Bible
The Bible is a collection of religious texts that are central to Christianity and Judaism, and esteemed in other Abrahamic religions such as Islam. The Bible is an anthology originally written in Hebrew and Koine Greek. The texts include instructions, stories, poetry, prophecies, and other genres. The collection of materials accepted as part of the Bible by a particular religious tradition or community is called a biblical canon. Believers generally consider it to be a product of divine inspiration, but the way they understand what that means and how they interpret the text varies.
The religious texts, or scriptures, were compiled by different religious communities into various official collections. The earliest contained the first five books of the Bible, called the Torah in Hebrew and the Pentateuch in Greek. The second-oldest part was a collection of narrative histories and prophecies. The third collection, the Ketuvim, contains psalms, proverbs, and narrative histories. Tanakh is an alternate term for the Hebrew Bible. The Masoretic Text is the medieval version of the Tanakh—written in Hebrew and Aramaic—that is considered the authoritative text of the Hebrew Bible by modern Rabbinic Judaism. The Septuagint is a Koine Greek translation of the Tanakh from the third and second centuries BCE; it largely overlaps with the Hebrew Bible.
Christianity began as an outgrowth of Second Temple Judaism, using the Septuagint as the basis of the Old Testament. The early Church continued the Jewish tradition of writing and incorporating what it saw as inspired, authoritative religious books. The gospels, which are narratives about the life and teachings of Jesus, along with the Pauline epistles, and other texts quickly coalesced into the New Testament. The oldest parts of the Bible may be as early as BCE, while the New Testament had mostly formed by 4th century CE.
With estimated total sales of over five billion copies, the Christian Bible is the best-selling publication of all time. The Bible has had a profound influence both on Western culture and history and on cultures around the globe. The study of it through biblical criticism has also indirectly impacted culture and history. Some view biblical texts as morally problematic, historically inaccurate, or corrupted by time; others find it a useful historical source for certain peoples and events or a source of ethical teachings. The Bible is currently translated or in the process of being translated into about half of the world's languages.
Etymology
The term Bible can refer to the Hebrew Bible, which corresponds to the Christian Old Testament, or the Christian Bible, which in addition to the Old Testament contains the New Testament.The English word Bible is derived from, meaning 'the books'.
The word βιβλίον itself literally means 'scroll' and came to be used as the ordinary word for book. It is the diminutive of βύβλος byblos, 'Egyptian papyrus', possibly so called from the name of the Phoenician seaport Byblos whence Egyptian papyri would be exported to Greece.
The Greek ta biblia was "an expression Hellenistic Jews used to describe their sacred books". The biblical scholar F. F. Bruce notes that John Chrysostom appears to be the first writer to use the Greek phrase ta biblia to describe both the Old and New Testaments together.
The Latin biblia sacra is a translation of the Greek τὰ βιβλία τὰ ἅγια , which also means 'the holy books'. Medieval Latin biblia is short for biblia sacra'' 'holy book'. It gradually came to be regarded as a feminine singular noun in medieval Latin, and so the word was loaned as singular into the vernaculars of Western Europe.
Development and history
The Bible is not a single book; it is a collection of books or texts whose complex development is not completely understood. The oldest books began as songs and stories orally transmitted from generation to generation. Scholars of the twenty-first century are only in the beginning stages of exploring "the interface between writing, performance, memorization, and the aural dimension" of the texts. Current indications are that writing and orality were not separate as much as ancient writing was learned in communal oral performance. The Bible was written and compiled by many people, who many scholars say are mostly unknown, from a variety of disparate cultures and backgrounds.British biblical scholar John K. Riches wrote:
The books of the Bible were initially written and copied by hand on papyrus scrolls. No originals have survived. The age of the original composition of the texts is, therefore, difficult to determine and heavily debated. Using a combined linguistic and historiographical approach, Hendel and Joosten date the oldest parts of the Hebrew Bible to having been composed in the premonarchial early Iron Age. The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in the caves of Qumran in 1947, are copies that can be dated to between 250 BCE and 100 CE. They are the oldest existing copies of the books of the Hebrew Bible of any length that are not fragments.
The earliest manuscripts were probably written in paleo-Hebrew, a kind of cuneiform pictograph similar to other pictographs of the same period. The exile to Babylon most likely prompted the shift to square script in the fifth to third centuries BCE. From the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Hebrew Bible was written with spaces between words to aid reading. By the eighth century CE, the Masoretes added vowel signs. Levites or scribes maintained the texts, and some texts were always treated as more authoritative than others. Scribes preserved and changed the texts by changing the script, updating archaic forms, and making corrections. These Hebrew texts were copied with great care.
Considered to be scriptures, the books were compiled by different religious communities into various biblical canons. The earliest compilation, containing the first five books of the Bible and called the Torah or Pentateuch, was accepted as Jewish canon by the fifth century BCE. A second collection of narrative histories and prophesies, called the Nevi'im, was canonized in the third century BCE. A third collection called the Ketuvim, containing psalms, proverbs, and narrative histories, was canonized sometime between the second century BCE and the second century CE. These three collections were written mostly in Biblical Hebrew, with some parts in Aramaic, which together form the Hebrew Bible or "TaNaKh".
Hebrew Bible
There are three major historical versions of the Hebrew Bible: the Septuagint, the Masoretic Text, and the Samaritan Pentateuch. They are related but do not share the same paths of development. The Septuagint, or the LXX, is a translation of the Hebrew scriptures and some related texts into Koine Greek and is believed to have been carried out by approximately seventy or seventy-two scribes and elders who were Hellenic Jews, begun in Alexandria in the late third century BCE and completed by 132 BCE. Probably commissioned by Ptolemy II Philadelphus, King of Egypt, it addressed the need of the primarily Greek-speaking Jews of the Graeco-Roman diaspora. Existing complete copies of the Septuagint date from the third to the fifth centuries CE, with fragments dating back to the second century BCE. Revision of its text began as far back as the first century BCE. Fragments of the Septuagint were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls; portions of its text are also found on existing papyrus from Egypt dating to the second and first centuries BCE and to the first century CE.The Masoretes began developing what would become the authoritative Hebrew and Aramaic text of the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible in Rabbinic Judaism near the end of the Talmudic period, but the actual date is difficult to determine. In the sixth and seventh centuries, three Jewish communities contributed systems for writing the precise letter-text, with its vocalization and accentuation known as the mas'sora. These early Masoretic scholars were based primarily in the Galilean cities of Tiberias and Jerusalem and in Babylonia. Those living in the Jewish community of Tiberias in ancient Galilee made scribal copies of the Hebrew Bible texts without a standard text, such as the Babylonian tradition had, to work from. The canonical pronunciation of the Hebrew Bible that they developed, and many of the notes they made, therefore, differed from the Babylonian. These differences were resolved into a standard text called the Masoretic text in the ninth century. The oldest complete copy still in existence is the Leningrad Codex dating to c. 1000 CE.
The Samaritan Pentateuch is a version of the Torah maintained by the Samaritan community since antiquity, which European scholars rediscovered in the 17th century; its oldest extant copies date to c. 1100 CE. Samaritans include only the Pentateuch in their biblical canon. They do not recognize divine authorship or inspiration in any other book in the Jewish Tanakh. A Samaritan Book of Joshua partly based upon the Tanakh's Book of Joshua exists, but Samaritans regard it as a non-canonical secular historical chronicle.
The first codex form of the Hebrew Bible was produced in the seventh century. The codex is the forerunner of the modern book. Popularized by early Christians, it was made by folding a single sheet of papyrus in half, forming "pages". Assembling multiples of these folded pages together created a "book" that was more easily accessible and more portable than scrolls. The first complete printed press version of the Hebrew Bible was produced in 1488.
New Testament
During the rise of Christianity in the first century CE, new scriptures were written in Koine Greek. Christians eventually called these new scriptures the "New Testament" and began referring to the Septuagint as the "Old Testament". The New Testament has been preserved in more manuscripts than any other ancient work. Most early Christian copyists were not trained scribes. Many copies of the gospels and Paul's letters were made by individual Christians over a relatively short period of time, very soon after the originals were written. There is evidence in the Synoptic Gospels, in the writings of the early Church Fathers, from Marcion, and in the Didache that Christian documents were in circulation before the end of the first century. Paul's letters were circulated during his lifetime, and his death is thought to have occurred before 68 during Nero's reign. Early Christians transported these writings around the Empire, translating them into Old Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopic, and Latin, and other languages.New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman explains how these multiple texts later became grouped by scholars into categories:
During the early centuries of the church, Christian texts were copied in whatever location they were written or taken to. Since texts were copied locally, it is no surprise that different localities developed different kinds of textual tradition. That is to say, the manuscripts in Rome had many of the same errors, because they were for the most part "in-house" documents, copied from one another; they were not influenced much by manuscripts being copied in Palestine; and those in Palestine took on their own characteristics, which were not the same as those found in a place like Alexandria, Egypt. Moreover, in the early centuries of the church, some locales had better scribes than others. Modern scholars have come to recognize that the scribes in Alexandria – which was a major intellectual center in the ancient world – were particularly scrupulous, even in these early centuries, and that there, in Alexandria, a very pure form of the text of the early Christian writings was preserved, decade after decade, by dedicated and relatively skilled Christian scribes.These differing histories produced what modern scholars refer to as recognizable "text types". The four most commonly recognized are Alexandrian, Western, Caesarean, and Byzantine.
The list of books included in the Catholic Bible was established as canon by the Council of Rome in 382, followed by those of Hippo in 393 and Carthage in 397. Between 385 and 405 CE, the early Christian church translated its canon into Vulgar Latin, a translation known as the Vulgate. Since then, Catholic Christians have held ecumenical councils to standardize their biblical canon. The Council of Trent, held by the Catholic Church in response to the Protestant Reformation, authorized the Vulgate as its official Latin translation of the Bible. A number of biblical canons have since evolved. Christian biblical canons range from the 73 books of the Catholic Church canon and the 66-book canon of most Protestant denominations to the 81 books of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church canon, among others. Judaism has long accepted a single authoritative text, whereas Christianity has never had an official version, instead having many different manuscript traditions.