Proverbs 4:7 says, “The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom, and whatever you get, get insight.” I love that. Wisdom doesn’t start with having all the answers, it starts with honestly pursuing them.
That’s exactly the idea behind a free Bible literacy assessment I just launched, and I want to tell you why I think it matters. Here’s a question worth pondering: do you actually know the Bible’s big story?
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Have you ever taken the time to locate an Old Testament passage which was quoted by a New Testament author? If so, you probably noticed that, frequently, the wording is not exactly the same. What is going on? Why did the New Testament authors not quite get the quote right? It’s not because they were being sloppy, nor was it because they quoted from memory and got it a little wrong. It was because they were quoting from the Septuagint.
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What’s the point of studying the Old Testament? It was written by ancient authors to ancient people concerning an obsolete covenant (Heb 8:13). One famous mega-church pastor said we don’t need the old testament scriptures to prop up the new covenant. So why would anyone want to study the Old Testament?
Why study the Old Testament?
The Bible is an interconnected whole. It is like a living organism that cannot be reduced to smaller pieces and retain its essence and being. Check out this marvelous graphic that depicts how the Bible connects and hyperlinks to different parts of itself. Along the bottom of this image is one vertical line for each chapter in the Bible. The longer the line, the longer the chapter. All of the colored arcs show 63,779 Bible cross-references. This is an incredible visualization that drives home the fact that the Bible is an astonishingly complex and interconnected collection of texts. Want to make sense of these scriptural hyperlinks in the New Testament without the Old Testament? Good luck with that!
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If you’ve spent much time comparing passages from newer translations of the Bible (NIV, NASB, NKJV, etc) to the King James Version, you’ve noticed that some verses, or portions of verses, have been moved from the main text into a footnote. The footnotes usually say that the verse does not appear in the earliest and most reliable manuscripts.
Why are these verses questioned by scholars and Bible translators? Are they trying to discard portions of the Bible? Are they attempting to achieve some dark objective which results in casting doubt upon the inspiration of the Bible? The quick answer is that nothing sinister is going on. Rather than “removing” verses, the translators have valid reasons to believe that some verses should have never been in the Bible to begin with.
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The Bible isn’t a single book. Rather, it is a collection of 66 individual books and letters that have been compiled into one volume. These books and letters were written by approximately 40 different people spanning a time period of over 1500 years.
The books which are regarded as having divine authority and which comprise the Bible are referred to by scholars as “canonical” writings. The English word “canon” is derived from a Greek word which referred to a standard or rule. Thus, a writing is considered canon if it meets a certain standard.
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