Reaching Students for Christ he akonga ki nga akonga hei ara whakawhiti mo te Karaiti

A Kingly Best-Seller

How many Bibles do you have in your home? In our house of four adults and one baby we have sixteen including two audio Bibles, one children’s Bible and two Bible apps.

We are enormously privileged. Approximately 340 million people still do not have the Bible in their own language. 774 million do not have the literacy skills to be able to read it. We have easy access to Bibles, the literacy skills to be able to read and the freedom to believe what we have read. So often we take these for granted.

2011 marks the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Version of the Bible. The first translation of the whole Bible into English was in the 1300’s by John Wycliffe. In the 1500’s William Tyndale published his New Testament. Following these several other translations were published. In 1604, King James I convened the Hampton Court conference and a decision was made to provide an entirely new translation from the original scriptural languages, to iron out the differences between the Church of England and the Puritans. The work started properly in 1607 and the first draft was available in 1609, to be redrafted the following year and finally completed for publication in 1611. Coming at a critical point in the evolution of English as a literary language it became the most popular English Bible for hundreds of years and exerted a significant influence on English language and literature.

According to Alister McGrath, Oxford University,

‘Without the King James there would be no Paradise Lost, no Pilgrim’s Progress, no Handel’s Messiah, no negro spirituals and no Gettysburg address…If any one book may be said to have shaped Western civilisation, it is the Bible.’

In celebration of the 400th year of the KJV and as an acknowledgement of those who have given us God’s Word in our own language TSCF and Scripture Union are inviting people to read through the Bible in a year, starting in January 2012. We are hoping that at least four hundred school, college and university students; graduates and supporters will join us on this journey through the Scriptures.

As the early translators and distributors of the Bible took advantage of the new medium of print to widely distribute the Bible, so too do we want to take advantage of the mediums available to us today. We are working to use the technology available to us to distribute readings in as many formats as possible.

If you haven’t read though the whole of Scripture before, or haven’t done it recently, why not join us? Doing it with a friend so you can chat over what you’ve read is a great way to keep going through the year. Please pray with us that, as people delve into God’s word, they would hear the living God speak.

Posted by Rachel Turner on 14/12/2011