Bible History and Biblical Information

Bible History Information

Ponder these Bible facts and 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.

It is the Christian book for all religious matters.
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.
The books 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 religious documents of antiquity are the basis of the Bible.

Ancient documents may be referred to as bibles. But they are not books as we are accustomed to seeing.
Documents of antiquity are individual and separate scriptures or manuscripts known as codices.
They are on sheets of paper and scrolls of vellum, papyrus, parchment, or animal skins.
Several antique writings have been discovered that are chiseled on stone and engraved in various metals.

Before the written word, the belief was that the biblical doctrines and scriptures were strictly oral and meticulously handed down from generation to generation.
Passing down information was a verbal tradition practiced by priests and believers from the time of creation until about 2000 BC.
This phase was when the creation of the alphabet and writing became prominent.
The schools of thought say that between 2000 and 1000 BC, written manuscripts began to appear in their various forms.
There is a belief that Joseph developed the alphabet, and the earliest form of conventional writing is in the ancient Hebrew language.
Joseph was running Egypt under the direction of the Pharaoh at that time.

Raised as a prince in Egypt, Moses would have spoken this language.
Moses would also have written the Pentateuch, the first known biblical scripture in this language.

The language of Joseph is the core root language that developed into Arabic, Phoenician, and Old Hebrew.
However, archeologists 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 Bible's creation story.

Note: These items were considered by some scholars as art and not language.

Hebrew was the language of the first early religious manuscripts.
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 of 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, or Hebrew Bible.

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

The first translation of the Tanakh from Hebrew into Koine Greek was 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.
It eventually became adopted by the early Jewish Church.

The next significant translation was into Latin, known as the Vulgate.

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

However, the Jewish community still used 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 began to appear, all written in 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?" said the religious leaders of the time.

It took away their control of the congregation. They didn't want 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.
The New Testament describes events during and after the birth of Jesus.
The Apocrypha contains scripture that is not 100% acceptable to the church.

The word "apocrypha" means "hidden."

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

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

There are two basic ways to translate the ancient scriptures.

Literal "word for word" or paraphrase "the meaning of the text."

It is difficult to translate from one language to another.
This is especially true when the original language is one of antiquity, completely dead, forgotten, or no longer used.

Not all languages have the same tense, voices, pronouns, verbs, or family relations like aunts, 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 German employees who built it adapted the name to their language.
So, my Riding on the Railroad story translated from Malagasy into English would be, "I took a ride on the machine."

How would the translator interpret "Maschine"?
Would it be a truck, car, oxcart, scooter, motorcycle, bus, taxi, limo, roller skates, pogo stick, helicopter, airplane, rocket, UFO, 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 version is a paraphrase of the meaning.

The thing is, there is no direct word for "please" in Spanish.

It is often impossible to make an accurate word-for-word translation.

Think about that. Correct translation is not easy.

French to English: "Jock a peint la maison noire avec de la peinture blanche."

Word-for-word translation: "Jack has painted the house black with of there paint white."

Does this direct word-for-word translation make proper sense?

Paraphrased translation: "Jack painted the black house with white paint."
This paraphrase of the text makes more sense.

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

As a side note:

Do you know that America has no official language?
People often assume that English is the official language. But it's not.
Correction: President Trump signed Executive Order 14224 on March 1, 2025.
This designated English as the official language of the United States.
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 over 50,000 (yes, fifty thousand) characters in its language.
The average Chinese newspaper uses about 2,000 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 true meaning of the Word of God as it was originally written unless they lived during the time the scripture was written and knew 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.

Moses accurately passed down oral tradition of thousands of years before the written language reached him.
Or, we have to believe that 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.
Moses and God must have discussed something apart from the commandments.
The point is, "It is difficult to translate with accuracy."

It takes a lot of "faith" to believe the original scriptures are translated correctly by humans. Believers acknowledge that the original authors of the Bible were divinely inspired and that the Bible was written by God through man.

It takes even more faith to believe the translations were made accurately by man without errors.
The most popular translation, the King James Bible, has been revised several times to correct "small errors" in the translation.
We also corrected simple printing errors and misprints.
It was not 100% accurate as translated or published by "man."

The early scriptures were not divided 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 resembled modern writing.
The lines were unnumbered, ran together, and often had no grammatical marks like periods, commas, question marks, or colons.

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.
We preserved many copies of these ancient documents, manuscripts, and codices.
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 have a prefix with the 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 is very challenging.

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, and the tense of verbs.
The original Hebrew and Greek of the Bible have different verb tenses than modern English.

Can you imagine 2,000 years from now making sense of this modern-day statement? "My Daisy was pretty ugly!"
What's a "daisy," and how can he, she, or it be pretty and ugly simultaneously?

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 reading the entire text in context and paraphrasing will give 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 because of this "weaning out" of scripture that was thought to be not relevant enough to be included in the final selection.

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