Copied, collected, translated

Many people, over a very long time. Some books name their author, some name a prophet whose words they record, and a good number name nobody at all — the Gospels and Hebrews among them.

Traditional attributions (Moses for the first five books, David for many psalms, Paul for Hebrews) are ancient and are held by many Christians. Modern scholarship treats several of them as open questions, and on some — the composition of the Pentateuch, the authorship of Isaiah — the debate is long-running and unresolved. This site names traditional attributions as traditional.

We know it changed in small ways, because we can see it. There are thousands of manuscripts, they differ from one another in thousands of places, and those differences are catalogued in the footnotes of most study Bibles.

The great majority are spelling, word order, or obvious slips. A small number are substantial enough to affect a passage’s meaning, and English Bibles usually flag them — the ending of Mark and the account in John 8 are the best-known. What the manuscript evidence supports is that the text is stable in substance and imperfect in detail, which is a more defensible claim than perfection and is also what the evidence actually shows.

Mostly by use before it was by decree. Communities read certain writings in worship, and lists recognising them appear over the first four centuries — the Muratorian fragment, Athanasius’ letter of 367, and the North African councils among them.

Rough criteria can be seen operating: connection to an apostle, wide acceptance across churches, and agreement with what was already received. Some books were disputed for a long time, including Hebrews, James, 2 Peter and Revelation. Councils are better described as recognising a settled consensus than as creating one.

Because translation involves choices, and different translations make them differently. Some aim to follow the original wording closely; others aim to reproduce the sense in natural English. Neither approach is dishonest and both involve loss.

Translations also differ over which manuscripts to follow, and English itself keeps moving. A modern translation is not a modernised King James — most are fresh work from Hebrew and Greek.

Manuscripts found from 1947 onward in caves near the Dead Sea, commonly dated between roughly the 3rd century BC and the 1st century AD. They include copies of nearly every Old Testament book, along with other Jewish writings.

Their importance is straightforward: they pushed our earliest Hebrew copies back by about a thousand years. The Isaiah scroll turned out to be strikingly close to the medieval text that translations had relied on, while also showing genuine variation — evidence of careful transmission rather than of a text frozen in place.

Because they inherited different collections. Catholic and Orthodox Bibles include books — Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, 1–2 Maccabees and some additions — that were part of the Greek Septuagint. Protestant Bibles follow the shorter Hebrew canon and call those books the Apocrypha or deuterocanon.

The dispute is old, and it sharpened at the Reformation. It is a real difference between traditions, not a case of one side adding or removing books from an agreed list. Mt. Pleasant is a Baptist church and uses the Protestant canon of 66 books.

For the New Testament, the earliest fragments are commonly dated to the 2nd century, with substantial copies from the 3rd and near-complete Bibles — Sinaiticus and Vaticanus — from the 4th. That is unusually early and unusually plentiful compared with other ancient literature.

The dating of the very earliest fragments rests on handwriting style and carries a margin of error of decades, which is worth saying plainly. For the Old Testament, the Dead Sea Scrolls are the earliest substantial Hebrew witnesses.

The Old Testament is the Scripture Jesus and the first Christians already had: the story of creation, Israel, the law, the kingdom, the exile and the prophets. The New Testament is the first-century writing about Jesus and the church that followed — Gospels, a history, letters, and Revelation.

“Testament” here means covenant. Christians read the two as one story, with the promises of the first finding their fulfilment in the second. How much of the older law still binds Christians has been argued about since the very first generation, and Acts 15 shows the argument happening.