How old is the Bible?
The Bible has thirty-nine in the Old Testament and twenty-seven in the New Testament for a total of sixty-six books. In order to determine how old the Bible is, we need to know when the oldest book in the Bible was written. The oldest book is Job, and it was written approximately 1500-1450 B.C. The next book is Genesis and it was written somewhere around 1450-1400 B.C.
Nehemiah was the last book of the Old Testament. It was written about 424-400 B.C. Then there was a 400 year gap before the first book of the New Testament was written. The first book of the New Testament was James and it was written about A.D. 44-49. The last book of the Bible was Revelation and it was written in A.D. 94-96.
The Old Testament was written in both Hebrew and Aramaic, and the New Testament was written in Greek. The Old Testament was eventually translated into Greek. The translation is known as the Septuagint Bible or the LXX. Jewish tradition says that seventy scribes translated the Hebrew Bible into Greek between 285 BC and 247 BC. Both the Old and New Testaments have been translated into many different languages. The first English Bible was translated in 1388. The English Bible was written in free flowing text without chapters or verses.The following table provides some interesting information about the divisions into chapters and verses.
|Divided into chapters – by S. Langton||1228|
|O.T. divided into verses – by R. Nathan||1448|
|N.T. divided into verses – by R. Stephanus||1551|