The Condensed Story of This Planet

Ralph D. Winter

Wednesday, October 9, 2002

There is something very strange about our Bible. In its first appearance it was a phenomenally wise selection of earlier documents made a couple hundred years before Jesus was born, all translated into colloquial Greek, which happened to be a language which had become somewhat like English today, used more widely in ancient times than any other.

Who used this huge corpus of literature called ?The Septuagint?? By the time Jesus was born ?the children of Israel? were already scattered very widely, most of them in Greek-speaking territory. Two thirds of those taken into exile in Babylon had not yet returned. A million Jews lived in Greek- speaking Egypt. Jewish synagogues could be found all through the Roman empire, even up to the very border of Scotland, at Hadrian?s Wall. Their representatives appeared annually at the feast of the Passover in Jerusalem.

This first ?book? was then eagerly translated into many other languages as well as becoming ?The Bible of the Early Church.? This was probably the scripture which Jesus read in the Nazareth synagogue and quoted from in his ministry. Eighty percent of the quotations in the New Testament are from the Septuagint. It took a thousand years before Jews in later centuries amassed the same selection of documents in Hebrew. No other coherent selection of documents has even remotely had a similar impact on the story of the human race.

No other document has ever even remotely been studied so closely, in so great detail or generated even one hundredth the number of books commenting upon it. You might suppose that the Qur?an has had a similar impact, partly because it often quotes from the Bible. But it hasn?t. Even though it is commonly memorized as in the case of the American Taliban, John Lindh, who had already memorized one third of it, such efforts have little effect because that kind of memorization is of a language not understood. It would be like the average American memorizing the Latin Mass. Probably not more than several hundred people in the world can read and understand it in its original language and it is not supposed to be translated. Even then every fifth sentence is uninterpretable.

The Septuagint, however, is much larger, containing both what is often erroneously called the Old Testament (itself four times the size of the Qur?an) and also a substantial addition of helpful writings called The Apocrypha which continued to be included in the Bible until fairly recently in history. The well-known King James Version of the Bible contained the Apocrypha, and was not printed without it until the appearance of the Bible Societies which wanted to produce the Bible in large quantities at the most economical cost. Catholics continued to include the Apocrypha, and so do many modern translations.

As the Septuagint made its way into the Greek world it is not surprising that additional documents in Greek were added in the decades and centuries following the death of Christ, being firmed up as the New Testament when the Roman Empire began to favor ?Christianity,? (the political label of Greek movement treasuring the Septuagint).

In the next centuries this now larger corpus of material, including the Old Testa- ment, so-called, the Apocrypha and the New Testament has wielded an influence without parallel in all human history. To this day it is still the primary ingredient in the missionary expansion of the church, and, in fact, its importance can in part be drawn from the fact that Biblical faith and human transformation continues to occur even without missionaries once a serviceable translation of a significant portion of the Bible exists. At this stage of history in the non-Western world there are, in fact, more zealous believers who are somewhat separate from the formal Christian movement than the number of zealous believers who are clearly a part of the movement called Christianity. As both Rick Leatherwood and Jim Kramer have testified, parts of the Septuagint in modern translation still have compelling power. Of course, the so-called New Testament displaying as it does the wonders of the ministry of Jesus as well as the mysterious process whereby a Semitic faith can be clothed in Greek garments, has also had a powerful role in extending and confirming the meaning of the Septuagint.

It is no wonder, then, that the human story cannot be told without reference to this book. One of the constant emphases of the book goes beyond its own words. It speaks of the heavens and the earth declaring God?s glory day and night pouring forth a message which is heard in every speech and language. We read in Romans that ?since the creation of the world God?s otherwise invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood

(how?) through what has been made.?

What God has made, whether the inorganic world of the universe or the biological world of this planet, is thus a powerful factor in addition to this all-important book, the Bible. Indeed, it is incumbent upon us to make sure that our understanding of the Bible and our understanding of God?s creation are seen together.

When, for example, village people in England began to uncover huge bones buried deep in the earth, it was immediately important, reverberating as far as Oxford University, to try to understand how this new insight fit into God?s creation and what the Bible was telling us. Now, almost 200 years later, we have literally hundreds of thousands of addition insights into creation?not only evidence of a long story of development, but evidence of 1,000 times as many extinct creatures as are presently alive today, but the whole new world of microbiology. How does this book of creation and the Bible fit together? This is no small question for modern man. The ?book? which pours forth

a message day and night in all languages and tongues clearly speaks more loudly now than ever today.