What is ‘The Bible’?
The Bible is not actually a book, it’s a collection of 66 books written by about 40 different authors over a period of around 2000 years. 39 of these books are what we call ‘The Old Testament, and 27, the New Testament (more about what Testament means later). It was around the middle of the 3rd century AD that the contenders for inclusion in the bible were collected together and about 400 AD before they were published as a single entity translated into Latin.
The Bible was never intended to be read from cover to cover like a novel or an academic treatise. It is not even altogether chronological. It is divided into categories; history, poetry, prophesy, law, stories of individuals, gospels (the life of Jesus), early church history, letters to the church and individuals, apocalyptic writings (more about this later).
So what’s the purpose of the Bible? Taken together, it chronicles human history from God’s perspective. It explains God’s vision for humanity, how the human race constantly moved contrary to this vision with disastrous effects, how time after time God tried various strategies to bring us back onto the right path and how we constantly returned to our old ways. Finally God came to earth in person in the form of Jesus Christ.
Is everything in the Bible true? – Well yes and no. The bible is ‘the word of God’. It was of course written down by human beings but they did so under the guidance and direction of God. However, this doesn’t mean that every word is to be taken literally or independent of context. Let’s take the creation story from Genesis as an example. Below is a pictorial representation of what the universe was believed to be like, not only at the time that the creation story was written but for 2,000 or more years afterwards. The creation story was intended to explain that the world didn’t just happen but was created as an act of will by God. Imagine how it would have been received if it had spoken of billions of galaxies, black holes, the earth as a tiny dot in a vast universe? Within the imagery of this story is the absolute truth that the universe was created by the will of God – that it didn’t just happen. The mechanism for this was well beyond the ability of the target audience to understand (and even today, our understanding is sketchy and constantly changing).
So how do we know which parts of the bible to take literally and which to consider in some other way? In future posts we’ll explore this as we look at different books of the bible in more detail but as a general principle; every part of the bible is important and has something to say to everyone who reads it.
