Christian Studies Year 9: Messages from the Memory Banks
Unit 1: Today's News - Tomorrow's Evidence
Requirements:
Video - Messages from the Memory Banks. Session #1 Today's News - Tomorrow's Evidence (18 min.)
Booklet 'Messages from the Memory Banks' (in .zip format)
Many small objects for memory exercise A sheet to cover them
Main Question
Everything recorded in the Bible happened a long time ago. To what extent can we presume that the accounts we have today are anything like how they started off centuries ago?
Sub-questions
What evidence do we have for the originals?
What do we know about the care with which the documents were copied?
To what extent can we compare results?
How do we find out how old the documents are?
What about before things were written down?
Where does all that leave us?
How do we distinguish between science, interpretation, and faith in what we've discovered?
Activity: Memory Exercise
It may be best to leave these exercises till the second period as the section involving memory only comes in half way through the material. What sort of people do you expect to be able to remember information accurately without needing to write it down or record it? Are there people who would be less able to memorise information? Why the difference?
What are your earliest memories? Why do these events stick in your mind?
Show the group a large selection of objects for a short period. Hide the objects, and on scrap paper, get students to list the items
As part of the review discuss why certain objects stuck in the mind more than others? What does this say about our memory of events?
What devices do we use to help recall? Suggest items such as rhymes, acrostics and poems. We know the rabbis at the time of Jesus used similar techniques to aid memory. The original language of the Lord's prayer (Matthew 6:9-13) uses rhythm and rhyme. The Beatitudes (Matthew 5:3-12) use similar techniques to aid memorisation.
Activity: Chinese Whispers
Pick a group from the class and play Chinese whispers. I try offering a lolly if they manage to pass the message received by the previous person on correctly.
The Video
Before starting the video, consider and discuss the first two questions
� Take some time to think about the Bible. How old do you think it is? Do you think it has been changed much over time?
� If you were to put together a time capsule, what type of things would you like to place in it as a record of who you were and the times in which you lived?
In what ways might the bible be like a time capsule?
� It is a collection of writings based on people's memories of various events, recorded over many centuries. It was put together by people around 300AD by people who thought they were of extreme value to future generations
What evidence do we have for the originals?
How and why were copies made reporting certain events?
� A person involved decides that an event is worth recording. A scribe records the event, and with an audience in mind, copies and made, and copies of these copies are made
� Over time some copies are lost, some copies wear out, so we work with the copies that remain.
When examining a text we are looking for
1. How many copies do we have?
2. What is the time gap between the oldest existing copy and the date of the original?
� We compare Caesar, Plato and Jesus
� Caesar's Wars - from before the birth of Jesus. We have 10 copies, the oldest one being from around 900ad. This is a gap of 1000 years. This is regarded as a good evidence for the validity of the text.
� Plato's writing - he wrote his philosophy around 300-400bc. The earliest copy we have is around 900ad. This is a gap of 1200 years, and we only have 7 copies. However, this also is regarded as sufficient evidence for the originals
� The New Testament, written in the second half of the 1st century AD. We have one document dated 60-70 years after Jesus, and 4 copies written 250 years after Jesus. In total, estimates put the total number of copies at 13, 000.
Care in copying.
How long would the Bible take to write out by hand?
� 10people x 30 hours x 4 = 1200 hours or 50 straight days
How long to do think it would take to photocopy
� less than 10 minutes (if automated)
If a scribe made a mistake in copying out the Old Testament, he would
� start a whole new skin
But if that mistake was an error writing the name of God, he would have to
� start the whole thing again
Because the bible must be copied without mistake or blemish, scribes would
� use complex and thorough checking procedures
Involving procedures such as
� Counting how often words appear
� Counting the occurrence of letter of the alphabet
They did this because they believed that they were copying writings that were
� Inspired by God
How do we know that all these copies are not just made from one another?
Tracing back the family tree
� If we take 2 copies from the tree, and find that they are, for all intensive purposes the same, we can say they are from the same source. If they are from branches a long way apart we can say that they come from a long way back and that accuracy has been maintained.
Working out where each copy comes from.
� The branches from each tree come from different parts of the empire and each area has a different style.
And we know that
� Some place names are spelt differently in different areas.
Beth esda - Alexandrian
Beth saida - Roman
Beth zatha - Western
These differences
� do not result in different meanings
No other ancient book has anything like such early and plentiful testimony to is text, and no unbiased scholar would deny that the text that has come down to us is substantially sound
Sir Fredrick Kenyan, Director, Britsh Museum
By which he means
� for no other similar writing is there such strong evidence that what we have today is, for all intensive purposes, the same as the originals.
How do we work out the age of the documents
With a bit of science, and a bit of general observation
� Carbon 14 dating
� Looking at the design
What do we have concerning the Old Testament?
In 1947, a Bedouin shepherd boy was searching for a lost goat near the Dead Sea. During his search he tossed a stone into a cave and heard the sound of breaking pottery. Upon investigation he found several large sealed jars containing leather scrolls wrapped in linen. Because the jars were carefully sealed, the scrolls had remained in excellent condition for nearly 1900 years. It is widely thought that they were hidden in the cave in AD 68 by members of the Jewish sect hiding from the advancing Roman army.
The implications.
� Our previous oldest documents of the book of Isaiah dated back to 900ad. We know when these copies were hidden, and the copy was, for all intensive purposes, the same as the one 900 years older, despite many generations of copying.
What about before things were written down?
The world record for memory
� Buddhist monk Bhandanta Vicitsara recited from memory sixteen thousand pages of Buddhist holy writings in Rangoon in 1974.
The lack of writing meant that people
� People were more used to remembering events in great detail and passing them on by word of mouth.
So, we can say from our investigations that
� Investigating Documents = Science
� Why it happened = Interpretation
� God's Part = Faith
In conclusion
Science does not rule out the possibility that the bible is inspired by God and passed onto us, in all-important respects, as they originally existed.
