Who authored the Bible – God or man? How was the Bible recorded originally? How did we get the multiple translations of the Bible that we currently use across the planet today? Can they be trusted as accurate? Anyone that has entered into the Christian faith system has at one time or another asked some if not all of these questions. Some ask out of curiosity and then later forget, and some ask with the sense of finding a plague like answer that could potentially alter their personally faith in the word of God. In short, to answer these questions we must take a look back at the history behind the written word of God. “The history of the text of the Bible in the church may be divided into several basic periods, especially with reference to the New Testament: (1) the period of reduplication, (2) the period of standardization of the text, (3) the period of crystallization, and (4) the period of criticism and revision, a struggle has been waged between the proponents of the “received text” and those advocating the …show more content…
During the period of standardization Emperor Constantine there was not much revision of biblical text; however, there were a lot of advancements in the development of paper copies of the Bible. These copies became more abundant after the twelfth century. The reformation period had a huge impact on the widespread use of God’s written word. During the period of crystallization the bible entered into a time of printing through the efforts Martin Luther and the brilliant work he did designing the printing press. This new technological breakthrough empowered the rapid growth of the first taste of what we would call editions of the bible. Some examples of these editions are the work done by men like Cardinal Francisco Ximenes de Cisneroos of Spain, Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, Robert Estienne of Paris, Theodore de Beze, and Bonaventure and Abraham