The History of the Bible from its Creation

Facts about the Bible and information about the Bible's history.

Ponder these Bible facts and Bible trivia commentary on the Bible's history, authenticity, and truth.

There are fascinating facts about the history of the Bible.

The Bible is accurate and authentic.

The Bible is the Christian's book for all matters of faith and religion.

The Bible is the guiding principle of the Christian faith.
It provides personal guidance, moral improvement, and counsel.
The Good Book tells Christians how to live.
It is called the "Gospels" because the Bible tells a story of why Jesus is here. This is called the Good News.
Books of the Bible are considered "scripture" because the writings come from God, the creator.
The Bible is said to be "The Word" because it contains the words of God and Jesus.

The Bible is built on the foundation of ancient religious documents.

We may refer to ancient documents as the Bible. However, they are not traditional books in the modern sense.
Documents of antiquity are individual and separate scriptures or manuscripts known as codices.
Ancient documents are on sheets of vellum, papyrus, parchment, or animal skins.
Researchers have found several ancient manuscripts chiseled on stone and engraved in various metals.

The Bible's history before the written word:

Passing down information was traditionally done verbally.
Biblical doctrines and scriptures were oral and meticulously handed down from generation to generation.
Priests were meticulous in passing down beliefs from the time of creation until about 2000 BC.

The written word:

It is believed that around 2000 BC, the alphabet emerged, and writing came into being.
Several schools of thought say that between 2000 BC and 1000 BC, written manuscripts began to appear in their various forms.
Joseph, while serving under Pharaoh, is believed to have developed the earliest form of conventional writing in the ancient Hebrew language.
There is a belief that Joseph was a popular personality in Egypt under the direction of the pharaoh at that time.
Raised as a prince in Egypt, Moses would have written in this language.
Credit is given to Moses for writing the Pentateuch, the first known biblical scripture written.

Photo of the entrance to the cave of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Ancient parchment of a page from the Bible.

The language of Joseph is the core root language that developed into Arabic, Phoenician, and Old Hebrew.
However, archaeologists have found walls, rocks, and caves with drawings, pictographs, hieroglyphics, and cuneiforms.
These are stories and recordings of history that carbon date back as far as 63,000 years.
Scientists assume that carbon dating is accurate.
However, research has proven its inaccuracy.
This method dates the findings to 57,000 years before the creation story in the Bible.
Note: Some scholars regarded these drawings as art, not as languages.

The history of the Bible began with the earliest religious manuscripts written in the Hebrew language.
It was the most spoken language among believers in the Middle East before the birth of Christ.

Koine Greek was the language of scriptural manuscripts after the birth of Christ.

Manuscripts written during the time of Christ included a small sprinkling of other dialects.
The early Hebrews used these manuscripts as their religious scriptures.
Scriptures were not in the book form like modern Bibles.
The scriptures were mostly in the form of handwritten individual scrolls, not as books.
Eventually, twenty-four manuscripts were put together.
They became known as the Tanakh and the Hebrew Bible.

Photo of a Greek manuscript from the Bible.

The first Bible (Tanakh) was written in Old Hebrew and later translated into the modern Hebrew of today's Old Testament.

The translation of the Tanakh from Hebrew into Koine Greek is called the Septuagint.

The Septuagint earned its name due to the purported translation efforts of seventy-two scholars. There were six translators from each of the twelve tribes of Israel.

The early Jewish Church eventually adopted the Tanakh.

The next significant translation in the history of the Bible was written in Latin and known as the Vulgate.

St. Jerome made this translation for the Catholic Church in 382 AD.
The Vulgate has additional scripture, "books" called the Apocrypha, added to it as well.
Eventually, the Vulgate became the "official authorized Bible" of the Western Christian churches.
Up until the 20th century, the Catholic Church used the Vulgate.

However, the Jewish community still uses the original Hebrew Bible instead of the Vulgate.

Today, people still use the Tanakh, a derivative of the Hebrew Bible, and often refer to it as the Torah.

Thereafter, the New Testament books were written in Koine Greek. (The language of the day.)

The names of all the New Testament groups of scriptural manuscripts and their authors are unknown.
A complete list of the 27 books of the New Testament is said to be in a letter written by Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria around the year 367 AD.
So, we know the New Testament books had the same names and number 2,000 years ago as they do now.

Eventually, the Greek New Testament and the Hebrew Old Testament were translated into English.

These highly regarded "first early translations" started with John Wycliffe in the 1380s and were followed by William Tyndale and John Rogers in the 1520s.
Because of their efforts to translate the Bible into English, the Church burned all three of their bodies out of disrespect and blasphemy.
"How dare they create an English abomination of the scriptures?" so say the religious leaders of the time.
English translations took away the religious leader's control of the congregation. They couldn't stand for that.
The more we learn about the early Christian Church, the more we realize how non-Christian they were.
They had the same self-righteous "holier than thou" behavior as the Pharisees of the Bible.
Simply brutal!

The traditional Bible comes in two or three sections, depending on the version.

The Old Testament describes events before the birth of Jesus.
Books of the New Testament describe events during and after the birth of Jesus.
The Apocrypha contains scripture that was not acceptable to the church.

The word "apocrypha" means "hidden."

The Greek language is the source.
Not all modern Bibles include the Apocrypha.
When incorporated, the Bible prints and binds the Apocrypha between the Old and New Testaments.

Photo of a Blue Leather Bible containing the Apocrypha.

What methods are used to translate the manuscripts into the Bible?

Translating the meaning of phrases from one language to another is a challenge.
This is especially true when the original language is one of antiquity, dead, forgotten, or no longer in use.
There are two basic ways to translate the ancient scriptures.
Literal "word for word" or paraphrase "the meaning of the text."
Not all languages have the same voices, pronouns, verbs, or family relations, such as aunts or cousins, etc.
Gender affects which words are feminine or masculine and which have no direct translation.
One word that comes to mind is the Spanish word "sobremesa."
Another is the German word "fremdschämen."
Google these for yourself.

Here is a personal example:
I rode on the railroad train to a town up in the mountains of Madagascar.
There is no word for "train" in the Malagasy language.
They call it the "Maschine."
The Malagasy adapted the name to their language from the German employees who built the railroad.
So, my railroad story, translated from Malagasy into English, would be, "I took a ride on the machine."
I would not have taken a ride on the train. See my point?

How would the translator interpret "Maschine"?
Would it be a truck, car, oxcart, scooter, motorcycle, bus, taxi, limo, roller skates, UFO, pogo stick, or helicopter?
Perhaps it could be an airplane, rocket, fiery chariot, go-cart, bicycle, tractor, steamboat, canoe, hot air balloon, ski lift, or possibly some other mechanical contraption?
Well, you get the point.

So it is with the Bible. "It is difficult to translate with accuracy and proper meaning."

Think about these translations:
Spanish to English: "por favor." The word-for-word translation is "for a favor."
However, the common translation is "please." This definition is a paraphrase of the meaning.
There is no direct word for "please" in Spanish.

It is often impossible to make an accurate word-for-word translation.
Give that some thought. Correct translation is not easy.
French to English: "Jock a peint la maison noire avec de la peinture blanche."
Word-for-word translation: "Jack a painted the house black with of there paint white."
Is this direct word-for-word translation clear and logical?
Paraphrased translation: "Jack painted the black house with white paint."
This paraphrase of the text makes more sense.
How about "aloha" in Hawaii?
It means both "hello" and "goodbye."
How can the word be properly translated by itself when taken out of context?
A word-for-word literal translation is impossible because it has several meanings.

Which makes a better translation, literal or paraphrased?
Think about it!

Egyptian is the oldest known language, with Greek being the second oldest and Sanskrit in India being the third.
According to estimates, there are over 2500 languages and more than 7500 dialects worldwide.
We print Bibles in more than 750 languages.
Did you know that the written Hebrew language, as well as early Greek, has no vowels?
Alaskans look out their windows and see snow.
Scots look out their windows and may see 420 different types of snow.
In Florida, people look out the window and see rain.
Hawaiians can see over 200 different kinds of rain.
What about those languages that use a click sound?
Talk about a translation nightmare.
Some languages, like German, have three genders.
America is creating more genders every month.
Cambodia has 74 characters in its alphabet.
The Papuan language has only 11 characters in its alphabet.
China has no alphabet. Instead, they use characters.
There are over 100,000 (yes, one hundred thousand) characters in its language.
The average Chinese newspaper uses about 2,500 characters.

Someone would be extremely naive to think that a word-for-word translation of the Bible would be understandable, let alone accurate.

Could a person truly understand and interpret the correct meaning of the Word of God as it was originally written unless they lived during the time the scripture was written and understood the language?
Our best hope is that the translators were truly inspired by the Holy Spirit and made an accurate "paraphrase" translation of the original meaning of the scriptures.
For thousands of years, stories were passed down orally and accurately before written language reached Moses.
Perhaps God and the angels informed Moses on Mt. Sinai of everything that happened before his time.
Moses was up there for forty days and nights talking about something apart from the commandments.
The point is, "It is difficult to translate with accuracy."

It requires a great deal of "faith" to accept that humans have accurately translated the original scriptures. Believers acknowledge that the original authors of the Bible were divinely inspired and therefore written by God through man.

Believing that man-made translations are accurate and without errors requires even more faith.
The King James Bible, the most popular translation, has been updated several times for "small" errors in the translation.
There have also been corrections for simple printing errors and misprints.
It was not 100% accurate as translated or published by humans.

The early scriptures were not organized into sections, chapters, or verses.

The Biblical Scriptures are individual writings (manuscripts, parchments, and codices) similar to magazine articles, short stories, essays, letters, tales, poems, songs, and other narratives that resemble modern writing.
The lines were not numbered; they ran together and often had no grammatical marks like periods, commas, question marks, or colons.
Can you imagine the difficulty in reading such a document?

Generally, the early believers only had one or two of these "scriptural manuscripts" in their possession, as they were all handwritten and few copies existed.
Many copies of these ancient documents, manuscripts, and codices have been preserved.
We can accurately learn and deduce from them about the early life of humanity as seen by the watchful eye of God and the life of Jesus during His time on earth.

Ancient scriptures do not contain a publishing date.
Therefore, it is impossible to determine the exact date of authorship for any particular manuscript.
Deciphering the true meaning of ancient languages in these early religious texts can be demanding.

When comparing various translations, many words are translated differently due to the views, understanding, logic, and perhaps the translator's conjectures.
There is a difference in grammar, word placement, tense of verbs, lack of grammatical marks, and local vernacular.
The original Hebrew and Greek of the Bible have different verb tenses than modern English.
Some languages have only two tenses, like ancient Hebrew. Turkish has dozens of tenses. English has twelve. Kione Greek has seven.

Can you imagine translating this modern-day statement 2000 years from now?
"My Daisy was pretty ugly!"
How can that sentence be properly translated?
What is a "daisy," and how can it be considered both beautiful and unattractive at the same time?

My Daisy is a female pug dog.
Our local vernacular uses the word "pretty" to sometimes mean "very" or "big."
How would translators in 1,000 years know that Daisy was a common pet name?
Would they understand that the word "pretty" sometimes means "very"?
So the question remains: are the Bible translations 100% word-for-word accurate?
The answer is no.

We can accept that the meaning of the scriptures is as accurate as possible and that there may be a few flaws in the translation.
The most famous fluke in the Bible states that a son is older than his father.
The story is in Chronicles.

When using either translation technique, paraphrasing or literal, the entire script must be read in context to extract the beneficial, most accurate, and "true meaning" the author was trying to convey.

A word-for-word translation may not accurately capture the true meaning of the text.

Only by reading the entire text in context and paraphrasing can one provide a true translation and meaning.

The early believers and followers of God used many manuscripts.

The translators did not place all of those manuscripts into the Bible.
Many Bible facts and biblical information were lost due to the "weeding out" of scripture that was believed not to be relevant enough to be included in the final selection.

Photo of long bearded ancient disciple of the Bible.

The first qualification to accept a codex or manuscript as true Bible scripture was based on the author's reputation.

Was the author an apostle, someone close to Jesus, or a devout believer?
The author could have been someone like Moses or a member of Moses' group.

The second requirement for acceptance was that believers had already accepted and heavily used the Scriptures throughout history.
Did the manuscript already have a history of being believed?
Was it already accepted as the Word of God?

"Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding.
In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths."
Proverbs 3:5-8.