The Bible

In ancient time paper was made from the papyrus or Egyptian paper reed.  The Greeks called it “byblos”, from which we get the word Bible which means The Books.  In fact, the Bible is not one book, but a small library of books.  As you know, if you go into a library you will find books on different subjects, written by different authors at different times.  So it is with the books of the Bible.  If you look at the list of them at the beginning of your Bible, you will see that there are 80 altogether, 39 in the Old Testament and 27 in the New Testament.  In between the Old and New Testaments are the 14 books of what is called the Apocrypha.  The best known of these are the Book of Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, and the two Books of the Maccabees.

The word Testament means Covenant or Alliance.  The Old Testament tells us of the history of God’s alliance with the Chosen People, the Jews, and how God promised to bless them and how they promised to obey him.  But when the Jewish leaders crucified God’s Son, Jesus Christ, God made a new alliance with the Christian Church, and so the New Testament tells us about this alliance by giving us the history of Our Lord’s life, death and Resurrection and of the growth of the Church after the first Pentecost (Whitsunday).

The Old Testament

Some of the books in the Old Testament are history books, such as Exodus or the Books of the Kings.  Others are books of speeches or sermons, as for example those of the Prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah.  Then there are the Books of the Law, which contain rules for God’s People to keep.  There is a book containing 150 hymns, called the Psalms, and another of wise sayings known as the Proverbs.

These books were written at different times by different people and were then all collected together.  We call them all the Old Testament, but the Jews called them “The Law, the Prophets and the Writings”.  They all teach us, in different ways, how God prepared the Jewish people for the time when he came into the world himself in the Person of Jesus Christ.

The New Testament

The New Testament is also a collection of different books written by different people at different times.  The first four books are called Gospels.  Gospel, that is god spel, means Good News; and these books tell us the Good News of Our Lord’s life, death and Resurrection.

The Gospels

The first Gospel is that of St Matthew the Apostle, who wrote it chiefly for Jewish Christians.  St Mark, the nephew of St Barnabas the Apostle, was a friend of St Peter who told him about the life of Jesus, and St Mark wrote it all down for the Christians in the city of Rome.  St Luke was a doctor and a friend of St Paul.  He very likely met Our Lady from whom he learnt the story of the Annunciation and of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem.  St John wrote his Gospel later than the others, when he was a very old man.

Acts of the Apostles

Besides the Gospels, St Luke also wrote another book, The Acts of the Apostles, which is the first history book of the Christian Church, written by one who lived through many of the events it records.

It tells us how the Church spread from an Upper Room in a house in Jerusalem to the city of Rome, the capital of the great Roman Empire.

Epistles

After the Acts of the Apostles you will find several Epistles.  The word ‘Epistle’ means a letter.  We write letters today to people who live some distance away and the Apostles did the same.  As they travelled about, planting the Christian Church in different places, they naturally wanted to keep in touch with its members, and this they did by letter.  So the First Epistle of St Paul to the Corinthians means the first letter that St Paul wrote to the Christians in the town of Corinth.  These letters were kept and treasured by the people who received them, and sometimes they were sent on to Christians in other places for them to read.  So when St Paul wrote to the Christians at Colossae he asked them to pass his letter on to those at Laodicea.  “And when this letter has been read among you, have it read also in the church of the Laodiceans; and see that you read also the letter from Laodicea” (NRSV, Colossians 4:16).

St Paul was not the only Apostle to write letters as you will see from the list of New Testament books.  There were also St James, St Jude, St Peter and St John.

Revelation

The last book of the Bible, the Revelation of St John the Divine, is a book describing visions which he saw.

Translations

Our Bible as we have it now is written in English, but the Old Testament and the Apocrypha were first written in Hebrew and the New Testament in Greek.  Later they were put into Latin by St Jerome and then, about 400 years ago, they were translated into English.  In the Prayer Book you will notice that the headings of the Psalms and Canticles are still in Latin.  So we still speak of the Magnificat, which is a Latin word meaning ‘magnifies’.

The Word of God

Many other writers wrote accounts of Our Lord and several bishops wrote letters to different Christian congregations, but the Church chose the writings of the New Testament from them all and added these to the Books of the Old Testament and the Apocrypha as being the Word of God.  And because the Bible is the Word of God, we should always treat it and speak of it with reverence and honour.

SUMMARY

1. The Bible contains different books written by different people.  The Old Testament and the Apocrypha tell how God prepared the Jews for the coming of Jesus and contain history, poetry, speeches, laws and wise sayings.  They were first written in Hebrew.

2. The New Testament, which was first written in Greek, contains four Gospels or Lives of Our Lord, a history of the early years of the Church, several letters and a book of visions.  The Church chose all of these from many others.

3. The two Testaments and the Apocrypha together form the Bible and are the Word of God, and for this reason we should always treat it and speak of it with reverence and honour.