Who Wrote the Bible?

The Bible is a collection of books written over thousands of years by kings, prophets, and apostles under inspiration from God. The word bible comes from the same root as the word bibliotheca, which means library.  These writings were saved and revered.  

There were many books that were accepted as scripture at one point in Christian history that we do not have in our modern Bible.  For example, we know that the Hebrew Bible of the first century was different in some ways from what we have in our current Old Testament because of other books found among the Dead Sea Scrolls of Qumran.  The Bible of the Eastern (Greek and Russian) Orthodox Churches differs from that of the Roman Catholic Church, which also differs from that of the Protestant Churches.  So when we talk about the Bible, we are not talking about one book that is standard across all Bible-believing cultures.  There are many versions of the Bible.

The Bible as we know it today wasn’t formally canonized until 400 years after Christ’s death.  Many books that had been accepted as scripture by the early Christian Church, such as The Shepherd of Hermes, were not accepted into the cannon.  Other texts that were almost excluded from the cannon included the books of James and Revelation. That there were other texts presenting other points of view in the early Church is evidenced by the early Christian texts found in the library at Nag Hamadi in 1945.

Once canonized, the Bible had very limited distribution due to the fact that it had to be painstakingly copied by hand and the fact that most people from the fourth century through the sixteenth century did not read. The Bible was only available in Hebrew, Greek, or Latin.  It was not translated into other languages until John Wycliffe translated the New Testament from Latin into English in 1382.  William Tyndale translated the Old Testament from the Hebrew and the New Testament from the Greek into English in 1536.  He wanted the Word of God to be available to “the boy that driveth the plow.” The King James Version of the Bible was based in Tyndale’s original work and was first published in England in 1611.

A simple farm boy that driveth the plow reading from the Book of James, KJV

Martin Luther translated the Bible into German in the 16^th Century.  Ulrich Zwingli brought the Word of God and the Protestant movement to Switzerland around the same time. Since then there are hundreds, if not thousands, of translations and partial translations of the Bible.

A Bible that is falling apart usually belongs to a person whose life isn't. (Spurgeon)

 

Text copyright July 2013 Gebara Education

 

Picture of historic Bible from www.historyofthebible.net

Picture of well-used Bible from www.roguepreacher.com