![]() ![]() All Christian Bible canons contain the same 66 “core” books For example, some readings of Collosians 4:14 point to Luke, the traditional author of both the Gospel of Luke and Acts as a non-Jew. However, there are a few authors who may have been Gentiles. Likewise, most of the New Testament was written by Christian Jews. More than 75% of the Bible’s text is in the Old Testament, which was predominantly written by Hebrew prophets and scribes. Most of the people who wrote the Bible were of Hebrew ethnicity ![]() Plus, there are some books whose authors we just don’t know, like the New Testament book of Hebrews. Similarly, it’s unlikely that Jonah wrote the book of Jonah, Isaiah may have had some help over the centuries, and so on and so forth. While many Christians see Moses as a historical figure, we don’t have any evidence that he existed outside the Bible itself-so it’s more likely that the books attributed to Moses were written by various religious leaders over the centuries. The reality is a bit messier than this, of course. Moses is given credit for the first five books of the Bible, most of the prophets are given credit for the books named after them, etc. The books of the Bible are traditionally attributed to heroes of the Jewish and Christian faiths. The Bible was written by more than 40 traditional contributors (in reality, there were many more) Instead, these writings were accumulated over the centuries and eventually compiled into the volume we call “the Bible” today. This is important to keep in mind when reading the Bible: it wasn’t written in a single room by a unified group of people. But some passages of Jeremiah were written in Egypt (Africa) and several New Testament epistles were written from cities in Europe. Most was written in what is modern-day Israel (Asia). The Bible was written on three continents If you’d like to learn how to study the Bible in these languages yourself, check out Zondervan Academic’s certificate program.* 3. The New Testament was written in Greek, the commonly-spoken language of the time. ![]() A few bits of the Old Testament were written Aramaic (looking at you, Ezra and Daniel). Most of our Old Testament was written in Hebrew, which was the language the original readers spoke. Those languages are Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. For example, parts of the Torah rely on oral traditions and writings that are much older than the present form of the Pentateuch, and the Song of Deborah (the fifth chapter in the book of Judges) is often referred to as one of the oldest works of Hebrew poetry in the Bible. Of course, these books reference sources from outside that window. The Bible includes stories from the first century CE as well as stories about the beginnings of the cosmos-but most biblical scholars agree that the books we find these stories in reached their present forms between 350 BCE and 150 CE. If you grew up with a lot of exposure to the Bible, it might be easy to assume the authors of the books of the Bible were like modern journalists: writing things down as they happened. The Bible’s content was written over the course of at least 500 years You’ll walk away from it with enough knowledge to have a thoughtful conversation about the Bible with a pastor, an atheist, or anyone else. Want more than just the facts? I wrote The Beginner’s Guide to the Bible to give people a non-preachy, jargon-free overview of what the Bible is, what it’s for, and what it’s all about. ![]()
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