Bible

The word Bible (derived from the Greek ta biblia, “the books”) describes a series of writings used in different forms and revered as sacred texts by Christians and Jews. These writings are usually collected and bound in a single volume titled “The Bible” or “Holy Bible” and as such are usually considered authoritative in some sense and used in religious ritual and practices in Christianity and Judaism. The word Bible is most commonly used to characterize a collection of 66 books, the first 39 of which (in the Christian numbering) are also the full extent of the Jewish scriptural canon, that is, the Hebrew Bible (HB) or Old Testament (OT), and the latter 27 of which constitute uniquely Christian writings, that is, the New Testament (NT). Thus, the term Bible has a decidedly Christian undertone, though some Jews refer to their own canon simply as “The Bible” as well. Although Christian and Jewish traditions overlap in content between their shared books, the order of the books is arranged differently between the Christian and Jewish Bibles, with the most prominent difference being the inclusion of (at least) 27 additional books (the NT) in the Christian canon. Furthermore, some Christian traditions, for example, Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, and Russian Orthodox, consider several additional books as canonical, further complicating any exact definition in terms of content for the term Bible.

The process by which the Bible came to be written and collected together as a single book and considered as a complete “canon” (Greek kanon, “measuring reed, rule;” by extension, an authoritative collection of books) is complex and historically obscure. There is currently no consensus about the circumstances under which the HB came be canonized, but it seems that by at least the mid-second century BCE certain portions of the HB were understood as authoritative (see, e.g., the reference to Jeremiah in Daniel 9:2 and the Prologue to Ecclesiasticus, where the threefold mention of “the Law and the Prophet and the others” seems to refer to some established set of books with traditional labels). Since Jewish communities (with the exception of the Karaites) traditionally see their Bible not in isolation as freestanding scripture but rather as part of a larger body of literature that includes, minimally, the Mishnah, Talmud, various rabbinic commentators, and oral tradition, Jews placed less emphasis on formal declarations of canonicity for any given book vis-à-vis [Page 143]Christian communities, though the Mishnah (Yadayim 3:5) and Talmud (Menahot 45a, Baba Bathra 14b–15a) do record debate surrounding the inclusion of several books. The HB/OT is written primarily in ancient Hebrew, although several short portions are in Aramaic. The earliest manuscripts of the HB are found among the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls, dating as early as ca. 250 BCE and as late as the first century CE. No original manuscript of either the OT or the NT has ever been discovered, and there is currently no consensus regarding the issue of when the earliest texts of the Bible were written; many have assumed that some parts of the Hebrew Bible date back to the 12th to the 10th century BCE, while it seems more certain that the entire corpus of the NT was written in the first and second centuries CE.

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