The Bible
The Bible
The Bible is made up of the Old and New Testaments. The word "bible" is derived from biblia,
which is Greek for books because the Bible is made up of a number of
books. The events in the Bible cover a vast period of time—from
prehistory to the dawn of Christianity in the first century CE.
The Old Testament
The Old Testament includes the same books as in the Hebrew Bible,
but the 24 books are rearranged and divided into 39 books, splitting
the books of Samuel, Kings, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Chronicles into two
each. The Christian church continued to group the first five books of
the Torah as they appeared in the Pentateuch (Five Books of Moses), but
it attempted to impose a chronological order on the remainder of the
Hebrew text with the exception of the books of prophecy and poetry. The
Catholic Old Testament added seven other books plus portions of others,
which the Protestants call the Apocrypha.
The Old Testament was written in Hebrew except for a few passages in Aramaic. In the wake of the sweeping conquests made by
Alexander the Great,
Greek had become the prevailing language in the Mediterranean world and
most people were no longer able to read scripture in its original
language. In the middle of the third century BC, a group of 70 Hebrew
scholars living in Alexandria, Egypt, translated the Five Books of
Moses from Hebrew into Greek. This translation is known as the
Septuagint. Over the next few centuries the remaining books of the
Hebrew Bible were translated into Greek.
The New Testament
The New Testament was written in Greek. The first four books —Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John— are
known as the gospels, meaning the "good news" of Jesus Christ. They
describe the earliest events in the life of Jesus and his teachings,
and were most likely recorded between 70 and 100 CE. Some suggest that
Acts of Apostles was also written by the disciple Luke, who took part
in Apostle Paul`s missionary journeys. Other writings include 22
letters, 13 of which are believed to have been written by Paul, eight
by different Apostles, with Letter to the Hebrews written anonymously.
The letters of Paul were written sometime around the middle of the
first century CE. The book of Revelation stands alone and is part of
the apocalyptic tradition.
The spread of Christianity inspired more translations of the Bible,
including several Latin versions. The lack of scholarship and
uniformity of these translations in the fourth century led Pope
Damascus I to commission a young Latin scholar, Jerome, to prepare a
new, more accurate translation that reflected the original writings.
Using Hebrew manuscripts, the Greek Septuagint, and New Testament
manuscripts in Greek, Jerome decided to spend his life working on the
new translation. The result was called the Vulgate (405). It became the
standard Bible of the Roman Church. It was not until 1382 that first
complete English translation of the Bible appeared 150 copies in all,
still written by hand. John Wyclif, an Oxford scholar, supervised the
translation.
In 1535, less than 100 years after the Gutenberg printing press,
Miles Coverdale published the first complete printed English Bible. In
1603, King James of England named 543 scholars to produce a Bible that
would be accepted by both Protestants and Catholics. Published in 1611,
the finished work was known as the King James Bible (KJV). It has
enriched English with such phases as "man does not live by bread
alone," "how the mighty have fallen," "seeing eye to eye" and hundreds
more. In recent times the number of translations has proliferated.
The Apocrypha
The Apocrypha comes from the Greek, meaning, "set aside" or
"hidden." It is a collection of historical writings, wisdom, and
prophecy and other writings that were part of the Greek Septuagint. The
Catholic Church and the Greek Orthodox Church agree in regarding as
authoritative certain books which they call deutercanonical and
Protestants call apocryphal. The Apocrypha is composed of The First Book of Esdras;
the Second Book of Esdras; Tobit; Judith; Additions to
the Book of Esther; The Wisdom of Solomon; Ecclesiasticus (or the
Wisdom of Jesus the Son of Sirach); Baruch; The Letter of Jeremiah; The
Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Young Men; Susanna; Bel and
the Dragon; The Prayer of Manasseh; the First Book of the Maccabees;
the Second Book of the Maccabees.
The expanded edition of the Apocrypha includes three additional
books that are of interest of the Eastern Orthodox: The Third Book of
the Maccabees; the Fourth Book of the Maccabees; and Psalm 151.
The Old Testament
ONE is using the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), published in 1989 by the National Council of Churches of Christ.
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