The history of the Bible

What’s this book? This is the Bible. The holy book of Christianity. But… why doesn’t it say who wrote it? How was the Bible written?

And when? The oldest stories in the Bible emerge over seven hundred years Before Common Era. But to begin with they’re not written down. At this time, most people can’t read or write. Instead, people memorize stories and tell them to each other.

Yes… it’s hard to remember all the details… Maybe it’s a good idea to write things down. Now we’re in the city of Jerusalem. The religious leaders of Judaism have started writing down stories about God, and how the world was created. Because these texts are about God, they call them holy texts. According to Jewish tradition, some of these texts were written by the prophet Moses.

But can just anyone write a holy text? No. Otherwise people could claim very different things. How do you decide which of the texts are holy then? Well, four hundred years Before Common Era, the Jewish religious leaders get together to go through the texts.

They decide which of them should continue to be counted as holy. Together, these texts, or books, are called the Tanakh, or the Hebrew Bible. Bible means the books in Greek. For hundreds of years, the Bible was a collection of different texts, not one book. Here are some of the first Christians.

But… Christianity is not a separate religion yet. It’s still part of Judaism. So the early Christians read the same holy texts as the other Jewish people. But they also read newer texts about the life and death of Jesus: the gospels. Over time, differences develop between what the Christians believe and what the Jewish people believe.

Eventually, Christianity becomes a separate religion. The Christian priests now think that there are too many gospels. So they meet to decide which texts should count as holy for Christianity. They divide the Christian Bible into two parts, two Testaments. Testament means ‘agreement’, and each testament describes the relationship between God and humans.

The first testament is about the time before the birth of Jesus. This is the Old Testament. The second is about the life of Jesus, and about the time after he died. This is the New Testament. The priests make a list, a canon, naming which books should be part of the Bible.

The texts that are not included in the canon are hidden away, and should no longer be read in the churches. They are called the Apocryphals. Four of the gospels were included in the New Testament. According to the Christian tradition, they were written by Jesus’s apostles Matthew and John, and by Mark and Luke. There are also texts that describe what the apostles did after the death of Jesus.

And also various letters from the apostle Paul. What about the Old Testament? Well, the priests include the same texts as in the Hebrew Bible. … but they also add some other texts. … and change the order a little. But in the 16th century, this monk shows up in Germany. His name is Martin Luther.

And he is protesting against the leader of the church, the Pope. Martin Luther claims that the Pope is living a life of luxury, and is not following the Bible. Luther’s protest will eventually lead to a new branch of Christianity: Protestantism. Luther also translates the Bible into German. He thinks that people should go back to the roots of the Bible, so the Protestant Old Testament has exactly the same texts as the Hebrew bible.

Today almost all branches of Christianity read the same New Testament. But sometimes, they disagree over what should be included in the Old Testament. Today the Bible is mostly collected as one book. But it was written by many people, not just one person, and this took hundreds of years.