hand written, to learn from, to explore, to enjoy. What treasure would we hold in our hands, even in our day, even in my house where numerous Bibles live, if we could hold a handwritten copy of one of the Epistles…or any other section of the Scriptures…in our hands?

As I write this, Christmas is rapidly approaching. I think the greatest gift I could receive for Christmas, or any time, would be just such a letter. A handwritten letter of Scriptures. Oh, what wonder would be contained within those pages. And how I would enjoy them.

There is just something about even a single page of handwritten Scripture.

I imagined the people of the early churches with no copy of the Scriptures…at least not like we have them today…and how they must have had their hearts lifted to receive one of those letters. What edification they must have gained from reading them.

And although I had yet to find the answer to the question that plagued me I was learning much fascinating information and so I kept digging and I learned…what I was looking for. Finally, after wading through more information that it seemed would be needed…I discovered the answer to my question in the midst of a secular article.

I do have to wonder why the answer came in a secular form when it would seem that anyone claiming the title of ‘Christian’ should have an interest in at least understanding how the Book they claim to put so much stock in came to be. And maybe the answer can be found in many a Christian article but I didn’t find it in any of the Christian articles I read.

This article, as it spoke of ‘the Christian Bible’ gave me the answer to what I was looking for. It was an article for informative purpuses, laying out the details the same way one might write of the history of any other book. There was nothing in it about the holiness of the Scriptures, nothing about its sacredness…but there was, in it, the answer to my question.

The Bible is separated into the Old and New Testaments…as we know…and these Testaments are labeled as such because of the Covenants of Scripture. I had wondered about that but I didn’t want to assume anything. I wanted to KNOW. And the knowing was a lot harder to come by than the wondering.

Apararently the Old Testament and the New Testament are often called the Old Covenant and the New Covenant. I had to stop there. You see, I grew up in and out of ‘church’ buildings, I was raised a ‘Christian’ and I had never heard the Old Testament or the New Testament referred to as The Old Covenant and the New Covenant. Not in relation to the sections of the Bible.

I know much of the difference between the old covenant and the new covenant but I have never heard Scripture separated into the Old Covenant and the New Covenant. And it was at that point, a point that I had already begun to think I didn’t much care for some of the man-made terms applied to the Scriptures, that I realized I much preferred the terms Old Covenant and New Covenant. They are terms that can be found in Scripture, and they just seem to…fit with the holiness of the Scriptures so much better than the terms Old and New Testaments.

There is a huge difference in the definition for testament. According to the oxford dictionary, the definition I got with a quick internet search, testament is defined as being a persons will, something that serves as a sign or evidence of a specified fact, even or quality, and…

I found this part interesting and a bit mystifying.

It is defined as…

 (in biblical use) a covenant or dispensation.

There was a distinction made for it being a covenant or dispensation. That distinction was only when it is used biblically. In other words the word testament appears to have been made to fit the use it was given. Because it was used to represent a covenant it now holds the definition of being a covenant but only when used in relation to the Bible.

At least, that is my understanding. So then I had to wonder…why in the world was the term Testament used when it would have been just as easy to label the sections of Scripture as Covenants?

But I didn’t follow through that at that time. I was still researching my original question and didn’t want to get sidetracked. With such a mystifying, and what seemed to me to be unnecessary labeling of the Scriptures I moved on to what a covenant is. A covenant is a contract. In Scriptures covenants are pacts made between the Lord and His people.

God made a covenant with Abraham to made the people of Israel His people. Christ made a covenant with his blood. These were holy agreements between the Lord and His people. Covenants are…to me…an entirely different thing than a testament is. And yet…our holy Scriptures are separated into Old and New Testaments.

There even seems to be some overlapping of the division of the Scriptures. Our Bibles are separated into Old and New Testaments. The Old Testament ends at the end of Malachi but the new covenant doesn’t go into effect until the death of Christ, or the moment when Christ says that He institutes a new covenant. And yet…the birth of Christ happened under the Old Covenant. The way our Bibles are divided puts the years between the beginning of the New Testament and the beginning of the New Covenant into the New Testament and yet they fall under the Old Covenant.

The lapse of 400 years between Malachi and Matthew makes a very big dividing line in the Scriptures. It is a time when we had no written instruction from the Lord recorded and it may well be that that time period was the Lord’s way of dividing his Scriptures…what do I know? But it seems as if we have a labeled division in the Scriptures not because the Lord put it there, but because man did. The Lord put the time gap there but what of the line that marks the end of the Old Covenant and the beginning of the New? Again…I know nothing…I’m just thinking and wondering and I’m doing it by writing which means I will share it with others…but… it seems to me that the division between the Old Covenant and the New Covenant is of much greater importance than the division between the beginning of that 400 year gap and the end of it.

And this got me to thinking of something else. Our Scriptures have been much changed from their original forms. They were originally written in three different languages by many different authors over many centuries.

They were written, in most cases, by men that did not know each other, and in many cases, by men that had few if any of the other Scriptures at their disposal. The Bible consists of 66 books written by 40 authors, that we know of, over a time span of about 1500 years. These men came from different times, different backgrounds, and spoke different languages. Since there was no Bible in the days that the Scriptures were written the men that wrote the Scriptures had no idea that their writings would one day be placed into a single book with other writings. They each wrote independently through divine revelation so that all of their writings support one another. They speak of creation, of God’s plan, of salvation, of redemption. They even foretold the future and got it right.

When the Scriptures were written they were written as individual writings. They were written on scrolls. As letters. As visions. They were not written with the intent of being included in a single book of any kind. The names of the books of the Bible as we have them were not written down at the top of that set of Scriptures before the writing started.

When I sat down to write out the Scriptures I got a notebook…really a composition book…and, after deciding to begin at the beginning of the New Testament, I wrote Matthew across the top of the first page in my notebook. I then proceeded to copy the Scriptures down.

The original writers of Scripture did no such thing. They no more named what they were writing that I name a letter I send to a friend or family member. Luke did not write his name above the story of the very holy happenings he recorded. He did not decide that what he was writing should hold his name and therefore make his name the first thing in those writings. At some point in time someone other than the authors of the books of the Bible named those books.

The point I’m getting to is that the more I thought of the history of the Bible the more I realized that much of the Bible comes to us with the addition of the things of men. Someone somewhere labeled each book. Supposedly, I have not seen this for myself, the Jewish Bible puts several of the books from the Bible into one book instead of two. They do have less books in their version than the Old Testament does.

Who made those distinctions?

I don’t need to know the answer to that question, although it might be interesting, I only ask the question because there is an important fact to be considered there. Someone…some person…decided what the books of the Bible would be named and in many cases where they would be divided into different books.

Because the New Testament comes to us as the New Testament we have a tendency to see the line in the sand, so to speak, as being the split between the Old and New Testaments but the reality is that those terms, and that separation, was decided by men and not by the Lord.

The same situation arises through the separation of the books of the Bible. Now in those we do get a bit more separation through the Scriptures themselves. There is often a theme to a certain book and a change of author. But still…someone decided where in the Bible that book would go and they gave it the name it has.

I recently had a stack of letters in my hands that were written by two different people. I was, you might say, an in between point for these two people. I was sharing what this one said with that one and what that one said with this one. In doing that I had multiple letters in my hands, written by different people, and I was juggling those letters trying to keep them separate and trying to figure out which page of which letter came first.

On that day I was sitting in the floor with those letters, written on different kinds of paper, on different colors of paper, and I was transcribing letters. And as I did that, as I tried to keep the pages straight, I began to think of how it might have been to have the Scriptures written on loose paper the way those letters were.

There, in my hands, were the original letters, but I had more than one letter written by each person. Each letter was written to me but I was trying to share the words of the two people that wrote to me with both of them. I was the go between. What if I had copied down those letters the wrong way? What if I mixed up page two of the first letter with page two of the third letter?

I’m not at all implying this happened with Scripture. Scripture is divinely inspired and divinely preserved. What I’m saying is that as the one that was in the middle with those letters I had to decide what was important enough in each letter to be shared and in what order I should share it.

Because the Scriptures were not originally written into a book, someone, somewhere had to decide how those Scriptures would go into a book when the book was put together. And someone, somewhere named the different sections. Just as someone, somewhere, picked the terms Old and New Testament…for what reason I never did find…and chose the line that would divide the Scriptures.

There is much fascinating history in the Scriptures. Just the knowledge that the New Testament was written in a totally different language (Greek) than the Old Testament, or the understanding that the original Scriptures…or as close to them as we have today…were written on animal skins, or the understanding that some of the oldest surviving Bibles, even pieces of them, were written on cotton and linen ‘papers’ and therefore are not prone to the same kind of deterioration that our modern Bibles, written on wood pulp paper, are.

I am, even as I write this, working on another writing, that one on Revelation 1:10. In that one I wrote of how the change of a single word can often effect how we see Scripture. If we have the word ‘on’ before this day…we assume that we are speaking of something taking place on this day, such as, it was this day, but if we have the word ‘in’ before this day, we think of a future happening. In this day…a day to come…this will happen. They are little differences but sometimes a little difference can be all the difference needed to make us think one thing when the reality is far different from what we think.

The use of the terms Old and New Testaments give us a far greater difference than the use of the terms Old and New Covenant. In fact, despite the fact that I was raised a ‘Christian’ in ‘church’ buildings…I don’t think I ever heard the terms old and new covenant. If I did they sure didn’t sink in. Which means they couldn’t have been used very much if any.

Even the term Bible. We so often call the Scriptures the Bible but the word Bible simply means book. And it can be found nowhere in the Scriptures. Someone, somewhere decided to label the Scriptures as Bible…and now it is the common acceptable term for the holy Scriptures. We even capitalize it to show respect for it and yet…it is nowhere in the Scriptures. We have allowed men to put a label…one that truly shows nothing of the sacredness of the Scriptures…in fact if you stop and think about it…how respectful is it to label the most sacred writings we’ve ever had as ‘the book’?

It is ‘the Book’ of all time. It is the greatest ‘Book’ ever written. But…the Lord never called it ‘the Book.’ In my research I saw someone state that we don’t find the term Bible in the Scriptures because the Bible, as we know it, didn’t exist then, but I have to ask…in a Book that holds so much prophecy…did the God that gave us the inspired holy Scriptures not have the ability to know that the Scriptures would one day be called the Bible? Could He not have used that term if He had wanted to? Instead we see it nowhere in Scripture.

We are given instead the description of ‘word’. The Scriptures are referred to in the Scriptures as the word of God. Which just so happens to be the same description used to refer to Christ. John 1:1 is a wonderful example of that…

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. (NIV)

The Scriptures are described as being the word of God but never as being ‘the book’, or ‘the Bible.’ We also see written in Scripture that they are referred to as Scripture…

All scripture [is] given by inspiration of God, and [is] profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: 2 Timothy 3:16

For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the scriptures might have hope. Romans 15:4

In my research I saw where someone had said that if we had the original copies…the very first writings…of Scripture that we would make idols of them. I don’t know if that’s true or not but there is much about Scripture that we could make idols of. I have a fascination with the Scriptures and a desire to understand much of them. That fascination isn’t only in the words of the Scriptures but also in the history of the Scriptures. I would love, absolutely love, to see a very hold Bible. Even more so, I would love to be able to touch one, to hold it in my hands. I would even love to own one.

So far the Lord has allowed me to see them only through pictures. But even as I have seen them in pictures…I still want to see one in person.

There has been much controversy over which version of the Bible is the ‘right’ version. I even spent a time wondering and researching that very thing myself. Maybe that’s a good thing so long as it isn’t taken to extremes. Scripture tells us to test everything and in our day there are many versions of the Bible that have been changed to the point that we probably should not even give them the name Bible.

I think…that much of the history of the Bible could become an idol if the interest in its history were to ever outweigh a person’s love of the Lord, or even their love of the Scriptures themselves. But I do think that we can learn much by looking to the history of the Scriptures and in my case…I have gained a deeper understanding of the Scriptures by questioning the things that men have added to the sacred writings.

And for me…there much more reverence in ‘the Scriptures’ than there is in ‘the Bible’. Yes, the Bible is the common description but just as I think it would be wonderful to have a written copy of any part of the Scriptures, I think that there is much difference in how we refer to the Scriptures.

The Bible…or the Book…is a common term that holds little or any of the reverence that seems to come through when we speak of the word of God or the Scriptures. There is a holiness about those two terms that cannot be contained in the word Bible…or so it seems to me.

It could just be the reverence that I place on the different words. But it does seem as if the descriptions used in the Scripture for the Scriptures hold more meaning than the descriptions given by men.

Oh, the treasures to be found within the Scriptures if we only dig deep enough to find them. Like buried treasure that must be unearthed we must think, and wonder, and question, to find the wonderful treasures within the Scriptures.