For most subjects, we don't know much beyond what we have been taught. To those of us who grew up learning about the Bible, it may seem obvious where it came from and when the events it records took place. But for those of us who are just getting started, those questions need to be answered. These questions are important: it makes a difference, after all, whether the Bible was completed in 10,000 B.C., A.D. 100, or A.D. 1994. It makes a difference whether the Bibles we read today say the same thing the original Bible did. I've written this page to go over the basics on where our Bibles came from.
First of all, as a Christian, I believe the Bible ultimately comes from God. At certain times in history, God has communicated to chosen people and given them words to deliver to others. These are the people known as prophets. God saw to it that some of these prophets wrote down messages they received. Sometimes God told them the specific words (as in Revelation 2-3), and sometimes they chose their own words (as in Jude). In either case, the words of the prophets were regarded as spoken by God; this is what it means to say the Bible was inspired. We also say the Bible is inerrant–contains no errors–because we believe God saw to it that what the prophet communicated was true. God chose to preserve some of these writings for all ages and providentially oversaw the collecting of these writings into what we now call the Bible. For this reason, everything in the Bible is important for us to read, no matter when or to whom it was originally written.
The Old Testament is a collection of 39 books written from around 1400 to 400 B.C. among the community of the Israelites, whose biological descendants are today's Jews. The books are written in ancient Hebrew, with some portions of Ezra and Daniel in a related language called Aramaic. The Hebrew language looks like this:
The first books of the Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) were written by Moses, who led his people, the Israelites, out of slavery in Egypt around 1446 B.C. While they were in the Sinai Peninsula, God gave Moses laws for these people to live by. Moses wrote down these laws and the history of God's work from creation to his own day. The next several books of the Bible (Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1-2 Samuel, and 1-2 Kings) give the history of God's dealings with the Israelites in what is now Israel and western Jordan, all the way to 586 B.C., when the Israelites were conquered by Babylon (modern-day Iraq). These books are anonymous but were probably written by a succession of prophets who lived during those times, and the books were completed during the people's exile in Babylon. The books 1-2 Chronicles were written around 400 B.C. and give a recap of that same history from a later perspective. Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther were also written about that time and tell about the Israelites who returned to their land and those who remained in the east after Persia conquered Babylon.
We don't know who wrote the Book of Job or when, but Job probably lived outside Israel in the early Iron Age (around 1250 B.C.). The Psalms are a collection of songs and prayers that cover the whole range of the Old Testament; many of them were written by King David around 1000 B.C. The Proverbs are short observations about life made by King Solomon and two other wise men of his time (around 950 B.C.). Solomon also wrote Ecclesiastes (called Qoheleth in Hebrew) and Song of Solomon (also called Canticles or Song of Songs), although Ecclesiastes was probably set in its present form around 400 B.C., about the time the Psalms were compiled. The rest of the Old Testament contains the writings of and about prophets who lived during the events of 2 Kings, Ezra, and Nehemiah. The following table gives the estimated times they wrote. (Lamentations was written in 586 B.C., probably by Jeremiah.)
| Isaiah (740-700 B.C.) | Hosea (757-732 B.C.) | Jonah (760 B.C.) | Zephaniah (630 B.C.) |
| Jeremiah (627-562 B.C.) | Joel (830 B.C.) | Micah (730-690 B.C.) | Haggai (520 B.C.) |
| Ezekiel (593-573 B.C.) | Amos (762 B.C.) | Nahum (645 B.C.) | Zechariah (520-470 B.C.) |
| Daniel (550-537 B.C.) | Obadiah (841 B.C.) | Habakkuk (605 B.C.) | Malachi (432 B.C.) |
These prophets were not always listened to during their lifetimes, but the Israelites recognized their writings as inspired and preserved them. By around 400 B.C., when God stopped sending prophets, the books that are now part of the Old Testament formed the Hebrew Bible, and this was the Bible the writers of the New Testament read.
The New Testament is much shorter. It contains 27 "books," most of them actually letters, written during the first century A.D. While most of the writers were Jews, they wrote in the primary language of that day, ancient Greek. (This is often called koine Greek to distinguish from the older Greek used by Homer.) God gave prophets to the churches in those days, and those whom Jesus Christ had personally sent out were called apostles. This word was applied to the twelve disciples, plus Paul, the half-brothers of Jesus, and a few other associates such as Mark, Luke, and Barnabas. For English readers, the language the apostles used looks a little more familiar than Hebrew:
![I Paul have written [this] with my own hand.](./greek.jpg)
The first four books of the New Testament are called Gospels ("good news") because they tell the story of Jesus Christ, who lived on earth from about 6 B.C. to A.D. 33. Since the Gospels were written for different purposes, they select different details from Jesus' life and teachings but present a harmonious account of His ministry. Mark, a companion of the disciple Simon Peter, probably wrote his Gospel around A.D. 50. The disciple Matthew and Paul's doctor Luke used Mark and other sources to write their Gospels around A.D. 60. The disciple John wrote his Gospel later; scholars disagree as to whether he wrote shortly before Jerusalem's destruction in A.D. 70, or later in the 80s or 90s. The book of Acts is Luke's "sequel" to his Gospel and tells about how the Christian church was started after Jesus returned to heaven. The main theme is how the message of salvation in Jesus Christ spread from the Jews living in the Roman province of Judea to the rest of the world, even among non-Jews (called Gentiles). The last half of the book gives the story of Paul and ends with him in prison around A.D. 62. Paul was evidently released and re-arrested some time later, and was put to death by the Roman Emperor Nero in A.D. 64 or 68.
The New Testament contains thirteen letters written by the apostle Paul to locations in Europe and modern-day Turkey. They are basically arranged according to length and were addressed (in chronological order) to churches in Thessalonica, Galatia, Rome, Corinth, Ephesus, Colossae, a man named Philemon, the church at Philippi, and to his associates Titus and Timothy. The book of Hebrews is anonymous and was written to convince persecuted Jews not to abandon Christianity for their more traditional Judaism. The letters of James and Jude were written by half-brothers of Jesus. Two letters by Simon Peter and three by John are also included in the New Testament. The last book is Revelation and contains visions given to the disciple John when he was exiled on the island of Patmos (west of modern-day Turkey). We know from history that Christians who were alive in John's day said he wrote it during the reign of Roman Emperor Domitian, around A.D. 95 or 96.
The Book of Revelation was sort of a grand finale for God's prophecies. Reports of frequent miracles and inspired prophecy quickly died out after that time. (Whether God has restored such miracles to the church today is a controversial issue we'll not get into here.) But the people of the time agreed that the writings of the apostles were the Holy Spirit's intended teaching for all ages of the church, and these writings were collected and circulated throughout the Christian world.
As a general rule, the books of the Bible were recognized by God's people as inspired by God at the time they were written, or shortly thereafter. The Jewish priests and scribes were responsible for maintaining the Old Testament books, and they wrote that God had given them all these words through prophets, of whom the last was Malachi. Other Jewish writings appeared between the Old and New Testaments, but these were never accepted by the Jews as inspired. The Christian churches accepted the same Old Testament books the Jews used. One difference is that the Hebrew Bible is in a different order. The prophets (Isaiah through Malachi) follow 2 Kings, the Chronicles come last, and Ruth, Lamentations, and Daniel are part of the "Writings," along with Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon. The Writings had no set order. The common Christian arrangement we see today comes from the standard Greek translation of the Old Testament, called the Septuagint, that was made a century or two before the time of Christ. Christians used the Septuagint because most of them were more familiar with Greek than with Hebrew.
The formation of the New Testament was more complicated. Some writers in the second century wrote forged gospels and prophecies that supposedly came from the apostles, and some of these contradicted the teachings of Jesus and His followers. A man named Marcion selected just a few "edited" letters from Paul as his new "Bible" and used them to promote heresy. The churches decided they needed to distinguish between inspired apostolic teaching and merely human writings. A few of the books now in the Bible, such as James and 2 Peter, were called into question, but the consensus of the churches from the beginning was that the 27 books we use now were the genuine article. This was not made official until around A.D. 400. The words canon and Scripture are used to describe the collection of writings recognized to be inspired and therefore part of the Bible.
Some Jewish writings from between the Testaments, such as 1-2 Maccabees, Tobit, Judith, and additional chapters of Daniel and Esther, became popular among Christians and were sometimes read in the churches because they were spiritually helpful. Some early church officials objected to their use, fearing that they would be confused with the Scriptures themselves. Sure enough, during the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s, the new churches rejected these books (called the Apocrypha or Deuterocanonical writings) since they were not written by apostles or prophets. If they were not inspired by God, they should not be authoritative for the church. The Roman Catholic Church responded by giving these books full canonical status, i.e., they were as much a part of the Catholic Bible as the other books. For a time, the Protestants still read the Apocrypha but did not consider them books of the Bible. Today's Protestant Bibles do not contain the Apocrypha at all.
Over the thousand years the Old Testament was being written, prophets and scribes kept the grammar and spelling up-to-date (since language changes drastically over many centuries) and occasionally added a short (one verse or less) comment as in Genesis 36:31, but the message was kept strictly the same. After the time of the prophets, scribes made sure they copied exactly letter for letter. They were carefully trained and even memorized how many letters were in particular books and how many times words occurred so they could check their work. The written Hebrew language was only consonants (b, c, d, f, g); there were no letters for vowels (a, e, i, o, u). But scribes in the Middle Ages called Masoretes wanted to preserve the correct pronunciations and so they added vowels and accent marks to their work. Their manuscripts are called the Masoretic Text. (Other scribes created their own vowel systems, but the Masoretic is the standard one used today.) One important change was that it was against Jewish custom to pronounce the name of God, Yahweh. Instead, they would say "Lord" (Adonai). The Masoretes wrote the consonants for Yahweh (YHWH; JHVH when translated into some languages) with the vowels for Adonai, so that readers would know to look in the margin and pronounce the Adonai written there. This is where the word Jehovah comes from.
The people who copied the New Testament were a little less careful. Scholars of the time complained that anyone fortunate enough to have part or all of the Bible would try to copy it, and anyone with a passing familiarity with Greek would try to translate the New Testament into their native language. We know from the thousands of manuscripts that it was common for copyists to leave something out, add something from a similar passage, hear a word wrong when it was read to them, or even add their own details. It is remarkable that God has preserved the New Testament as intact as it is. About 90% of the text is firm (the same in all copies), and we have so many manuscripts that we can tell which readings were original. One thing that helps is that the sandy Middle East preserves papyrus and parchment well, and it was in this area that the copyists seem to have been most faithful in their work. Most of the oldest and best manuscripts were found there. Western Europe and North Africa were most free about "embellishing" the text. By the late Middle Ages, the Church had pretty much standardized most of the variant readings, and so the Latin texts in the West and the Greek texts in Eastern Europe were mostly the same by that time–though not necessarily in line with what the apostles originally wrote. Scholars from the time of Erasmus (late 1400s) to today have worked to track down what the original, inspired text was, and in about 99.9% of the cases, we can be pretty certain what we have is original.
Versions of the Bible in other languages are nothing new. By the time of the New Testament, the Old Testament books were available in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Syriac. The New Testament was translated into Latin very early, as well as Coptic, Armenian, and other languages of the day. But church officials preferred to work with the Greek, even when the language was being forgotten in Western Europe. When a man named Jerome translated the Bible into common Latin (the Latin Vulgate), he met resistance from some people who criticized him for going back to the Hebrew of the Old Testament instead of the traditional Greek Septuagint. But a thousand years later, the Latin Vulgate was the official Bible of the church, and the Greek was dismissed along with the Hebrew. Attempts to translate the Bible into languages such as English were punishable by death, but men like John Wycliffe and William Tyndale did the work anyway and were persecuted for it. The Protestant Reformation opened the door for legal translation. In England, Tyndale's work was revised, eventually becoming the Bishop's Bible, the official version for the Church of England. Puritans who disliked this version fled England to do their own translation, the Geneva Bible, which also became popular. In order to resolve the conflict, King James I appointed a mixed group of Puritan and loyalist scholars to revise the Bishop's Bible. The resulting King James Version, first printed in 1611, became the standard English translation and was unchallenged for centuries. It went through a number of corrections and minor revisions until 1769, when the KJV came into the form we use today.
It was not until the late 1800s that people in the US and England produced many rival translations. Because the English language had changed so much since 1600, and because many earlier manuscripts had been discovered, the Church of England had the KJV revised. The resulting Revised Version and its American counterpart, the ASV, were controversial but were followed by a flood of translations by individuals and Bible societies. Yet it was not until the last forty years or so that many Christians in the US were using other translations in large numbers. Even today, there are still many Americans who consider only the King James Version to be a real Bible. Some of these groups are quite extreme. Recent trends have been toward looser and looser renderings, so that some Bibles are better described as paraphrases or imaginative renderings than actual translations. This is largely because Christians looking for Bibles are not as concerned about literal translation as they are about understanding what they read. Few translations get high marks for both readability and closeness to the text.
Why are there so many differences between translations? Why not just give the English equivalent of each Hebrew or Greek word? The fact is that it's not that simple.
Let's take just one verse as an example. Philemon begins this way in the KJV: "Paul, a prisoner of Jesus Christ, and Timothy our brother, unto Philemon our dearly beloved, and fellowlabourer." In the Greek (using our alphabet) we see this: Paulos desmios Christou Iesou kai Timotheos ho adelphos Philemoni to agapeto kai sunergo hemon.
Actually, that's just what my edition says. The actual manuscripts have a few differences. Instead of desmios (which means "prisoner"), one old manuscript says apostolos ("apostle"), and a few say doulos ("slave" or "servant"). Why the difference? Probably because Paul usually starts his letters by calling himself an apostle (as in Colossians) or a slave/servant (as in Romans). Only here does he start by calling himself a prisoner. An inattentive scribe might have missed the word by force of habit; it's unlikely that many scribes would change to the less common word. Besides, all the best manuscripts, as well as the later majority, have desmios. So as the translator, I conclude that the reading in my edition is correct. The other variation is that after the word agapeto, a few sources add the word adelpho (which gives us "beloved brother" instead of just "beloved.")–again, probably just by accident. The rest of the verse is the same in all sources. So even though there are two textual "problems" in this verse, I have no reason to doubt what the original text was.
(Please note: A lot of people misunderstand how translators choose among variant readings. When I chose the word prisoner in the above paragraph, I was not denying that Paul was an apostle, or that he was a servant of Christ. I made the decision not from theological concerns, but on the basis of what the original text most likely said. We should not charge the translators with theological bias simply because of their textual choices.)
Now that I've decided which words to translate, I need to choose how to communicate their meaning in English. The KJV translators chose a straight literal reading: Paulos = Paul; desmios = a prisoner; Christou Iesou = Jesus Christ (reversing the word order); kai Timotheos = and Timothy; ho adelphos = the brother (inserting our in italics); Philemoni = unto Philemon; to agapeto...hemon = our dearly beloved; kai sunergo = and fellowlabourer.
The KJV language here isn't too outdated; just change unto to to and fellowlabourer to fellow worker and you have modern English. There are other word choices possible: bondsman, inmate, or captive instead of prisoner; friend for beloved, etc. And notice that we have changed the names Paulos and Timotheos to the more familiar Paul and Timothy. We could make it more literal by retaining the order Christ Jesus and by saying Timothy the brother. Or we could make things flow more smoothly by reading Paul, Jesus Christ's prisoner, and our brother Timothy, to my dear Philemon, who labors with us . Notice that for our smoother reading I have made at least six changes from the original words and structure chosen by the author. Occasionally this is necessary just to get an understandable sentence, but is that really true here? If I say yes, I might go further and put it in the form of a modern letter: Dear Philemon, my fellow worker: This is Paul, a prisoner for Jesus Christ, along with Timothy, our brother in Christ. At this point I am paraphrasing.
One of the problems with paraphrasing is that I am giving my own interpretation of the text. Desmios Christou could mean a prisoner held captive by Christ, a prisoner for the sake of Christ, a prisoner belonging to Christ, a prisoner in Christ's place–the possibilities are many. The literal reading "prisoner of Christ" leaves these possiblities open. "A prisoner for Christ" does not, and if I'm wrong in my interpretation, I'm shutting off the reader from the original meaning of the text...which defeats the purpose of translation. We have to resist the temptation of doing all the thinking for the reader, and let him ask the same questions the original readers did. There is also some question as to whether Paul is calling Timothy his brother, our brother, a friend as close as a brother, or just a fellow Christian. One way to leave the question open is to say "brother Timothy" or "Timothy, brother," instead of inserting our or my. At least the KJV's italics tell us that the pronoun is not expressed in the original text. Most translations don't bother with italics. (One reason they don't is because English usually uses italics for emphasis, which could lead to confusion here.)
Translating myself, I come up with Paul, a prisoner of Christ Jesus, and brother Timothy; to the beloved Philemon, our fellow worker. I've stayed close enough to call it a literal translation, but I moved beloved in front of Philemon to make the sentence more clear. Other versions have made their own choices. What we see here is that a short, simple verse like this, with very few textual problems or interpretive questions–not even a verb to deal with–still has a host of translation possiblities. Multiply this by roughly thirty thousand verses, many of which are longer and much more complex, and you have literally millions of decisions to be made when translating the Bible. It's no wonder most versions are produced by dozens of professionals with several levels of review. We are fortunate that English is as close to Greek as it is. Some non-Western languages are so different that translating pronouns and tenses is a real challenge.
So can we trust our Bibles? Well...most translations are close enough that we can consider them the Word of God and have good access to God's inspiration. But no version is perfect, so rather than blindly trust our favorite, we should compare several translations and study from those that prove most reliable. Commentaries, Bible dictionaries, and other tools can bring out meanings that some versions might miss and can explain unclear passages. You might even want to take a few months and learn the rudiments of Greek or Hebrew. The Bible, well translated, is clear enough that any thinking person can understand it, and even an older child can get the basics. It is wise not to rely too heavily on scholars–whether appointed by the Pope, the king, or a publishing company–to do all the work for us.
For a thorough examination of Bible versions, see this section of the site.
The Origin of the Bible, edited by Philip W. Comfort, and The Canon of Scripture by F. F. Bruce, have a lot of good information about how the Bible came to be.
Halley's Bible Handbook by Henry Halley is a good general guide to the background of each book of the Bible.
Books on how the text was copied are more technical, but the best are The Text of the Old Testament by Ernst Würthwein and The Text of the New Testament by Bruce Metzger.
My favorite book on Bible versions is a non-technical but informative book by Robert L. Thomas called Choosing the Right Bible Version. For a more positive opinion of free (loose) translations, see Philip W. Comfort's Essential Guide to Bible Versions.
For a concise statement of my beliefs about the Bible, see my Declaration of Faith.
