The Bible — corpus and transmission
What the Bible is, how its two testaments were assembled from many hands across a thousand years, and how the text was translated, standardized and criticized down to the present. An orientation for the general reader. For the contents book by book, see its books.
The corpus at a glance
The Bible (from Greek ta biblia, “the books”) is not a single work but a library. Christians divide it into the Old Testament — the Hebrew scriptures shared with Judaism — and the New Testament, which recounts the life of Jesus and the birth of the Church. The Old Testament falls into the Law (Torah), the Historical books, the Wisdom and poetic books, and the Prophets; the New Testament into the four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles, and Revelation. It is the most translated and most printed book in history.
Crucially, there is no single “Bible” agreed by all: the canon — the list of books counted as scripture — differs by community. The Jewish Tanakh has 24 books; Protestants number the same material as 39 Old Testament books; Catholics add seven deuterocanonical books for 46; the Eastern Orthodox include a few more still. All share the same 27 books of the New Testament.
Forming the canon
No committee wrote the Bible; the canon emerged. On the Jewish side, the Torah was authoritative earliest, the Prophets next, and the Writings last. On the Christian side, the Gospels and Paul's letters circulated and were read in worship long before any official list; the canon crystallized in the second through fourth centuries as the Church distinguished apostolic writings from a mass of apocryphal gospels and acts. Athanasius's list of 367 CE and the North African councils of the 390s mark the point at which the boundaries became firm in the West.
The revisions: versions and text
Because the Bible has always lived in translation, its transmission is a story of great versions. The Greek Septuagint carried the Hebrew scriptures into the wider ancient world and shaped the early Church. Jerome's Latin Vulgate became the West's Bible for a millennium. The Jewish Masoretes fixed the Hebrew text with vowels and accents, producing the Masoretic Text behind modern Hebrew Bibles. The Reformation's vernacular translations both spread the text and split the canon over the deuterocanonical books. And since the nineteenth century, and dramatically after the Dead Sea Scrolls, textual criticism has worked back toward the earliest recoverable wording by comparing thousands of manuscripts — the discipline that underlies every serious modern translation.
Milestones of transmission
The Hebrew scriptures take shape
The books of the Old Testament were written and edited over roughly a thousand years in Hebrew (with some Aramaic). By the turn of the era the Torah and Prophets were settled; the third section, the Writings, was fixed later. Jewish tradition counts these as the 24 books of the Tanakh.
The Septuagint (from c. 250 BCE)
Greek-speaking Jews in Alexandria translated the scriptures into Greek — the Septuagint (LXX). It included books not in the Hebrew canon and became the Bible of the early, Greek-speaking Church; most Old Testament quotations in the New Testament follow it.
The New Testament written (c. 50–100 CE)
Paul's letters, the four Gospels, Acts, the other Epistles and Revelation were composed in Koine Greek within decades of Jesus. They circulated individually before being gathered; the fourfold Gospel and the Pauline collection formed early cores.
Fixing the canon (2nd–4th c.)
Which books counted was settled gradually against rival lists (Marcion's, and various apocryphal gospels). Athanasius's Easter letter of 367 CE lists the 27 New Testament books now universal; the councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) ratified the wider canon in the West.
The Vulgate (c. 382–405)
Jerome translated the Bible into Latin, working for the Old Testament from the Hebrew rather than the Greek. His Vulgate became the standard Bible of Western Christendom for a thousand years and the Catholic Church's official text at Trent.
The Masoretic Text (c. 7th–10th c.)
Jewish scribes called the Masoretes standardized the Hebrew consonantal text and added vowel points, accents and marginal notes to lock its reading. The Aleppo and Leningrad codices are its great witnesses; the Leningrad Codex (1008 CE) underlies most printed Hebrew Bibles.
Reformation and the deuterocanon
Luther, translating into German (1522–34), followed the shorter Hebrew canon and grouped the extra Septuagint books as 'Apocrypha.' This split the canons: Catholics (46 OT books) and the Orthodox retain the deuterocanon; Protestants (39) set it aside.
Printing, vernacular Bibles and textual criticism
Gutenberg printed the Vulgate (c. 1455); Tyndale and then the King James Version (1611) put English scripture in ordinary hands. From the 19th century, and after the 1947 Dead Sea Scrolls pushed Hebrew witnesses back a thousand years, scholars build critical editions from the oldest manuscripts rather than any single tradition.
What scholars weigh
- Authorship and dating. Traditional ascriptions (Moses for the Torah, single authors for many books) are debated; much critical scholarship sees the Torah as woven from several sources and several books as composite — a view discussed further in the companion piece on the Torah.
- Which canon. The status of the deuterocanon divides Catholics and Orthodox from Protestants and Jews; it is a difference about the list, not usually about the wording of the shared books.
- Manuscript variety. The New Testament survives in thousands of Greek manuscripts that differ in countless small details; the Dead Sea Scrolls showed the Hebrew text to be remarkably stable over a thousand years while confirming that some variation existed. Critical editions aim to reconstruct, not to pick one copy.