We divide The Bible into the old and new testament books. The Old Testament books were written before the birth of Jesus Christ and the New Testament describes the political, economical and spiritual situation after his birth.
The Bible got its name by a diminutive of a Greek word for a book “he biblos”.
Biblos used to be an old Phoenician port that was placed near today's Beirut in Lebanon. In its time it was the main Phoenician trading centre and the Phoenician were mostly middleman in selling writing tools and they started the alphabet. It is no wonder that the Greek called their parchment that had written words on it by that port, that is probably the epicenter of our literacy.
The Bible has many authors and it is assumed that it was written somewhere between the 10th century B.C. and the 1st century A.D. The Jews and the Christians consider The Bible holy in their own, special ways.
It is believed that The Bible doesn't have its translations, but actually has transcriptions of its books that are called textual witnesses. During the Bible's translations to other languages the scientist use strict methods to change it as little as possible to preserve the original text so it could be interpreted in the right way.
The Jews interpret it literary and look for a deeper sense in it. In today's time many other scientific facts, like the ones based on archeological discoveries, are taken into consideration in the interpretations so that they could be perfected and in that way the interpretations have been brought closer to the Christian versions of the Bible.
The Christians have many versions of the Bible. They started to interpret it in the 2nd century when the members of the Alexandrian school started to gain interest in the allegorical biblical texts. The Antioch school had a more literally approach to it while the scholastics had more way of interpretation: allegorically, literally, morally and mystically. While the Catholics are led by the Church's doctrine in their interpretation, the Protestants lean on a subjective perspective.
The Biblical texts are more than just a literary work and historical writings about life of the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt. Many people believe it contains the word of God and guidelines for a moral, righteous life. Also, the Bible is a memorial to humanity and the base of the European culture and civilization.
The Jews consider the parts written in Aramaic and Hebrew to be holy. Those parts were written before the birth of Jesus. Those books, since they contain the first God's orders, are called Protocanonical. Deuterocanonical books (Greek deuter – second) are the books of the Old Testament written in Greek.
The Deuterocanonical books are the First and Second Maccabees, seven books Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch and some parts of Esther and Daniel that make the part of the Catholic Old Testament but not the Hebrew.
The Old Testament contains 46 books and it is divided into 5 larger groups. They are: Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy), The Historical Books (Joshua, Judges, Ruth, First Samuel, Second Samuel, First Kings, Second Kings, First Chronicles, Second Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther), Psalm, Wisdom books (The Book of Wisdom, Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Eccleasiastes, Song of Songs, Sirach), The Prophetic Books (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi)
The New Testament contains 27 books. They are: Four Gospels (Mark, Matthew, Luke, John), Acts of the Apostles, 21 epistle (14 of Paul and 7 general epistles) and Apocalypse. It was written by the second half of the 1st century.
The biblical motives have been an inspiration to many artists throughout the years and the Bible is the most sold books of all times.
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God's contact with the humanity begins a few days after God decided to create the world. He created it for seven days.
The first day he created the light and the darkness – night and day. The next day he created the sky, the third one the water, land and plants, the fourth the sun, moon and the stars, the fifth the fishes and birds and the sixth day animals and a human.
The first people were Adam and Eva but they were disobedient so they were kicked out of the Paradise that God intended for people.
He had to start things over because they made a wrong turn. For example he had to sink the world but not before he let the uncorrupted animals and people get onto the Noah's ark. He also had to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah because people were getting corrupted and evil.
People got greedy and wanted to be bigger than God himself so they decided to build the Babylon tower. God decided to divide them by languages.
His son's name was Jesus and he was conceived by the Hold Spirit. His mother was a virgin named Mary. At the age of 33 his son joined him and now he rules with his Father.
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