The Bible: What is it?

The Bible is in fact a collection of many smaller “books.” These were written by a variety of around 40 different authors from different walks of life, over some 1600 years. The different books of the Bible also vary in length and style: there are narratives, letters, reflections, poetry, oracles, and more.

The books that make up the whole Bible were written by human authors for their own times and places, but inspired by God for his people in all times and places. “Inspired” means that God guided and directed the writing processes of the human authors to ensure his own goals were met through them.  

The Bible is the ultimate authority and source for Christian faith and practice. It judges and corrects supplementary sources of authority and guidance for Christian faith and practice. These ‘lesser authorities’ include church traditions, human reasoning, spiritual and personal experiences, and writings by Christian thinkers.

The diversity of the biblical writings is drawn together as a unified grand story by its focus on Jesus the promised king (or the “Christ”/“Messiah”). The Old Testament looked ahead to Jesus and prepared God’s people for his coming through its promises and hopes and its shaping of their understanding of God and his ways. The New Testament books were written in the decades after the life, death, resurrection, and return of Jesus to heaven. These look back at these events of Jesus’ life, telling their audiences of their significance and meaning while also looking ahead to his second coming.

• For further reading, read HERE.
• For a five minute animated video on this, watch the clip below:

The “big story” of the whole Bible includes God’s words and actions in real times and places in history and geography. Not all of this has external evidence (e.g. archaeology) to verify it, although much has been discovered in the past 200 years, and more continues to be found and studied. Much of this was with the people of Israel and their experiences under the rule of empires from the ancient world, including that of Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, the Greek kingdoms, and Rome.

The Bible was not originally written in English. The Old Testament books were written mainly in Hebrew (which looks like this: אָלֶף-בֵּית), while the New Testament books were written in Greek (which looks like this: ἀλφαβήτα). Good translations of the Bible into other languages convey the meaning of the text. Some do this by staying as close as possible to the Greek or Hebrew words and sentences, while others paraphrase the thoughts of each sentence which can make for easier reading. A good paraphrase English Bible is the New Living Translation.

The Bible doesn’t answer all the questions we might have about God and spiritual matters it but tells us clearly the things that God wants us to know – namely who he is, what he has done in Jesus, and how we should respond.

The Bible is a complete whole. The list or “canon” of the Bible includes 39 separate “books” in the Old Testament (pre-Jesus), and 27 in the New Testament (post-Jesus), making 66 in total. The collections (canons) of OT and NT books were decided by a process of recognizing which books were given and inspired by God.

• For more on the topic of the canon of Scripture, read HERE.
• For a five minute animated video on this, watch the clip below: