Which book? Which Bible are you referring to?
God says in the bible heaven and earth will pass but my word will not pass. It is in the book of Mathew somewhere . I no your going to let me have it for this comment…I will look it up and get the facts .
I understand the bible has many different books as well as the many people who wrote it. But I thought as in terms of the completion of the bible as a whole it had been completed 3000 years ago.
The last book was written (most likely Revelations) is less than 2000 years old.
And it took several hundred years after that before a commonly agreed upon version was compiled. And even then, the current protestant version wasn’t decided until 1825. Several different churches use different bibles, and consider certain books to be part of scripture… or not. And as we still don’t have definitive translations, or even autographs for most of the Bible. And among the oldest copies of the various books, there are more words that they disagree on than there are total words in the Bible.
So when you say, “the Bible says,” it is completely reasonable to ask “which Bible?” Depending on your church, and translation, you could be using a Bible that contains significant differences from any of the Bibles sitting on my shelves.
There are three issues here:
-
What is the oldest complete Hebrew Bible existing today.
-
What is the oldest surviving biblical text?
-
When do scholars think the Hebrew Bible was first written down?
The answer to #1 is about 1700 years old. This is the Septuagint, a Greek translation.
The answer to #2 is about 2100 years ago. These are found among the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The answer to Number 3 is probably about 2500 years ago for the Torah. Probably a few hundred later for The Prophets.
New Testament books were thought to be written about 100 years +/- after Christ lived. But the oldest NT texts are from several hundred years later.
How can one seriously think this, if one is including the New Testament as part of “the Bible”? Obviously, books relating the life and teachings of Jesus can’t predate Jesus.
I have a partially autographed Bible that I’ve been taking to Bible-cons for years. Most dedicated autograph hounds pretty much have the same gets. You see the same faces at the cons year after year.
I’ve got Jeremiah and Ruth (Ruth pretty much does nothing by con appearances these days), I’ve got Acts of the Apostles autographed by Bartholomew and Thaddeus, I’ve got Judges autographed by Ehud, Deborah, and Lance Ito, I’ve got the Book if Job autographed by Steve Wozniak (that was an error on my part, but he really should have said something), and I’ve got Genesis autographed by Tony Banks and Steve Hackett.
I was using the older technical definition for autograph here: “something written in a person’s own hand, as a manuscript or letter.”
That is to say we don’t have the originals for any of the books. In fact we don’t have any copies of any of the NT books that were written within hundreds of years of the originals, or as they are called the “autographs.”
This is unreal. Im learning more about the bible on this site then I ever did in school or church. Do you think any bible has some truth?
There are some parts of the definition of autograph that I like and there are some parts of the definition of autograph that I don’t like. I’m what you might call a Cafeteria Semantic.
For the OT, I believe the oldest actual texts were bits found in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Pushes the date back to around 200 BCE (for some bits). The Scrolls themselves are dated in a range, from 385 BCE to 50 CE, based on radiocarbon and graphic analysis.