How Bible Came to Were it Is Today

¶ … 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 is not true, as written traditions predating the Ten Commandments actually form much of the history of the Bible and can be traced to almost 2,000 years prior to the birth of Christ. 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 the new writings that were beginning to develop as part of the growing Christian movement. The books include those commonly referred to as the New Testament. The dates for the authorship of the books of the New Testament are somewhat contested, though it seems fairly well established that they were not written until approximately a century after the death of Christ. In the 300s, the Bishop of Alexandria, Athenasius identified the 27 books of the New Testament, and people began translating the Scriptures into multiple languages. By 500 AD, the Sciptures (Old Testament, New Testament, and Apocrypha) had been translated into over 500 languages. The King James version of the Bible removed the Apocypha, resulting in the basis of most modern Bibles.

One thing that should be clear from even the brief overview of the Bible's history above is that the contents of the Bible have been the result of human choices in two main ways. The first way that human choice has impacted the Bible has been in the choice of books in the Bible. The 14 books of the Apocrypha have been excluded from the modern Bible. Some Bibles omit portions of the books of Daniel and Esther. Moreover, relatively modern discoveries of the Dead Sea Scrolls suggest that the modern Bible omits books that were considered part of Scripture until well after the death of Christ. Therefore, the modern Bible is the process of intentional selection.

Perhaps even more important than the intentional selection present in the Bible is the error that has been introduced through translation. Five common translation mistakes, etymology, internal structure, cognates, old mistranslations, and misunderstood metaphor, lead to a significant amount of translation errors, which have changed the text of the modern Bible. Some of these mistakes are relatively harmless and do not truly impact the meaning of the biblical vs. In question. For example, the original Bible verse does not name the type of fruit that was in the Garden of Eden, simply calling it a fruit. However, the common belief is that the fruit was an apple. This can probably be traced to the idea that the Latin word for apple and evil are the same in Latin, which led to a mistranslation in a Latin Bible. This seemingly innocuous mistake has led to a widespread, though unfounded belief in the idea that the forbidden fruit was an apple.