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The Structure of the Bible

• The Bible is a set of books, each of which was written by one or more human authors under the divine inspiration of the Holy Spirit (2 Peter 1:20-21; 2 Timothy 3:16).
• Christians often divide the Bible into two sections, the “Old Testament” and the “New Testament,” because the New Testament is explicitly about Jesus Christ and His New Covenant, while the Old Testament merely points forward to these things.
• The Old Testament is also the “Bible” of modern Rabbinical Jews who don’t accept Jesus as the Jewish Messiah, although they consider other Jewish writings authoritative that Christians do not.
• Protestant Bibles follow the structure of the Septuagint (a popular Greek translation of the Old Testament written in the 300 years leading up to Jesus’ birth) in splitting up some books of the Old Testament that the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament text used by Rabbinical Jews) sees as single books, which is why the Protestant Bible has 39 books in the Old Testament, while the Hebrew Bible only contains 24.
• Beyond the books of the Old Testament found in the Protestant Bible, Roman Catholic and Orthodox traditions include additional Jewish books written between the Old and New Testaments, composed in Greek, as “deuterocanonical” writings. Catholics include seven deuterocanonical books, while Orthodox traditions generally include those plus more. Protestants and Rabbinical Jews classify these books as “apocrypha,” i.e., interesting and historically significant, but not part of the Bible.
• Certain other Jewish texts written during the intertestamental era (between the time of the Old and New Testaments) were pseudepigrapha (books claiming falsely to be written by major figures of the Jewish faith), which were occasionally valued by the Jews of the time but were not included in the deuterocanonical / apocryphal book lists.
• The 27 books of the New Testament are accepted as the formal canon (official list of Bible books) by all major factions of Christianity. Combined with the 39 books of the Old Testament, Protestant Bibles therefore have 66 books.
• While there are no deuterocanonical New Testament books, certain texts like the Shepherd of Hermas and the Didache were prized by the early Christian Church and were mostly consistent with the themes and ideas of the New Testament. However, Church councils such as the Synod of Hippo in 393 AD and the Council of Carthage in 397 AD excluded all but the 27 books we worship today.
• These church councils also excluded Christian pseudepigrapha (books claiming falsely to be written by major figures of the Christian faith) and later Gnostic texts that deviated significantly from the thematic elements of the canonized (authoritative) New Testament.
• Fun fact: There are 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet. If there were a logical way to divide up and combine the Old Testament books that yielded a count of 22 OT books (the Old Testament being mostly written in Hebrew), then when combined with the 27 books of the New Testament, there would be 49 books in the Bible, which is a very biblical number (49 = 7 x 7). There is therefore probably a divinely ordained way to parse and order the books of the Bible that yields a book count of 49. Example ideas:
  • Origen took the Hebrew Bible and combined Judges with Ruth and Jeremiah with Lamentations to produce 22 OT books.
  • The Literary Structure of the Whole Bible
  • Bible Book Order?

Notes on Authorship

• Popular legend holds that Moses wrote the Book of Genesis, the very first book of the Bible. However, Genesis was most likely written by a series of authors, starting with Adam and ending with Jacob’s sons. Three pieces of (non-exhaustive) evidence for this:
  • There are section markers in Genesis indicating who wrote which parts.
  • The nature of the Hebrew words changes from section to section, corresponding to the time period of the events described therein.
  • It is highly unlikely that God’s people had no Bible whatsoever for the first 2500 years of their existence.
• There is dispute about the author of the New Testament Book of Hebrews. However, in 2 Peter 3:14-16, Peter, who is writing to Jewish Christians (which we can deduce by connecting 2 Peter 3:1 to 1 Peter 1:1, James 1:1, and Acts 8:1), mentions that Paul wrote an epistle to the Jewish Christians, which Peter calls Scripture. This must be the Epistle to the Hebrews.
• It was common for later Bible authors to insert editorial notes into earlier books. For example, they might reference the later name of a city that had a different original name, or they might indicate that a state of affairs established in the past is still in effect hundreds of years later.

The Content of the Bible

• Bible books fall into a number of different genres. For example, there are:
  • Historical books, which tell a continuous narrative from creation through the acts of the first-century Church.
  • Law books, which contain the various legal commands given to Israel by God.
  • Wisdom books:
    • A songbook (the Psalter)
    • Poems (the Song of Solomon)
    • Philosophical musings (Ecclesiastes)
    • A morality tale (Job)
    • Proverbs (Proverbs)
  • Prophecies, which contain predictions of future events (often expressed in symbolic imagery).
  • Gospels, which narrate the life and acts of Jesus Christ, including the many parables He told.
  • Epistles, letters written by apostles to encourage, educate, and correct first-century churches.
• Many books are multi-genre: for example, the law books and many of the prophetic books contain historical narratives, while the Book of James is a wisdom epistle.
• Some sections of books, such as the prophets and the epistles, are ordered by length (longest to shortest), not when they were written or in what order their narratives occur chronologically. Note: the epistles are separated into letters written by Paul and letters written to the Jewish Christians by other apostles.
• The first 5 books of the Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy) are called the Torah, the Pentateuch, or the Five Books of Moses. However, considering that Moses did not write Genesis, nor does it contain any of the laws given to Moses, it is not certain that Genesis is included in the “Book of the Law of Moses” mentioned in Joshua 8:31 and Joshua 23:6.
• Joshua 24:26 indicates that the Book of Joshua is part of the “Book of the Law of God,” which suggests that the complete “Book of the Law” is the first six books of the Bible, with Genesis being preamble and Joshua being fulfillment of the promise of God to Abraham. This would connect the first six books of the Bible with the six days of creation in Genesis 1. As the seventh book, Judges would represent sin on a Sabbath, much as Adam and Eve sinned on the first Sabbath day.

Notes on Translation

• The Bible is often said to be infallible (perfectly trustworthy) and inerrant (without error) “in the original languages,” because the Bible was not originally written in English:
  • The Old Testament is primarily written in Hebrew, quite possibly the original language spoken by Adam and Eve and passed down through God’s covenant line to the nation of Israel.
  • Several portions of the OT books Daniel and Ezra are written in Aramaic, a language closely related to Hebrew that was the official language of the Babylonian and Persian empires that dominated Israel during and after the Exile.
  • The New Testament is written entirely in Greek, except where it explicitly mentions words from other languages.
• The exact text of the Old Testament is a matter of scholarly debate. Beyond the Masoretic Text (the Hebrew text passed down by Jews from Old Testament times and considered authoritative by modern Rabbinic Jews), the Septuagint and other non-Hebrew texts translated from older Hebrew manuscripts are relevant for attempting to determine the exact original wordings of disputed passages. Fortunately, the sources considered reliable by scholars are largely in agreement about the bulk of the Old Testament text.
• The exact text of the New Testament is also a matter of scholarly debate. The reliable Greek manuscripts, of which there are many, are 99% in agreement and do not deviate on any major doctrinal issues. For the remaining 1%, there are three main approaches:
  • Give priority to the oldest manuscripts.
  • Give priority to the manuscripts that were copied most frequently.
  • Take as a matter of faith that God preserved a single version of the Greek New Testament, generally assumed to be the one underlying the King James Version.
• Different English translations vary in part because they use different underlying manuscripts for the Old and/or New Testaments, based on which of these three approaches they follow.
• English translations also vary because there are two main ways to translate:
  • As literally and as close as possible to the original language (“word for word”)
  • Attempting to capture the meaning of the original language in modern English parlance (“meaning for meaning”).
• Translations do not fit neatly into either category but rather exist on a spectrum from one extreme to the other. It is impossible to be perfectly word-for-word without creating a new version of English that requires a serious understanding of Hebrew, while an extremely meaning-for-meaning translation essentially ceases to be a translation and instead becomes an interpretative creative work of the translator’s own design.
• Popular word-for-word translations include the New American Standard Bible (NASB), the English Standard Version (ESV), the King James Version (KJV), and the New King James Version (NKJV). Middle-ground translations (balancing word-for-word and meaning-for-meaning) include the highly popular New International Version (NIV), the Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB), and the Common English Bible (CEB). Meaning-for-meaning translations include the New Living Translation (NLT), the Good News Translation (GNT), and The Message (MSG).
• Note: Attempts to translate in a more “English-friendly” way can cause problems, such as in John 21:15-17. Jesus uses the word “love” three times, but He uses a different Greek word for love the third time, which is why Peter is grieved. If you only see the English word “love” three times (English does not have separate words for the different Greek words in play here), you will not understand why Peter is grieved.
• A final issue with translating the Bible is that English is a far more figurative language than Hebrew. For example, the mostly word-for-word NKJV translates 1 Samuel 20:34 as “Jonathan arose from the table in fierce anger,” but the Hebrew literally says, “Jonathan arose from the table in the heat of his nose.” When we are fiercely angry, our nose feels like it’s on fire. Thus, while the meaning is the same, what is actually being said is deliberately obscured to make the language more accommodating to English speakers.