Sermon Tone Analysis

LISTEN TO: I will praise you (Ginny Owens)

Good morning and welcome to Oldfield Free Church.

I’m Ian and it’s great to see you here!

Have you come prepared to participate in worship?

I hope so.

Love the song from Ginny Owens.

When the darkness fades away - very personal to her being blind, but also for us, for then we shall truly see when we are face to face with Jesus.

Today we will have a message about our Bible: What is the best bible translation?

Of course, this is a complete waste of time if we then don’t read it - so we shall be announcing a new bible plan today too!

Again, let me remind you, you do not need your phones during our service, you really can do without them unless you are using the Logos Bible App!

If you’re new here a huge welcome to you.

We have leaflets at the back telling you about us - check out our website and stay for a cuppa after the service.

Let’s start with prayer:

Faithful Father, we begin today by giving you thanks.

Your love endures forever, it never fails.

Though there are many ways in which we have failed, we have not exceeded the supply of your mercy and grace.

We thank you for revealing yourself to us through your word.

As we open the Bible today we pray that we would hear your voice.

We ask that your Holy Spirit would be at work, opening our ears to hear and our hearts to receive your word.

May we be transformed into your likeness.

Through Jesus Christ, our Lord, Amen.

10,000 Reasons

Waymaker

This is amazing grace

Prayer/Notices/Offering/Kids Leave

Sermon

Within a couple of weeks of starting here last year I spoke about the Word of God and how it should be an indispensable part of our daily lives.

Without it we cannot grow as Christians.

Do go and listen to that sermon again, called ‘Let the Word of Christ dwell in you richly”.

Without the Scriptures we shall be swayed by feeling, experience, preachers, sermons, messages, TV, culture if we are not deep rooted in the Scripture.

For how do we know if any of the things I and others have mentioned are of God or not?

We shall lack discernment.

And believe me, discernment is lacking among Christians.

Christians today somehow believe all the publicity around the bible not speaking the truth, that it is corrupt, that it has contradictions, and so on and so on.

You would think by now that there would be no one who could believe a word that is said within the pages of the book called the Bible.

And many are swayed without properly investigating for themselves.

But in all things that it speaks about it has been found to be 100% true and reliable.

That what we have is more accurate than the ten historical documents that we take for granted as being true from 1500+ years ago.

That the contradictions can all be explained with good use of reason and logic.

The things that are ignored are archaeology, history, prophecy and so on that show that the Scriptures has proven time and again its accuracy.

I cannot speak often enough to encourage you to get soaked in God’s Word for it is the number one way that God will speak to us.

The Scriptures does not make Christianity fall or stand but what we understand about our faith cannot be known without it.

Christianity, if you really want to know, stands or falls on the accuracy and reliability of the resurrection.

If that did not happen then there is no point to Christianity at all.

Certainly it is not a moral system to follow for if the resurrection is not real then Christianity is corrupt and lying to us.

But it is not and neither are the Scriptures.

Translations

Today, I want to talk to you about translations especially as we are about to update the bible the Church uses as its base from the NIV 1984 version to the ESV 2001 version.

One of the top questions among Christians and those who are not, is

“what is the right translation?” or “what is the best translation?”.

There is an argument that has raged, especially in the U.S., about Bible Translations and especially concerning the KJV also known as the Authorised Version.

And we will get back to this later on...

We are going to need a bit of history now as to how we got our English translations and a few other interesting titbits.

Well, we need to go back to the Vulgate.

This was a Roman Catholic Translation of the Hebrew and Greek Manuscripts by Jerome in the 4th Century.

Why is this important?

Because most of our translations since then have been influenced by it.

And indeed some false religion known as Jehovah’s Witnesses for it is from this translation that we ended up with Jehovah, which is not God’s name, by the way.

God’s name is YHWH.

There is no J in Hebrew.

And, in fact, Jehovah is made up of the letters of what is called the Tetragrammaton, which is YHWH.

and Adonai, which means Lord or Kyrios in Greek.

There are no vowels in Hebrew.

The Latin used the vowels of Adonai and Elohim and inserted into YHWH and ended up with Jehovah.

There was no such word as Jehovah before that.

It is artificial simply because of the language of the time, Latin, and other languages changed the pronunciation of J from Y to what we have today.

Gja instead of Ya.

This is where Jehovah’s Witnesses have gone completely wrong with even the name of God.

We know now that YHWH is pronounced Yahweh Jews and Greeks have always pronounced it.

Anyhow, returning to English Translations, we come to the man known as Wycliffe who was a priest who wanted people to have God’s Word in English rather than in Latin so he translated from the Latin Vulgate to give an English rendering.

You see what has happened here?

It is a translation of a translation.

Despite this it was quite a good version published at first, in the year of his death, but written in Middle English.

That was in the 14th Century.

Oh, I did say he was a Roman Catholic priest who wrote many a treatise against the Catholic Church, an early reformer and he does not hold back in his attacks.

Then came a man of the reformation known as Tyndale.

We even have a bible society called after him.

He translated from what?

You guessed it - from the Latin Vulgate but ALSO from some Greek and Hebrew.

A little bit of a mix.

But this version has set the standard for even though Tyndale was martyred for this translation, it was just a few years later that Henry the VIII Authorised the translation of a bible and it used what translation?

Tyndale, the man he had put to death.

Miles Coverdale did the work and it was known as The Great Bible.

But it could only be put into churches for it was huge, like the so-called family bibles.

No normal person could afford a copy.

Then a new translation was created in Geneva by the Calvinists using a Greek translation produced by Erasmus in 1590 and this was mass-produced called, would you believe it, the Geneva Bible.

Erasmus is an interesting guy for he translated from six manuscripts the whole bible in Basel Switzerland.

The interesting part is that the manuscripts had Revelation missing and he cobbled together Revelation from commentaries of the time but the last six verses were missing and so Erasmus created these six verses translating Jerome’s Latin Vulgate into Greek.

And this was used to translate back into English.

So, it went from Greek into Latin into Greek into English.

And to this day all bibles that use the so called Textus Receptus have Erasmus interesting Greek translation translated into English.

But the problem was that the Anglican Church did not like it so produced another bible Authorised by Elizabeth I, known as the Bishop’s Bible.

This used partly the Greek translation of Erasmus and the Authorised Great Bible produced in Henry VIII’s day.

The general public had the Geneva Bible but in Church they heard the Bishop’s Bible!

And so along came King James I of England with yet another version and was translated from both the Bishop’s Bible and Geneva.

Confused yet?!

This was the King James Version, also known as the Authorised Version - but note this is the

third Authorised Version by a monarch:

King Henry VIII Great Bible,

Queen Elizabeth I Bishop’s Bible