Scriptures & Texts

The Bible

Also Known As Bible Short form. The atlas files this entry under a longer name and readers reach for the shorter one.

Christian Scriptures

There is no single list called the Bible. Judaism's Tanakh contains 24 books; Protestant Bibles hold 66, the same Hebrew material recounted as 39 plus 27 in the New Testament; Catholic Bibles hold 73, adding the deuterocanonical books confirmed at the Council of Trent in 1546; Eastern Orthodox Bibles add further texts including 1 Esdras, 3 Maccabees and Psalm 151, with the exact contents varying between churches; and the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo canon, the widest in Christendom, includes Enoch and Jubilees. The disagreements are old, they are about which books are scripture, and no council has ever settled them for everyone.

Facts

Origins

Era of Composition

1200 BCE to 100 CE 1

Language

Biblical Hebrew 1

Language

Aramaic 1

Language

Koine Greek 1

Attributed Author / Compiler

Numerous authors across a millennium; traditional attributions vary by book 1

Attributed Author / Compiler

The canon was formed by the church over the first four centuries (critical) 1

Text

Literary Form

Text collection / anthology 1

Structure

66 books (Protestant), 73 (Catholic), or more (Orthodox); Old and New Testaments 1

Status

Canonical Status

Canonical 1Christianity

Attestation

Historicity

Historically attested 2

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Four Canons, and the Books That Separate Them

The Protestant canon has 66 books: 39 in the Old Testament and 27 in the New. Its Old Testament contains exactly the Hebrew material of the Tanakh, differently divided and differently ordered, and nothing else. The Reformers held that books not preserved in Hebrew lacked authority, and Luther grouped them separately as Apocrypha, useful but not doctrinal. Later English editions dropped them altogether, which is why most Protestant Bibles today print 66 books without comment.

The Catholic canon has 73. It adds Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch and 1 and 2 Maccabees, plus Greek additions to Esther and Daniel, and calls them deuterocanonical rather than apocryphal. These books were in the Greek and Latin Bibles of the early church and in general Western use for over a millennium; the Council of Trent, in its decree of April 1546, made their status binding doctrine in response to the Reformers' rejection of them.

Eastern Orthodox Bibles go further, following the Septuagint: they include the Catholic deuterocanonicals and add 1 Esdras, 3 Maccabees, Psalm 151 and the Prayer of Manasseh, with 4 Maccabees usually printed in an appendix. Contents vary between the Greek, Slavonic and Georgian traditions, and no single Orthodox number can honestly be given.

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo canon is the widest. It is traditionally said to comprise 81 books and includes 1 Enoch and Jubilees, which no other church treats as scripture, together with Ethiopic works such as 1-3 Meqabyan, unrelated to the Maccabees of other canons. The figure of 81 is traditional and the lists that circulate do not consistently reach it, since sources differ on how books are counted and grouped.

How the Lists Were Fixed, and by Whom

No council fixed a Christian Bible for all Christians. The Old Testament question was live from the start because the church read the Greek scriptures, which circulated with more books than the Hebrew collection. Jerome, translating the Latin Vulgate from about 382, insisted on the Hebrew as the standard and marked the extra books as edifying but not canonical; Augustine disagreed and carried the Western church with him. Regional synods at Hippo in 393 and Carthage in 397 listed the wider canon, and Western practice followed them without ever treating the matter as formally closed.

That ambiguity held for a thousand years and broke at the Reformation. Luther's German Bible of 1534 printed the disputed books in a separate section; Trent responded in 1546 by defining the canon with its own list and attaching an anathema to anyone rejecting it. The Church of England took a middle position, and the Thirty-Nine Articles of 1571 kept the Apocrypha for reading as examples of life but not for establishing doctrine. The 1611 King James Bible printed the Apocrypha between the Testaments; the British and Foreign Bible Society resolved in 1826 to stop funding editions containing it, which is the immediate reason most English Bibles now lack it.

The Orthodox churches never held an equivalent to Trent. The Synod of Jerusalem in 1672 endorsed several of the wider books, but Orthodox canon lists remain somewhat fluid and are treated as a matter of received liturgical use rather than of conciliar definition. The New Testament shows the same pattern from the other direction: its 27 books were agreed across almost the whole church by the late fourth century, and no Christian body has since disputed them, but that agreement was reached by usage rather than by decree.

From Vulgate to Vernacular, and the Scale of Translation

No original manuscript of any biblical book survives. The Hebrew text rests on the Masoretic codices of the tenth and eleventh centuries, checked against the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Samaritan Pentateuch and the Greek Septuagint. The Greek New Testament rests on some 5,800 catalogued manuscripts, ranging from the credit-card-sized Papyrus 52 to the great fourth-century codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, which are the earliest surviving near-complete Bibles. Modern critical editions reconstruct the text from these witnesses; the printed Bibles of the Reformation era rested on far fewer and later ones.

Jerome's Latin Vulgate, produced between about 382 and 405, was the Bible of Western Europe for over a thousand years and the basis of Catholic translation until the twentieth century. Vernacular versions were made throughout the Middle Ages, but the ones that mattered came later and were contentious. The Wycliffite Bibles of the 1380s and 1390s, translated from the Latin by followers of John Wycliffe, were condemned and their circulation criminalised in England in 1409. William Tyndale translated from Hebrew and Greek instead, printed his New Testament abroad in 1526, and was strangled and burned in 1536 before finishing the Old Testament.

The King James Version of 1611 was produced by six companies of translators working from the original languages and leaning heavily on Tyndale, whose wording it preserves in large stretches. It shaped English prose for three centuries and remains in use.

Translation has since become an industrial enterprise. As of 2025, the full Bible exists in around 776 languages, the New Testament in a further 1,798, and some portion of scripture in around 1,433 more, covering over 4,000 of the world's roughly 7,400 living languages. No other book approaches that reach.

Passages from This Text

1 Kings 19:11-12The Holy Bible, American Standard Versionrevelation

And he said, Go forth, and stand upon the mount before Jehovah. And, behold, Jehovah passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before Jehovah; but Jehovah was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but Jehovah was not in the earthquake: and after the earthquake a fire; but Jehovah was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.

The Holy Bible, American Standard Version. translated by American Revision Committee.

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