About the Bible books and how they came into being

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t's time to provide some information about the Bible, because if there's one thing that's surrounded by nonsense, it's this collection of books. To broaden your knowledge, here are a few facts.

-The Bible consists of 66 books, which begin somewhere in Mesopotamia and end in Rome. The book has been divided into an Old and a New Testament. At least, that is how the Christian world sees it. In Judaism, only the Old Testament is recognized, which is called the Tanakh. This is an abbreviation of Torah, Nevi'im (prophets), and Ketuvim (writings).

-People often talk about the Bible as if it were a single book. It is not. It is a collection of books that were written over a period of at least 1,500 years (!). Calculating backwards from our time, that would mean that we would soon be publishing a book that we started writing in the year 500. That is even before the Vikings existed. The Middle Ages would still be to come. A very long period of time.

-The books were written in different languages. The Old Testament was written in ancient Hebrew, but Daniel was written in Aramaic. The New Testament, however, was written in Greek, more specifically in a vernacular form of Greek known as Koine. Sometimes a quote from Jesus appears (“tabitha koemie,” “lama sabachtani”) and that is in Aramaic, not Hebrew. However, the New Testament has already translated all the Hebrew and Aramaic.

-The Bible was not written by a single author, as some people believe. It is also not always clear who the author of a book is. It was customary in ancient times (and in the Middle Ages) to attribute books or works of art to great figures with an important reputation. For example, the books of Moses are attributed to Moses, but those books are about Moses, so they cannot all have been written by Moses. (Incidentally, we do not even know whether Moses is a historical or mythological figure, or both.)

-The Bible (including the New Testament) and the church are often linked. I want to separate them here. The church seems to be based on the Bible, and many people know the Bible through the church, but they are certainly not one and the same.

This comes from a time when many manuscripts of the original text of the Bible had not yet been found, as they have been in our time. At that time, they used a Latin translation, the Vulgate. This caused a lot of misunderstanding, especially when it came to eternity. This was interpreted as “Roman” and “Greek.”

Whereas Jewish thinking, including that of Jesus, always focused on a kingdom of heaven on earth, Roman and Greek-Hellenistic thinking focused on life after death. Suddenly, heaven, eternity, and hell appeared everywhere in the Bible. I emphasize that this way of thinking was foreign to Judaism and to Jesus. I will return to this in a subsequent article.

The books of the Bible are not a book of fairy tales or fables, as some atheists like to claim. They belong to a different literary genre. They contain myths and miracles, certainly, as in all literature of that time. The writers were not always interested in purely historical descriptions, as we are in our time. They often wanted to “embellish” things with miracle stories, and in doing so they were very much in line with the customs of their time.

A special literary genre that we encounter in the New Testament is the so-called “midrash.” A midrash is an ancient Jewish way of understanding the Bible better. The word means “to investigate” or “to explain.” Sometimes a midrash explains a rule, sometimes it tells an additional story.There are two types: one about laws, and one with stories and lessons. One type tells you what you can and cannot do (this is called halacha). The other tells stories with a message (this is called aggada).

Midrashim sometimes invent things that are not literally in the Bible. They help people to better understand what God means. They make the Bible alive and instructive, even for today. You could say it is a Jewish way of storytelling that Jesus would have known.

The events in the Old and New Testaments are difficult to date. This is partly because the manuscripts from which the Bible was compiled never left the time in which they were written. If only that were the case! And if only there were only one original text!

-The original texts of the Old Testament (OT) and New Testament (NT) that we know today, and on which our English translations are based, have been reconstructed from 5,800 Greek manuscripts (I am not counting the other languages). These manuscripts vary greatly in age, completeness, and quality. The oldest known NT fragment is a small piece from the Gospel of John, dated around 125 AD.

Incidentally, thanks to this enormous amount of sources, the New Testament is the best documented work of antiquity. No other ancient writing has been handed down in so many manuscripts, in so many languages, and over such a long period of time. This allows textual scholars to reconstruct the original text with great accuracy, despite the fact that the original manuscripts have been lost.

-The original text of the Old Testament was written in Hebrew, with some parts in Aramaic. The most important source is the Masoretic Text, which was carefully handed down by Jewish scholars between the 7th and 10th centuries AD. This version has been used as the standard within Judaism and Christianity for centuries.

-An important addition came with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which date from before the year 70 AD. These contain fragments of almost all the books of the Old Testament and show that in ancient times there were several versions of the text in circulation, such as precursors to the Masoretic Text, the Greek Septuagint, and the Samaritan Pentateuch.

-Although there are fewer manuscripts than of the New Testament, there are still thousands. By comparing them with ancient translations, such as the Septuagint, the Syriac Peshitta, and the Latin Vulgate, researchers can form a good picture of the original text of the Old Testament.

-The Bible has been compiled over the centuries. There has been considerable debate about which books belong in the biblical canon. This question has been debated since the 4th century. By the 16th century, both the Catholic and Protestant Bibles were “complete.”

In short, the Bible is not a single book, but a complex, centuries-old collection of texts with diverse styles, purposes, and histories. Many popular ideas about the Bible are based on misunderstandings or traditions that have been handed down and do not always stand up to historical or textual criticism.

Those who really delve into the background, composition, and context of these texts discover not only how special this collection is, but also how layered, human, and historically rooted it is.

This is also where its power lies: it shows how people have searched for meaning, direction, and connection with the divine for centuries, in a way that still provokes thought today.