In this series of lessons, we will travel from ancient Sumeria, the cradle of modern civilization, to the latest translations we use today in our study of God’s word. During this travel, we will learn many things. We will look at many subjects, many people, many religions, and many things that have occurred through history and we will see what effect all of this has had on the book we now know as the Holy Bible. This single book, consisting of 66 separate books, with a total of 1,189 chapters and 31,173 verses, has consistently been the best-selling book in the history of published works and has had the most profound effect on humanity of any written work.

    We will look at those who produce translations. We will discuss how they know what is correct and what is in error. The rules they use to determine "rightness" have been refined over hundreds of years. We will examine each major translation to see what rules were imposed on the translators and see what effect those rules might have had.

    We will look at the influence of contemporary history on the Bible and its translators. Politics cause people to do strange things and the effect of governments and politicians on the Bible is profound.

    We will look at the lives of those who are most responsible for the proliferation of Bibles throughout the world. A great number of devout Christians gave their lives so that the word of God might be recorded and spread throughout the world.

    We will trace the various paths that the scriptures have taken through history.  There are Hebrew paths, Greek paths, English paths, and others. There have been celebrated and notorious events and people with profound effects on the production of the Bible. We will discuss these things.

    How long can a study like this take?  Thousands of books have been written on the Bible. One of my favorites is a very small book called "How We Got the Bible", by Dr. Neil Lightfoot of Abilene Christian University. We will use this book as a guide for our study, expanding on the chapters as we proceed through them.

    The fragment of manuscript shown on the left is the earliest known actual writing of the New Testament. This small fragment of St. John’s Gospel, less than three inches high and containing on the one side part of verses 31-33, on the other of verses 37-38 of chapter 18 is one of the collection of Greek papyri in the John Rylands Library, Manchester. It was originally discovered in Egypt, and may come from the famous site of Oxyrhynchus (Behnesa), the ruined city in Upper Egypt.

     The importance of this fragment is quite out of proportion to its size, since it may with some confidence be dated in the first half of the second century A.D., and thus ranks as the earliest known fragment of the New Testament in any language. It provides us with invaluable evidence of the spread of Christianity in areas distant from the land of its origin; it is particularly interesting to know that among the books read by the early Christians in Upper Egypt was St. John’s Gospel, commonly regarded as one of the latest of the books of the New Testament. Like other early Christian works which have been found in Egypt, this Gospel was written in the form of a codex, i.e. book, not of a roll, the common vehicle for pagan literature of that time.

    But we are a long way from getting to the point of discussing New Testament manuscripts. We need to begin at the beginning, and that is with the history of writing itself.

    Early Writing.   Sumerians created cuneiform script over 5000 years ago. It was the world’s first written language. The last known cuneiform inscription was written in 75 AD. Pictograms, or drawings representing actual things, were the basis for cuneiform writing. As shown in the chart, early pictograms resembled the objects they represented, but through repeated use over time they began to look simpler, even abstract. These marks eventually became wedge-shaped ("cuneiform"), and could convey sounds or abstract concepts.

    The first pictograms were drawn in vertical columns with a pen made from a sharpened reed. Then two developments made the process quicker and easier: People began to write in horizontal rows, and a new type of pen was used which was pushed into the clay, producing "wedge-shaped" signs that are known as cuneiform writing. 

    Cuneiform was adapted by the Akkadians, Babylonians, Sumerians and Assyrians to write their own languages and was used in Mesopotamia for about 3000 years.

    Clay tablets were the primary media for everyday written communication and were used extensively in schools. Tablets were routinely recycled and if permanence was called for, they could be baked hard in a kiln. Many of the tablets found by archaeologists were preserved because they were baked when attacking armies burned the building in which they were kept. Clay was an ideal writing material when paired with the reed stylus writing tool. The writer would make quick impressions in the soft clay using either the wedge or pointed end of the stylus. By adjusting the relative position of the tablet to the stylus, the writer could use a single tool to make a variety of impressions. While many wedge positions are possible, awkward ones quickly fell from use in favor of those that were quickest and easiest to make. Like sloppy handwriting, badly made cuneiform signs would be illegible or misunderstood.

    On a hot sunny day 3700 years ago in the city of Nippur under the rule of the Hammurabi Dynasty (circa 1900 - 1600 BC) a young boy was learning to be a scribe. His classroom was most likely in a private home; his materials: a reed stylus and clay tablets.  The lesson of the day was to practice writing thousand year old Sumerian cuneiform characters. Higher levels of Babylonian learning involved studying the Sumerian roots of their civilization, much like modern students study Greek and Latin.  Literacy and knowledge were the tickets to a prosperous life as a scribe in the ever-growing government and religious bureaucracies. The day’s lesson was a routine, but important, practice in handwriting and vocabulary.

    In the reign of Hammurabi (1792 - 1750 BC) when law and literature were celebrated with zeal, the ancient Sumerian heritage of the region was fully incorporated into the education of the empire’s most promising students. These Babylonians spoke Akkadian and wrote in cuneiform on clay tablets. Akkadian and cuneiform continued to thrive for more than another thousand years under the Assyrians and the later Babylonian revival of Nebuchadnezzar. The use of Aramaic became widespread after the beginning of the first millennium and the Aramaean alphabet gradually replaced cuneiform.

    The Round School Tablet from the Babylonian city of Nippur during the Hammurabi Dynasty - This type of school tablet is called a "lentil" or "bun". The convex shaped back fits naturally into the palm of the hand. There are 4 rows of signs on the front of the tablet. The teacher in ancient Nippur inscribed the signs in rows 1 and 2. The student then took the soft tablet and copied the text into rows 3 and 4. Our student was learning Sumerian signs that were already 1000 years old.  The signs in row 1 were pronounced gi-gur which translates "reed basket". Row 2 reads gi-gur-da and that means a type of large reed basket. This lesson was both for handwriting and vocabulary.

   The Philadelphia Tablet represents the second stage in the development of the Mesopotamian system of recording ancient economic activities. The very first stage of bookkeeping was tied to specific economic items represented by tokens, originally made from stone and then from clay. There was a specific token for sheep, another for wine, another for a day’s work, etc. To record 3 sheep and 2 jugs of wine, the ancient bookkeeper would create the token for sheep three times and the token for wine twice. These tokens were then stored in a container, probably made of cloth or leather. In this first stage, quantities and items were integrally linked together.

    Around 3000 BC the second stage of recording economic activities began to develop. Scribes began to utilize a more complex system of notation, in which tokens were replaced by pictographs on wet clay using a reed stylus. In this second stage, quantities and items were separated. No longer were they using the token for sheep three times in order to represent three sheep, but rather they began to write the pictographic symbol for sheep alongside the symbol denoting the number three. Instead of the same symbol used three times, scribes now wrote two different symbols: one for the amount and another for the item. This was revolutionary.

    Numbers were now free to develop on their own into a complicated numerical designation system. Simultaneously, other written symbols were developed on a phonetic basis rather than a purely pictographic basis. This allowed for the recording of more abstract items such as names of gods, kings and humans and the recording of spoken words in addition to the recording of concrete pictograph items, like sheep and flour. With this breakthrough, the recording of written language developed so that cuneiform writing not only counted things, but could also tell stories.  

     The Sumerians lived along the lower Tigris and Euphrates valley in what is now Iraq. They were the first people to build cities and achieve what we call ‘civilization.’  Sumerians domesticated goats and cattle; they developed writing; they grew wheat and barley, and used them to bake bread and brew beer. The Sumerians built large temple complexes and had kings whom they buried in large tombs. We don’t know whether the wheel was invented by the Sumerians or imported, but in the years between 4000 and 3000 BC it come into general use for military, commercial and agricultural applications.