The Story of the Bible CHAPTER I ABOUT THE BOOK, AND THE BOOKS I AM going to tell you the Story of the Bible. Is the Bible, then, a story-book? Well, it does tell us hundreds of stories—true stories too! But I am not going to speak of these. You can read them all for yourselves. My story is the story of the Bible itself: how it was written 1; how it was kept, and copied, and translated, and circulated. And a wonderful story it is! First of all, what does the word Bible mean? The answer to this question is very curious. In ancient times books were written either on dried skins or on a part of the stem of a reed called papyrus-the "bulrush" of which the box or ark" was A made in which the infant Moses was put. The outer coat or rind of this reed was called biblos, and from this the writing on it came to be called biblos. So in the Greek language biblos meant a book, and biblion a little book. If you open your New Testament, you will find that its first words are "The book ," and in the Greek, in which the New Testament was written, the first word is Biblos. Then if you turn to the 4th chapter of St. Luke's Gospel, you will find that when Jesus Christ stood up in the synagogue at Nazareth to read, they gave Him a book to read out of, and there the Greek word is biblion. Now the plural of biblion is biblia, "books"; and in the Early Church the Christians used to call the ancient Scriptures of the Old Testament "the Books," biblia. By and by the Roman Christians, who spoke the Latin language, used this word. biblia; but in Latin it would not sound like a plural word, but like a singular one, and so with them biblia came to mean "book," and they used it of the whole Scriptures together as one book-Biblia-" the Bible." So in Greek the Bible means "Books," and in Latin it means "The Book." And this is a very remarkable thing, because it reminds us of the exact truth. Our Bible is "books," and it is also "The Book.' We have it in one Volume, but the Volume contains sixty-six separate books. Sixty-six books! That is quite a library, is it not? The word "library," too, comes from another Latin word, liber, a book. And indeed our Bible really is a wonderful library of books. A famous learned man in the Early Church, Saint Jerome, who lived 350 years after Christ, called it the Divine Library. And yet it is in another sense all one, the One Book of God. When I was a little boy, I used to have to learn a verse out of the Bible every day; and one of the first pieces that I learned in that way was the Nineteenth Psalm. If you will look at that Psalm, you will find that God has spoken to men in two ways. First we read that "the heavens declare the glory of God"; that "day unto day uttereth speech," that "their words" are gone "to the end of the world." This means that the beautiful sky and sun and stars, though they have no voice for our ears, speak to our 99.66 minds of the glory and greatness of God. But then the Psalm goes on to tell of something else that God has given us, His "law," "testimony,' precepts,' ""commandment" ; and these we find in the Bible. So we have the Book of Nature and the Book of Grace. We may well call the Bible the Book of Grace, because it tells us, not only, like the Book of Nature, of God's greatness and power, but also of His love and mercy and grace to us all. Let us now think a little what sort of Book the Bible is. If you went to Turkey, or to Egypt, or to some parts of India, you would find that the Mohammedans there have a book which they think sacred, called the Koran. They would tell you that it is God's book, that it is His message to men, and that He sent it straight down from heaven by an angel, just as it is. Of course that is quite untrue. But do you think that God sent the Bible straight down from heaven like that, just as it is? Not at all. God's way of sending His messages to men was quite different. First, when men in the early ages of the world had forsaken God, and were worship |