The Bible as we have it today is divided into
two sections, the Old Testament which has 39 different documents and the New
Testament with 27.These 66 documents are traditionally called “books” even though
they are almost never published as separately bound volumes. This canon of
Scripture has been generally accepted by Christians as the inspired Word of God
since the 3rd century.
The 39 documents that comprise the Old Testament
were originally written in Hebrew from about 2000 B.C. until about 450 B.C.
Jews also accept this collection as Scripture and Muslims accept the first five
books.
The 27 documents of the New Testament written in
ancient Greek are seen as additional Scriptures by Christians. They were
written from about 45 to 70 C.E. with perhaps one or two being written as late
as 90 C.E.
These documents are not uniform in character.
The shortest is only one page while the longest is more than 100 pages. They
are of various literary types, including history, narrative, poetry, prophecy
and personal letters. Within these genres, there are numerous clear examples of
fiction; parables, dreams, and so forth. Sometimes, it is not easy to know exactly
what a passage is intended to be; history, poetry, fiction, nonfiction.
These 66 books of the Bible were originally
written in three different languages: Hebrew (most of the Old Testament),
Aramaic (a sister language to Hebrew used in parts of two Old Testament books),
and Greek (all of the New Testament). These documents were authored and
compiled by very diverse individuals—poets, kings, prophets, priests, shepherds,
farmers, fishermen, a tax collector, a physician, scribes—from the very common
to the elite, the intellectual to the uneducated. These very different people
wrote over the course of 1,000 years and came from different nations and
cultures.
In spite of this amazing diversity, there are
common themes that run through seemingly disparate documents; stories about God
and God’s dealing with people, haunting stories, unbelievable stories of
success and failure, passion and persistence. And not only stories about God
but also about humanity—the formation of human civilization, a movement, a heritage—stories
with our own fingerprints all over them, showing us not only God but also
ourselves in relationship with God and one another.
These stories are not delivered in a linear
logic. They do not constitute a textbook or manual or encyclopedia of
philosophy, theology or morality. They are all over the board, messy, chaotic,
jumping back and forth with imagination, passion, fury, and hope. They’re about
encountering God in the middle of feast and famine, good and bad governments, changing
economies, disappointing marriages and dysfunctional families, poignant moments
and exhilarating victories, deep friendships and bitter betrayals. Let’s take a
closer look at the story line of Scripture.
Another thing that may seem strange to someone
first reading the Bible. It uses an ancient system for finding things instead
of the page numbers that are so familiar to us in books today. This is because
the Bible existed as a written document long before the invention of the
printing press and with the hand-copied versions there was no way to make sure
that every page was precisely the same. So chapters and verses have been added
to the Bible over the centuries. They are not part of the original text, but
they provide a common system for finding a particular sentence or paragraph.
They continue to be used because there are so many different translations of
the Bible into many modern languages and various printings and editions. Page
numbers are impossible to keep uniform.
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