What is the Bible?

The rest of this week and next, I plan on a series of posts about the background material about our main resource of The Story - the Bible. What is it? What is it or should it be used for? Can we trust what it says? Why or why not? What about...? And so I'm looking forward to discussing the point from which we will start this journey.

Today, we will be looking at what the Bible is. We will delve into how to read it and other hermeneutics in some future posts; but for now, we're sticking to facts; so let's do the lovely reporting questions of: who, what, when, where, why, and how.

What - When we talk about the Bible, the first and foremost distinction we must make is the Bible is not one single, solitary book; it is a collection of 66 books, at least in our Protestant Tradition*. These books also contain many types of literature: historical accounts, poetry, wisdom literature and proverbs, prophetical statements and discourses, letters of instruction, and everyone's favorite... apocalyptic literature.

The Bible is also divided into two sections: the Old and New Testaments. For you people who enjoy etymology, the word "testament" comes from the Latin root for "to testify" which informs the later Latin word for "a will or covenant". So a "testament" means "to testify to a covenant." Therefore, the Old Testament testifies to God's covenant with his people of Israel; and the New Testament testifies to God's covenant through Christ to extend out to the entirety of humanity.

And if I've forgotten something basic about what the Bible is, here is a good link that covers the basics.
* The Roman Catholic Bible includes other books known as the Apocrypha; and the Hebrew scriptures combine several books into one (e.g. 1 & 2 Samuel into one book)

Who - Again, we are sticking to the historical facts, and so while we indeed believe that God wrote this as it is his word, we are only concerning ourselves with the human authors at this point. Therefore, the accepted number of authors of the books of the Bible is in the neighborhood of 40 different authors.

When - The time period that seems to be accepted by most scholars would say that the Bible was written somewhere between the period of around 1,500 BC to no later than 100 AD.

Where - The vast majority of the locales mentioned in the Bible lie around the Mediterranean Sea on the northern and east-to-southeastern shores reaching inland on the eastern side to the Persian Gulf. And for those of you are are not geographically inclined, here's a map :).

Why - I love the words of the apostle John toward the end of his book: "But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name" (John 20:31).

How - Throughout Jewish history, they wrote down the stories of their fathers in the faith and these were gradually collected into the Tanakh, our equivalent of the Old Testament. In the 2nd Century BC, as the Greeks were in the process of Hellenizing the world, 70 of the most renowned scholars gathered together to translate the Tanakh (written in Hebrew) into Greek and this would be known as the Septuagint. Around the year 400 AD, Jerome translated the Greek Septuagint into Latin (the language of the Roman Catholic Church), and this translation is known as the Vulgate. Within the span of 200 years, the Latin Vulgate became the only accepted form of the Scriptures, exclusively controlled by the Roman Catholic Church. Any further translations into other languages were swiftly met with force and condemnation.

However, this assertion became to be challenged by various Reformers who believe the Bible should be in the common man's language. John Wycliffe (1382) and William Tyndale (1525) published it in English, and were condemned; while Luther translated it into German (1522). And now, 500 years later, the Bible sells over 30 million copies per year; and is in 73 languages on Bible Gateway alone, with many thousands of other languages and dialects worldwide.