Thomas Hartwell Horne (1780-1862) compiled the following statistics about the King James Bible in a three-year study: 1400-400 B.C.) while the New Testament was written over a much shorter span of time, about fifty years (ca. The Old Testament was written over nearly a thousand years (ca. The Bible is a library of sixty-six books written over a period of nearly 1,500 years. The books, however, are semi-chronologically arranged from Genesis to Revelation.

Following the pattern established by the Vulgate, the divisions of the English Bible are arranged topically instead of officially (i.e., by rank or office of the author). It is not surprising then that Wycliffe’s English Bible followed the same format or divisions, for both the New and Old Testaments, as the Latin Vulgate. The Latin Vulgate had reigned in Christendom nearly a thousand years before Wycliffe produced the first English Bible. The French depended upon the Latin biblia, which in turn was derived from the Greek biblos. In the thirteenth century, the writings that composed Scripture were known as “The Book.” The term “Bible” is an Anglicized form of the Old French word for Bible ( biblia). The evolution of the terms that gave rise to the English word “Bible” is presented below: Any book which leaves were made from the outer bark was called a biblos, and eventually all books were called biblos regardless of the material from which it was composed. The term referred to the outer bark of the papyrus plant. The English word “Bible” is derived from the Greek word biblos, meaning a scroll or little book. How the books of the Bible were preserved and how they were translated into other languages. How the books of the Bible came into the form in which we know them how they were arranged. How God impressed men to write the Bible.

The term revelation should simply be regarded as the varied ways in which God has revealed both his being (existence) and nature (character) to the human race. In coming to a deeper appreciation of Scripture, three important subjects must be considered: A. The process by which certain books were recognized as possessing divine authority is known as “canonization.” I. Both revelation and inspiration have manifested themselves in concrete written forms. The doctrine of revelation considers the subject of what is divinely revealed and the doctrine of inspiration concerns itself with the manner in which that revelation is reduced to a written form, but these doctrines would be incomplete without considering the character of the Bible as is determined by the boundaries of the documents that were divinely revealed and inspired. 90-100?)Ĭanonization of the New Testament (ca.

Bible canonization timeline