SO, WHAT IS IN THE BIBLE?

By: Rev. Daniel Schultz

So, what is in the bible?

About 30,000 verses, 750,000 words and over 300,000 textual variants, for starters. Most Bibles run between 2000 and 2500 pages, depending on how much annotation and secondary material they include.

The Bible is an anthology of anywhere from 24 to 75 pieces of scripture, depending on what's included, and how it's counted.

A very broad outline of the various groups of materials in a typical Protestant Bible follows:

I. Old Testament:

A. History; Origins (Genesis-Deuteronomy).

B. Laws; More History (Deuteronomy-Nehemiah).

C. Wisdom Literature (Esther-Song of Solomon).

D. Prophets (Isaiah-Malachi).

II. New Testament:

A. Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John + Acts).

B. Letters of Paul (Romans-Philemon).

C. Letters of Other Early Leaders (Hebrews-Jude).

D. Revelation (the Apocalypse of John).

What Christians call the "Old Testament" makes up about three-quarters of the Bible.

As in many anthologies, the Bible contains a wide range of genres: songs, stories, history, science, law, poetry, politics, humor, letters and theory. There's even some horror and spy stories!

In addition to these genres, there are some forms found in the Bible that don't fit well into other categories. The most important of these are gospels and apocalyptic literature.

What there is not very much of in the Bible is what we today would call philosophy or "systematic theology". The people who wrote the Bible wrote their portions for particular purposes, and often for particular occasions. They didn't worry much about reconciling what they wrote with other pieces of scripture; in fact, they seem to have often thought of their writings as pieces of a larger conversation, not revelations of an unchanging, monolithic truth. The charge of contradiction sometimes laid against the Bible is therefore unfair. By design, it is meant to represent many voices, which may or may not agree with one another.

How did the Bible get to be in its current form?

Since the Bible was written, compiled and transcribed by many different people over the course of about a thousand years, there is no "original" text we can refer to. What we do have are copies - lots of them. The earliest of these generally date back to somewhere between 200-300CE, with the exception of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which go back as far as 250BCE.

Some manuscripts are papyrus scrolls and some are "codices," or "books," as we now call them. They are often incomplete, and many of them reflect variations in the text due to scribal error or editing. In addition, many scriptures exist in somewhat different versions, depending on time and location. For example, to determine the meaning of an Old Testament passage, scholars might consult the "standard" Hebrew text, or versions in Aramaic, Coptic, Ethiopic, Latin, Samaritan, or Syriac. Once they have that meaning more or less fixed, they can take a stab at translating it into the idioms of a modern language.

What we read as "the Bible," then, is really a patchwork of texts painstakingly combed for the best of many alternatives. Most of those alternatives are not very dramatic: is this word "a" or "the"? The important variations are noted and discussed in any good study Bible.

Despite all that, it is still possible to talk about the Bible as a unified entity. The text has been more or less stable since around 400CE, when St. Jerome translated the Bible into everyday Latin, an edition known as the Latin Bible.

This was the standard text for centuries afterward; translations into European languages from the Greek and Hebrew original text were not available (or legal) until the 1500-1600s. The celebrated King James Bible, for example, was the first authorized translation into English.

From there, the Bible has gone through many editions in English. Some of the most important of these in use today are the Revised and New Revised Standard Versions, the New Interpreter's Version, and the Good News for Modern Man.

Two important distinctions separate different editions: first, if they are drawn from original texts, or are rewrites of English texts; and second, if they are strict interpretations or paraphrases of the original text. Paraphrases can open up meanings "hidden" in odd phrases or unfamiliar references, but they can also distort the meaning of the text or even introduce new ideas not found in the original.

Notice in all of this what we haven't said: that the Bible was dictated to humans by God. That's because that idea of composition simply isn't in the tradition, either in Judaism or Christianity. (It is, however a part of Islam.) Even ?The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy,? the standard for "literalist" readings, declares that the Bible is inspired, but not transcribed.

That answers part of the question, but how were the books of the Bible chosen?

They were chosen through two separate yet parallel processes. Over the course of several centuries (from perhaps 200BCE to 100-200CE), the Jewish community fixed a canon of twenty-four books. How that happened exactly is not known. What we do know is that there were several different versions of "the scriptures" circulating.

One of the most important of those versions was the Greek translation known as the Septuagint, so named because of a legend that seventy-two translators working separately took seventy-two days to produce exactly the same translation of the texts. The Septuagint was the Bible for many Greek-speaking Jews and Jewish "fellow-travelers," who worshiped in synagogues, but had not yet met all the requirements for full conversion. The Septuagint has many variations from the Hebrew texts, some important, some not. It is the form of Jewish scripture most often referred to in the New Testament.

The New Testament developed in a roughly similar manner. Most mainstream scholars believe that Paul's writings are actually among the earliest Christian texts. The gospels emerged later, as various Christian communities began to feel a need to consolidate and put down in a permanent form their collective memories of Jesus.
After Paul's letters--perhaps overlapping them--came the gospels. Most scholars believe that the gospel of Mark came first, and that Luke and Matthew substantially rewrote portions of it. Though Luke and Matthew worked separately, they seem to share a common source of Jesus' sayings. This is referred to as "Q," an abbreviation of the German word "quelle," or "source". Though Q is sometimes described as something like a "lost gospel," its original shape and content are uncertain at best. In any case, these three gospels are often referred to as the Synoptic Gospels, because they seem to see Jesus' story in roughly the same way.

John's gospel is probably the last to be written, and depicts Jesus' life and message very differently from the other gospels. Outside the gospels are several letters from the apostles Peter, James, Jude and John to different congregations, and the letter to the Hebrews, whose author and audience are not known.

By about 100CE, the New Testament was complete. However, like the Jewish scriptures, it took many years for the contents of the New Testament to be formalized. Marcion and the Montanists tried to pare down the New Testament to a much abbreviated form, while discarding the Hebrew scriptures entirely. In its response to this challenge, the early church established two important principles: diversity and continuity. Against Marcion's synthesized version of Luke, the church kept all four gospels and the New Testament letters. Against his break with the "God of the Jews," the church maintained its continuity with Jewish tradition by retaining what Christians now call the Old Testament. The church thus affirmed that Christians and Jews worship the same God.

(continued below)