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15 Facts About the Bible You Should Know

How many do you know?

The Bible is the best-selling book in the world. Whether you have read it before or not, you probably have some basic knowledge about it. In this post, I’m going to share 15 facts about the Bible you should know, but many people don't.

1) The Bible is actually a collection of books, poems, and letters.

You’ll often hear people refer to the Bible as the best selling book of all time. You might also hear people talk about the Bible as one story. Both of these ideas are partially correct. Modern Bibles look like books and Christians maintain that Scripture tells the story of God’s redemption.

However, the Bible is not a book like you might think. It more like one of those anthologies you probably used in an English literature class. Anthologies bring together a broad collection of literature.

In a similar way, the Bible consists of a wide variety of literature. You’ll find narrative, history, fiction, poetry, prophetic, and apocalyptic literature.

While both Jews and Christians believe that God is the ultimate author of Scripture, they also acknowledge that many humans wrote and edited the Bible over many centuries. So, yes the Bible is a book… sort of. But it’s not like most books you read.

2) The Bible was written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek.

Contrary to some people’s opinion, the Bible was not meant to written in Shakespearean English. No matter which translation you prefer, it’s good to remember that the Bible you read is just that… a translation.

Most of the Old Testament was written in Hebrew. Some portions in Daniel and Ezra were written in Aramaic. The New Testament was written entirely in Greek although it does contain some Aramaic phrases.

3) The Bible contains different books depending on your faith tradition.

Unless you are familiar with different faith traditions, you may be surprised to discover that the contents of the Bible change if you are Jewish, Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox.

Every tradition contains the same books as you can find in the Jewish Bible, but you won’t find the New Testament books or some books Catholic and Orthodox Christians consider to be a part of the Old Testament.

While Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox believers agree on the contents of the New Testament, they disagree over books in the Old Testament. Protestants only retain the books found in the Jewish Bible. Catholics add several more books and the Eastern Orthodox Christians have the most.

4) The order of the books of the Bible varies in different traditions.

If you didn’t know fact #3, you probably won’t know this one either. Each tradition categorizes and arranges the books of the Bible differently.

The Jewish Bible has three main sections: the law, the prophets, and the writings.

The Christian traditions divide the Old Testament into four different sections: the Pentateuch, the historical books, the poetic books, and the prophetic books.

All three Christian traditions agree about the order of the New Testament books.

5) Martin Luther and other Reformers rejected some books Catholic and Orthodox Christians accept as canonical.

Continuing our facts about the books of the Bible, did you know that Martin Luther and the Reformers were the first Christians to reject Old Testament books observed by the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches?

In an effort to “go back to the original sources,” Luther and other reformers rejected any Old Testament book the Jews did not consider a part of their Bible. This mean that books like Tobit and Sirach were ommitted from Protestant lists of biblical books.

6) Unofficial lists of the Old Testament appeared around the time of Jesus.

When the Old Testament canon solidified is unknown. Evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls (3rd-1st century B.C.) suggest the Old Testament was still partially in development but that most of it was established and considered authoritative.

Although the evidence is unclear, Josephus refers to 22 books of the Old Testament. He was a Jewish historian in the first century A.D. Typically, the Hebrew Bible consists of 24 books, but Josephus may have been combining books so the books of the Bible was the same as the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet.

7) Unofficial lists of the New Testament appeared in the 2nd century A.D.

An early Church Father name Ireneaus identified all but four of the New Testament books as scripture. He was the Bishop of Lyon and he wrote some influential books defending the Christian faith. The only books he leaves out are Philemon, 2 Peter, 3 John, and Jude.

8) Bible translators compare ancient manuscripts to translate the Bible into English or other modern languages.

You are probably so familiar with your English translation that you never stop to think about how we get translations. Well, it’s quite an interesting process.

Unfortunately, we do not have original copies of the books of the Bible. Instead, we have copies of copies that were passed down over the centuries. [NOTE: It’s helpful to remember the printing press wasn’t invented until 1436.]

Sadly, our earliest complete copies of the books of the Bible come from centuries after they were written. In order to overcome these problems, translators have developed a method for reconstructing what the original copies of the Bible most likely looked like. If you read the footnotes in your Bible, you will often find reference to these other copies of the Bible when translations disagree about a particular phrase.

9) The oldest complete Hebrew manuscript of the Old Testament is from 1008 A.D.

While we have fragments of Old Testament books that go back further in time, the oldest complete manuscript of the Old Testament goes back to 1008 A.D. It’s called the Leningrad Codex. If you are doing math, that means our oldest complete copy of the Old Testament in Hebrew was made well over 1,000 years after the last books were written.

10) The earliest evidence for the Old Testament is the Dead Sea Scrolls which date from the 3rd to 1st centuries B.C.

If you found the last fact concerning, #10 should help you feel a little better. Between 1947 and 1956, archaeologists discovered caves with ancient manuscripts. The manuscripts are called the Dead Sea Scrolls. Many of these were Hebrew copies of Old Testament books written between the 3rd and 1st centuries B.C. While none of them offered a complete copy, they showed remarkable consistency with the Leningrad Codex. This discovery validated the belief that Jewish scribes had meticulously preserved the Bible.

To be clear, there are substantial differences in a number of the scrolls, but overall the Dead Sea Scrolls provides evidence that Old Testament had not changed much in over 1,000 years.

11) The oldest complete Greek manuscript of the New Testament is from the middle of the 4th century A.D. (i.e., 350 A.D.).

Our oldest, complete copy of the New Testament comes from the 4th century A.D. It is called Codex Sinaiticus. A scholar named Constantin von Tischendorf found it in 1844. The manuscript also preserves much of the Old Testament in Greek.

12) There are over 5,500 (incomplete) Greek manuscripts of the New Testament books.

The New Testament is one of the most well-documented texts in history. Between Greek, Latin, and other languages, scholars have many thousands of copies to examine when translated the Bible.

13) The Old Testament was translated into Greek beginning in the 3rd century B.C. This translation is called the Septuagint.

Jews living in Alexandria, Egypt began translating the Old Testament from Hebrew to Greek around the 3rd century B.C. They completed translations of all the books by some time in the 1st century B.C.

This translation is called the Septuagint and it is frequently abbreviated as LXX. The name comes from the legend that there were 72 Jewish translators who produced the Septuagint. While our oldest Hebrew copy of the Old Testament is from 1008 A.D., we have nearly complete Greek translations that are much older. Codex Vaticanus and Codex Alexandrinus are two of the oldest (4th-5th centuries A.D.).

14) The English names of the books of the Bible come from the Greek language.

If you talk to someone from a different faith tradition (e.g., Jewish, Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox), you may be surprised to hear them refer to books of the Bible you’ve never heard of before. This is especially the case with the Old Testament.

Sometimes the difference is because they consider some books to be Scripture that your tradition doesn’t. Other times the difference is because of how we get the names.

The English names for the books of the Bible mostly reflect the Greek translation of the Old Testament. The Greek and Hebrew names differ in many places even though the content is the same.

15) The Old Testament is slightly different in the Hebrew Bible, the Greek Septuagint, and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Studying the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint, and the Dead Sea Scrolls presents many interesting questions. While most of the content is the same, there are substantial differences between these sources.

For example, some passages in 1 and 2 Kings are arranged differently and provide different details in the Septuagint than they do in the Hebrew Bible. The same is true when we look at the Dead Sea Scrolls. While we find remarkable similarities, we sometimes find substantial differences. For example, the Dead Sea scrolls containing the book of Psalms has a different order and even contains extra poems.

People who translate the Bible study these issues and more to figure out what the earliest versions of the books of the Bible looked like.