¶ … Bible
To many people The Bible is the word of God and its status as the word of God means that it is infallible and its origins should not be questioned. However, such an approach to the Bible ignores facts that are known about its history and how it is written. A better, more informed approach examines the history of the Bible, when it was written, how it was written, the original books in the Bible, and how modern books have been selected or omitted. Furthermore, one also has to consider that there are actually multiple versions of the modern Bible, so that it is virtually impossible for any person to say what the contents of the Bible are. This fact should be enough to demonstrate the fact that the Bible is a living document, which has changed throughout time, and will continue to change as Christianity continues to develop and change.
The first thing to understand about the books of the Bible is that they were originally written in a time when authorship was not considered to be of the same importance that it is in the modern world. Furthermore, even though many biblical books are named after people, it would be a mistake to assume those people are the authors. Instead, it is important to keep in mind that very little is known about the authorship of any of the books of the Bible. The difficulty of determining authorship provides questions about provenance, which eventually became determinative when different groups of people were determining books for the Bible.
Many believe that the first written words of God in the Judeo-Christian tradition were the Ten Commandments, which were handed down to Moses approximately 1,400 years ago. This belief...
These early pieces in the Hebrew tradition were probably small pieces of poetry, which probably began as part of an oral tradition. Once they were committed to writing, these poems that eventually became part of The Bible were not part of a holy text; instead they were considered pieces of stand-alone writing, and, while they have been considered religious in nature, they were not considered infallible or considered the word of God.
Eventually, these stand-alone pieces began to be placed together in a text. Sometime around the time of Solomon, these books began to take the shape of modern Scripture. However, the Old Testament did not begin to take its modern shape until sometime after the return from the Babylonian exile. However, by around 500 BC, the 39 books of the Old Testament had been completed in Hebrew, and those books have remained largely unchanged in the modern Bible. The next major development was the translation in Greek, and the Old Testament translation had occurred two hundred years prior to the birth of Christ. In addition to the 39 books of the Old Testament, 14 additional books referred to as the Apocrypha, has also been translated into Greek. Together, those 53 books were considered the foundation of the Jewish holy text, though such a classification was largely informal.
It was not until approximately 100 years after the birth of Christ that the Council of Jamnia codified an official version of the Jewish Old Testament canon. This was probably in response to…
