Archived Daily Manna | Rejoice Fellowship | A mission to release people to rejoice in the world.

Message: The Bible is the biggest-selling book of all time; there is no other that even comes close. That may not surprise you, but how about this? The Bible was the first major book ever printed (by Johannes Gutenberg in 1454) and it has been the biggest-selling book every year since. You heard me right. In 2019, in 1957, in 1888, in 1620: the Bible has been the best-selling book in the world since the printing press was invented. (It is possible that Mao Tse-Tung's Little Red Book outstripped the Bible for one or more years in 1967-1972, but there are no accurate figures for it.) Today, there are over 100 million Bibles printed every year, not including innumerable e-book downloads or the millions of books about the Bible. If somebody asked you how many books there are in the Bible, or the New Testament, would you be able to tell them? The New Testament has 27 books. The Old Testament, however, is different in different major denominational groups. The Protestant Bible has 39 books in the Old Testament, for a total of 66. The Catholic Bible has 73, and Orthodox Bibles even more — the number varies among the major divisions of Orthodoxy. Why the difference? It really is not as major as it sounds. Protestants are encouraged to read the seven extra books in the Catholic Bible. Until recently, they were actually included in Protestant Bibles as “The Apocrypha,” but as people began to want lighter and shorter Bibles, they were excluded. sheep reading, from French illuminated Bible In this context, when we talk about the Bible, we are referring to the collection of books that Christians believe are the inspired and inerrant Word of God. There is a word for this: the “canon”. So, the Catholic canon is 73 books; the Protestant, 66. The reasons for this are not doctrinal so much as historical. There was no Hebrew Bible in 100 A.D.! Judaism did not collect, consider, and compile a standard canonical Hebrew Bible — the Tanakh — until around 900-1000 A.D. A group of scholars in Israel called the Masoretes spent centuries sifting through Hebrew Scripture (and adding vowel marks) and the “Masoretic Text” was finalized in the 11th century. Instead, early Christians had relied on a Greek book of Scripture, compiled by Hellenized Jews in Alexandria (the world's great center of learning at the time), called the Septuagint. The Septuagint was finalized around 300 B.C. (The name comes from the fact that there were seventy scholars who did the work; you might recognize the Greek root sept-, meaning seven, as in Sept-ember, the seventh month.) So, when the Christian Bible was being standardized during the years 300-400 A.D., it adopted the only complete Old Testament available: the Septuagint. Protestantism began to develop in the late 1400s; by the time the Protestants decided on a canonical Bible, the Masoretic Text had been finished in Hebrew. They considered it more authoritative and so adopted it, rather than the Greek Septuagint, as their Old Testament. The Masoretic Text omitted the books of the Apocrypha, and so the Protestants did, too. The Bible was written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit by over 40 different authors from all walks of life: shepherds, farmers, tent-makers, physicians, fishermen, priests, philosophers and kings. The oldest book, Genesis, is so old that nobody even knows what language it was originally written in, or when it was written. The first 11 chapters, which are clearly different from those following, are difficult to translate; they are themselves translations into Hebrew of some earlier language, and as many as 10% of the Hebrew words in these chapters are not accurately known today. (Hebrew was already a dead language when Christ was born.) Romans papyrus Bible Earliest known fragment of Romans, ca. 200 AD. The New Testament was written between 50-100 A.D. in a language called koine Greek. Koine means common or collective (and is the root of congregation). It was an amalgam of numerous Greek dialects, necessitated by the army of Alexander the Great: the soldiers of his army, who came from many different places speaking many dialects of Greek, had to communicate with each other. No original manuscript of the New Testament exists; we do not even have early copies. The oldest copy of the New Testament was written @ 400 A.D., although there are a few fragments from 100-200 A.D. and large portions from 200-300 A.D. The Greek New Testament we use today is a re-creation, made by hundreds of dedicated scholars examining thousands of manuscripts. This is why, oddly, new translations are considered more accurate than the King James: scholars have more and better sources — additional manuscripts are regularly discovered by archaeologists — and have had more time to digest them. The KJV translation is five centuries older than the NASB, but the NASB translates an “older” Greek Bible; it is closer to the original, “actual” Bible.