What is The Holy Bible

First, thank you for your interest in The Bible in a Year (B-I-Y). I am really excited to share this journey with you. Second, there is NO GUILT in B-I-Y land. If you get the readings done, great. Some of the readings, well, that is good too. But even if you haven’t done anything, pop into the blog. Maybe someone will have words of wisdom meant just for you. And it will inspire you to get back on the path.
Before we start reading the actual Bible, I decided to take a fresh look at just what the Bible actually is.
Here is what I found out, along with my sources.
The actual name is The Holy Bible. It is the number 1 best selling book of all times with approximately 1.7 BILLION copies sold. It has also been translated into the most languages of any book.
The Bible is a collection of books. The word “bible” comes from the Latin meaning book. Which is why, when my sons Matthew (18) and Cole (15) took Spanish, the word biblia means book, any book. The Latin word is actually a derivation from the “Greek word βιβλίον . It had the literal meaning of "paper" or "scroll" and came to be used as the ordinary word for "book". It is the diminutive of βύβλος bublos, "Egyptian papyrus", possibly so called from the name of the Phoenician port Byblos (also known as Gebal) from whence Egyptian papyrus was exported to Greece. “1
There are 66 books in the Protestant Bible. We will read each of these. The Catholic and some Episcopalian Bibles include additional books known as the Apocrypha. I have read these books and love them, particularly the additional Esther passages and for a really good feminist Bible book, read Judith. However, we will not be reading those this year.
Experts disagree (are you surprised??) on when the books of the Bible were written. Most of the current research dates the earliest sections of the Bible (the tales of the patriarchs, Exodus, Sinai, and the wilderness wanderings) to 1000 BCE. The last book to be written was either Hebrews or Revelation in the early second century CE. The literature that we will be reading is a translation, mostly from Hebrew in the OT and mostly from Greek in the NT. We do not have original sources for our translations for the most part.
Most of the OT comes from a 10th century compilation called the Masoretic Text. This was developed by rabbis and is considered the authoritative text on the Jewish scriptures. It is interesting to note that the Dead Sea scrolls do contain earlier versions of some of the Jewish scriptures but especially the Isaiah passages are virtually identical. This speaks to the incredible training that rabbinic students had in the oral traditions and scholarship in the Diaspora.
The NT is a bit different as we have lots of different manuscripts, translations, and traditions. I found 2 interesting YouTube videos that follow this post.
There are multiple different types of literature in the Bible. There is poetry, narratives, laws, wisdom literature, songs, erotica, letters, mystic writings and, everyone’s favorite, apocryphal literature. Some are easier to understand than others. Sometimes, you just have to keep plugging along and hoping that maybe, just maybe you will understand – like when God told Joshua to kill all the current inhabitants of Canaan….
No matter what, where, when, the most important questions to me are always WHY. And that, my fellow journeyers, is why we are reading this amazing collection this year. Why was God important to them and why is that important to me. I just about can’t wait for Jan 1!
Sources: 1:Wikipedia direct quote from Bible page, Harper’s Bible Dictionary copyright 1985 http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/Masoretic.html