The Bible was written over a period of about 1,500 years. It was first recorded by people who were inspired to write by God’s Spirit, and the writers had no idea that their stories would one day be collected into one book.
The final redaction and canonization of the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) most likely took place during the Babylonian Exile (6th–5th century BCE). The entire Hebrew Bible was complete by about 100 CE. The books of the New Testament were written in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE.
The first part of the Bible was written in the late 1400s BC by Moses. It includes Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.
The second part of the Bible was written between 900-600 BC by King David and other kings of Israel who ruled after him (1 Samuel through 2 Kings).
The third part of the Bible is called “the prophets” because it contains writings from prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah who spoke on behalf of God. They lived between 750-550 BC.
The fourth part of the Bible is called “the Gospels,” which means “good news.” These books tell us about Jesus’ life on earth as told by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John—all who knew Jesus personally. They were written between 60-100 AD (about 100 years after Jesus died).
The Bible Was Written Over a Period of 1,500 Years
A previously unknown section of the Bible that was penned more than 1,500 years ago has been discovered by scientists. Following the use of UV light to a document containing ancient Christian songs and stories that was kept in the Vatican library, they were able to discover the scripture.
For Christians, the Bible is the most important collection of sacred texts. In Greek, the name “Bible” originates from the word “ta biblia,” which translates to “the books.” Despite the fact that many people consider the Bible to be a single book, it is actually a collection of volumes that were written over the course of around fourteen hundred and fifty years.
Below is a Timeline of When The Bible was Written
Old Testament:
1. Genesis – Late 1400s BC by Moses
2. Exodus – Late 1400s BC by Moses
3. Leviticus – Late 1400s BC by Moses
4. Numbers – Late 1400s BC by Moses
5. Deuteronomy – Late 1400s BC by Moses
6. 1 Samuel – 900-600 BC by King David and other kings of Israel
7. 2 Samuel – 900-600 BC by King David and other kings of Israel
8. 1 Kings – 900-600 BC by King David and other kings of Israel
9. 2 Kings – 900-600 BC by King David and other kings of Israel
10. Isaiah – 750-550 BC by Prophet Isaiah
11. Jeremiah – 750-550 BC by Prophet Jeremiah
New Testament:
1. Matthew – 60-100 AD by Matthew
2. Mark – 60-100 AD by Mark
3. Luke – 60-100 AD by Luke
4. John – 60-100 AD by John
The Bible as library
The Bible is not just one book, but an entire library, with stories, songs, poetry, letters and history, as well as literature that might more obviously qualify as ‘religious’.
The Christian Bible has two sections, the Old Testament and the New Testament. The Old Testament is the original Hebrew Bible, the sacred scriptures of the Jewish faith, written at different times between about 1200 and 165 BC. The New Testament books were written by Christians in the first century AD.
The Old Testament
The Law
The Hebrew Bible has 39 books, written over a long period of time, and is the literary archive of the ancient nation of Israel. It was traditionally arranged in three sections.
The first five books, Genesis to Deuteronomy. They are not ‘law’ in a modern Western sense: Genesis is a book of stories, with nothing remotely like rules and regulations, and though the other four do contain community laws they also have many narratives. The Hebrew word for Law (‘Torah’) means ‘guidance’ or ‘instruction’, and that could include stories offering everyday examples of how people were meant to live as well as legal requirements.
These books were later called the ‘Pentateuch’, and tradition attributed them to Moses. Some parts undoubtedly date from that period, but as things changed old laws were updated and new ones produced, and this was the work of later editors over several centuries.
The Prophets
The Prophets is the largest section of the Hebrew Bible, and has two parts (‘former prophets’ and ‘latter prophets’).
The books of ‘latter prophets’ preserve sayings and stories of religious and political activists (‘prophets’) who served as the spiritual conscience of the nation throughout its history, reminding people of the social values that would reflect the character of God. Some books are substantial (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel), others are much shorter (Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi). Sometimes, the prophets could be mime artists and dramatists, accompanying their actions by short spoken messages, often delivered in poetic form. These were the sound bites of their day, which made it easy for others to remember them and then write them down.
The ‘former prophets’ consist of Joshua, Judges, 1-2 Samuel, 1-2 Kings. They are history books, but what makes them also ‘prophets’ is that they not only record information, they interpret it, explaining its significance in relation to other events in the history of Israel, and of the wider world of their day.
Unlike Chesterton—and this is how you know he’s an early-21st-century guy, someone with Wi-Fi—Hart is extremely rude. Richard Dawkins, “zoologist and tireless tractarian,” has “an embarrassing incapacity for philosophical reasoning”; Sam Harris’s The End of Faith is “extravagantly callow”; and Dan Brown’s heretical The Da Vinci Code is “surely the most lucrative novel ever written by a borderline illiterate.” (All this from the first one and a half pages of 2009’s Atheist Delusions.) He once proposed, as a thought experiment, that bioethicists such as the late Joseph Fletcher (“almost comically vile”) be purged from the gene pool: “Academic ethicists … constitute perhaps the single most useless element in society. If reproduction is not a right but a social function, should any woman be allowed to bring such men into the world?”
What Does The Bible Say
The Bible is a book of relationships. It shows us what our relationship to God is meant to be and how we can have that kind of relationship. It shows us how we should interact and treat our fellow Christians. It shows us how we are to view those who do not believe. Because we can see and touch the physical world around us, many times it seems more real than the spiritual world in which we connect and communicate with God. This means that sometimes we let our earthly relationships become more important than our relationship with God. What does the Bible say about relationships?
Love The Lord…First
In Mark 12:30, Jesus tells us that our first responsibility is to Him, “And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength’”. This same theme is reiterated many places in the Bible (Deuteronomy 6:5, 13:3, 30:6; Matthew 22:37; Luke 10:27). Putting the Lord first in our lives is the most important decision we could ever make. A life built around anything else but God, is a life built on shifting sand and vapor. Too many people today wonder why their lives are filled with so much turmoil and misery. However, these very same people refuse to submit to God and live for Him. These people build their lives on fantasies and deception; then they wonder how it could all fall to pieces. It is because their foundation was untrustworthy. They put their faith something other than God and that something let them down. There is no surer foundation for life than a relationship with God through faith in Jesus Christ. It is this relationship that must be first and foremost in the life of the Christian.
Only when Jesus is our priority can we be assured that our other relationships are based on a firm foundation.
Love Your Neighbor
The command that we are to “love our neighbor” is repeated many times throughout the Bible (Leviticus 19:18; Matthew 19:19, 22:39; Mark 12:31; Galatians 5:14; James 2:8). Along with the admonition to love God completely, this command was also repeated in three of the four Gospel accounts. The importance of loving God and loving others as much as we love ourselves is apparently a very important matter. It is also very important to get the order correct…God first; everything else follows.
The apostle Paul said that we can be sure we are treating others the way God would have us treat them if we simply followed this commandment, “For the commandments, “You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,” and any other commandment, are summed up in this word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself”” (Romans 13:9 ESV). Simply, if we are motivated by a love for our neighbor, we will never intentionally do them any harm, only good.
The Writings
These include Psalms (songs, prayers and liturgies for worship), Proverbs (sayings of homespun wisdom), Job (a drama that explores the nature of suffering), plus the ‘five scrolls’ (‘Megiloth’) which were grouped together because each had associations with a particular religious festival: Ruth (the Jewish Feast of Weeks, also called Shavuot), Song of Solomon (Passover), Ecclesiastes (Tabernacles), Lamentations (Destruction of Jerusalem), and Esther (Purim). This section also includes the last books of the Hebrew Bible to be written: Ezra, Nehemiah, and 1-2 Chronicles (all history books), and Daniel (visions of a better world).
The New Testament
The New Testament has 27 books, written between about 50 and 100 AD, and falling naturally into two sections: the Gospels, which tell the story of Jesus (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John); and the Letters (or epistles) – written by various Christian leaders to provide guidance for the earliest church communities.
The Letters
Letters were the natural way for itinerant church leaders to communicate with their converts, and the earliest ones were written before the Gospels. With some exceptions (Romans, Hebrews), they were not meant to be formal presentations of Christian belief, but offered advice to people who were working out how to express their commitment to Jesus in ways that would be relevant to the many different cultural contexts in which they found themselves throughout the Roman empire.
Reading them can be like listening to one half of a conversation, as the writers give answers to questions sent to them either verbally or in writing. Paul was the most prolific writer of such letters, though he was not the only one.
The Gospels
The Gospels were written to present the life and teachings of Jesus in ways that would be appropriate to different readerships, and for that reason are not all the same. They were not intended to be biographies of Jesus, but selective accounts that would demonstrate his significance for different cultures.
The first three are effectively different editions of the same materials, and for that reason are known as the ‘synoptic gospels’. The writer of Luke also wrote the Acts of the Apostles, which tells the story of how Christianity spread from being a small group of Jewish believers in the time of Jesus to becoming a worldwide faith in less than a generation.
The New Testament concludes with the book of Revelation, which begins with a series of letters to seven churches in the area of Asia Minor (modern Turkey), but then offers a visionary presentation of the meaning of all things, from creation to the end of the world.
Disputes and controversies
Historical accuracy of Biblical accounts
Some Biblical scholars, armed with archaeological evidence, dispute the historical accuracy of some of the books from the Old Testament. In her 2011 TV series Bible’s Buried Secrets, Dr Francesca Stavrakopoulou questioned whether King David’s kingdom, as described in Samuel, did in fact ever exist.
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The Bible’s legacy
Legacy and impact of the Bible
The sheer diversity of literature in the Bible is one of the secrets of its continuing popularity through the centuries. There is something for all moods and many different cultures. Its message is not buried in religious jargon only accessible to either believers or scholars, but reflects the issues that people struggle with in daily life. Despite their different emphases, all its authors shared the conviction that this world and its affairs are not just a haphazard sequence of random coincidences, but are the forum of God’s activity – a God who (unlike the God of the philosophers) is not remote or unknowable, but a personal being who can be known by ordinary people.
Melvyn Bragg believes the King James version of the Bible, first published in 1611, has had a profound effect on human history over the last 400 years.