What does First B Jackson teach about bible translation history?
Drawn from the messages where it was actually addressed: the words said from the front, the passages taught, and where to hear the whole thing.
At First Baptist Jackson, the teaching on Bible translation history comes from a place of deep gratitude and honest reckoning. Pastor Ray walked the congregation through the long, costly effort to put God's word into ordinary hands, beginning with Jerome's Latin Vulgate in 405 AD and moving through the medieval period, when regional councils in Toulouse and Tarragona restricted vernacular translation and prescribed death for those caught with a Bible in their own language. He did not soften that history. The people who gave us scripture in our own language, figures like John Wycliffe, William Tyndale, and Miles Coverdale, paid for it with their reputations, their freedom, and in Tyndale's case, his life.
The thread running through Ray's telling is that God's word belongs to everyone, and that the hunger ordinary people showed for it, evidenced by the fact that more Wycliffe manuscripts survive than any other medieval English writing, is itself evidence of God's hand at work. The King James Version of 1611 came out of a disciplined process: King James I removed partisans from both sides and set forty-eight scholars to work in six companies, each section checked repeatedly before passing to the next, with a requirement of fidelity to the best available Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic texts.
Pastor Carl picked up a related thread in a later message, explaining what textual criticism is and why some modern translations place brackets around passages like Mark 16:9-20. He was direct that no secret council removed anything. Scholars comparing thousands of manuscripts found that two passages were absent from the oldest complete manuscripts discovered in the 1880s, and responsible translations mark that rather than hide it. The difference between the two main Greek textual traditions amounts to those two passages and a handful of words that would fit on half a page. The goal on both sides of that conversation is the same: fidelity to what God actually said, held with humility.
Taught from Isaiah 55:10-11 · Isaiah 40:3 · 1 Peter 3:7 · Mark 16:9-20 · John 7:53-8:11
The passage taught · 1 Peter 3:20-21
20 who before were disobedient, when God waited patiently in the days of Noah, while the ship was being built. In it, few, that is, eight souls, were saved through water.
21 This is a symbol of baptism, which now saves you—not the putting away of the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good conscience toward God, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ,
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- May 5, 2024 Nothing Has Been Wasted Pastor Carl walks through the disputed ending of Mark 16, textual criticism, and what Scripture says about belief, baptism, and the signs that followed the early church.
- April 28, 2024 His Word Will Not Return Empty A Wyoming pastor traces the Bible's journey from Jerome's Latin Vulgate to modern translations, showing why you can trust the version in your hands.
- April 28, 2024 Humble Before the Word Ray traces the Bible's journey from Jerome's Latin Vulgate to modern translations, making the case that God's word belongs in the hands of ordinary people who approach it with humility.