1279. Our New Normal! As counseled by President Russell M. Nelson, and my plan to follow it!

 I absolutely loved the General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, this past Saturday and Sunday, October 3rd and 4th, 2020!

We are so blessed to have our General Authorities and Prophet lead us!

Our Prophet, Russell M. Nelson, counseled us:

A New Normal
By President Russell M. Nelson

Today we often hear about “a new normal.” If you really want to embrace “a new normal,” I invite you to turn your heart, mind, and soul increasingly to our Heavenly Father, and His Son, Jesus Christ. Let that be your “new normal.”Embrace “your new normal” by repenting daily. Seek to be increasingly pure in thought, word, and deed. Minister to others. Keep an eternal perspective. Magnify your callings. And, whatever your challenges, my dear brothers and sisters, live each day so that you are more prepared to meet your Maker.

Today is my 86th birthday!  October 6, 2020.  It is also the 66th birthday of my dear daughter-in-law Julie.  I live with her and my son, Wayne.

I have decided  to do this next year:   I've had a book for years that is the textbook for a college New Testament class.  It has 56 chapters in 568 pages, and I've decided to write a synopsis of each chapter once each week.  I will keep reading "Come Follow Me", that our Church is following, but I will also study this every week.  I do want to focus on Pres. Nelson's counsel! 

 I hope it helps you readers also keep your minds and hearts on our Savior Jesus Christ!  I will post my notes, such as below, each week for the next year, until I'm 87 years old!  That's my plan and I hope it will be interesting and that I can do it!

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Chapter 1, Introduction to the New Testament.

This chapter gives a brief overview of the period between the Old and the New Testaments.  The last book in the Old Testament was finished about 430 B.C.  During the period until Jesus was born, there was a lot of war, etc., and the books written then are called the Apocrapha.

Those periods between the period of the Old Testament and Jesus were very confusing, as the 10 tribes of Israel had been conquered, and sent into many surrounding countries.  The periods were of different types of governments in control -- the first was called the Persian period --  from 516 B.C. to around 336 B.C.  Before that time in the Old Testament there were prophets who wrote -- last one in the Bible was Malachi, written about 430 B.C.  After that, scribes, temple priests and Rabbis gradually replaced prophets as their spiritual leaders.  During the Hellenistic period, 336-323 B.C. Alexander the Great conquered  Babylon and that area, the Greeks were in control, and many Jews were scattered, throughout the Mediterranean area.

The next was known as the Hasmonean period, and Judaism was banned, and pagan gods were put in the temple in Jerusalem.  In 167 B.C. the Maccabeans revolted, and if you have heard of the Apocrapha, it tells of the Maccabeans overcoming those who had conquered the area we now know as Israel. 

Then the Roman empire captured that area in about 63 B.C. and during that time Jesus Christ was born, and the ruler of Judea was the Jewish king Herod the Great.  He was the one who ordered the killing of the children of Bethlehem age two and under.  We'll read it in the Christmas story in Matthew, which comes next week.  When he died, the lands he ruled were divided between 3 of his sons, and Herod Antipas ruled Galilee, in which was Nazareth where Jesus grew up. (I visited that area when I was in Israel, and was in a ship on the Sea of Galilee,)  They ruled until about 324 A.D.  So that area didn't have freedom, and that was the life into which Jesus was born.  

In this chapter it tells of how the New Testament books were written beginning around 200 A.D.after the deaths of the Apostles.  The various apostles had written their accounts during their lifetimes, and they were kept.  The word Bible is derived from the Greek word biblia, which means books.  Before they were compiled they mostly wrote on scrolls, or papyrus types. 

In367 A.D. Arthanasius of Alexandria compiled a list of the 27 books which are now in the New Testament, made in codex form, or separate pages bound together, sort of like we now would have a book spiraled.  That is about when Christianity became the national religion mostly throughout the Roman Empire, and Europe, and they began having Popes.

In 383 A.D. the Pope commissioned his secretary Jerome, to produce a new version, written in Latin as the books then written were in Greek and Latin, and probably some Hebrew.  It became the Vulgate edition, and  for over 1000 years, it helped preserve Europe's spiritual and intellectual heritage, and actually helped preserve the language. For over a thousand years the common people weren't allowed to read the Bible, only the Priests, etc. so the men who translated the Bible during those years were mostly Catholic priests.  

The Bible was first translated into German beginning in 348 A.D. when Wulfila, a Catholic Priest, fled with his followers from Germany to Bulgaria, because of religious persecution.  He translated the Bible from Greek into the Gothic dialect, and this helped set much of the Christian German vocabulary that is still used today.  Several German translations of the Bible were produced in German, when in 1517 Martin Luther began working on another translation. He finished the New Testament in 1522, and finished the entire Bible in 1534.  It influenced German culture, and helped standardize the German religious and literary language, and helped create national unity.  It also helped start the Reformation, as he studied the books of the Bible, and could see ways the Christian churches had changed the way Jesus had taught.

The first translation of the Bible into English was by John Wycliffe,  in the late 1300's.  About 30 years after his death his bones were dug up and burned and the ashes scattered, and he was called a heretic.  The definition of a heretic is a person whose beliefs or actions are at odds with what is accepted in the ruling Church.

His version was  written in English, and was  studied by William Tyndale, fluent in eight languages, who wanted to put the Bible in the hands of the common man, about the time of Columbus. He tried to get permission to prepare a translation of the Bible in English so that everyone could read, and apply the word of God.  It was denied and considered casting "pearls before swine". In 1535 Tyndale was arrested for heresy and treason, and was in prison in a castle dungeon in Belgium for about a year and a half.  On October 6, 1536, 984 years ago today!  he was taken outside the castle wall and fastened to a post.  He just had time to say his final prayer "Lord! Open the king of England's eyes!, and he was strangled, and then his body was burned at the Stake.

The printing press had been invented in Germany in 1440, and the first book printed was the Gutenberg Bible, in Latin.  About 600 years before, the Chinese had invented block printing, where they put ink on blocks and could print them, but Gutenberg was the first with moveable type.  What an invention that was, and changed the world!

Tyndale's translation of the Bible helped in the production of the King James Bible, done in England from 1604 through 1611 by a team of about 50 translators.  King James the First who lived from 1566 to 1625 commissioned it, and translations of the Bible in English, Spanish, French, German, and Italian were used, along with manuscripts of Bible texts in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek.  It has had a tremendous influence on the English language, similar to the impact of the Luther Bible on German. 

The Prophet Joseph Smith studied the King James Version of the Bible, and he was divinely commissioned to make a new translation.  He did replace some words, and/or phrases, and other inspired revisions which are in the Bible in the back part as the Joseph Smith Translation.  The major part was completed by July 1833, but he continued to make modifications in preparing a manuscript for the press until his death in 1844.  It helped restore the plain and precious things that had been lost from the Bible.  In the footnotes of each page in our Bible now, you will see JST: which shows a correction for that verse or word.  It helps to read the part behind the Bible Dictionary in our Bible.