Dr Paul Allen

October 31 should be Bible Appreciation Day. While the world’s children appreciate candy and playing dress up, we Christians ought to appreciate those who shed their blood in order for us to hold the Bible. If only Wycliffe, Hus, and Tyndale could have seen a vision of my iPhone as they were being killed for their hard work! They would have seen the dozens of translations I hold in my Bible gateway app, or my Logos app, that allows me to have access to so many tools, including the ability to parse Greek words at the drop of a hat! I think it is proper for us to spend a little time tomorrow thanking God for His Word, and for emboldening men and women to be willing to die for the sake of the possibility to hold our Bibles. It is also imperative that you realize the ramifications of their actions. The Roman Catholic Church hates the fact that you have your Bible. They made that very clear when they dug up John Wycliffe’s bones in order to burn them and scatter them in the river Swift.

Hasn’t the Bible been rewritten a number of times? If that’s the case, does the Bible we have today look anything like the original? A friend said she couldn’t trust the Bible because it had been rewritten “like eighteen times.” I asked her if she thought it would be smarter for Christians to just go translate the oldest documents they could find. She said yes—and then I had some good news for her: that’s already what we do. So, are we truly reading the same book now that the earliest Christians used in the first or the second century? Or is it a book that has been rewritten and changed over the centuries? This is actually quite an easy question to answer because of the discovery of so many ancient manuscripts of the Bible in the past one hundred years. The Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Ancient Copies of the Bible One of the biggest discoveries of ancient copies of the Bible was the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1948. Among these scrolls were copies of every Old Testament book (with th