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What is the Bible?

When I first decided to start reading the Bible on my own, I was so excited. Until I turned to the Table of Contents and saw 66 different… Chapters? Most of which I had never heard of. Do I start from the beginning? Why are there two divisions? I thankfully had someone walk me through these questions, but that’s not always the case. So today is Crash Course Bible Background.

We believe that the Bible is from God, but written down by over 40 authors. The Bible is a collection of historical documents… AKA real pieces of evidence like what our history textbooks are based on. Actually, the Bible is more reliably documented than many famous ancient works like Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars, the writings of Aristotle, and The Odyssey. There have been over 6000 manuscripts (copies) of the New Testament found wholly or partially. This helps us know that the stories we read now haven’t been changed from the original.

More than the writings themselves, over 23,000 archaeological digs have been done to prove/disprove the historical accuracy of the bible, and NONE have been able to invalidate the events of the Bible.

Now that we know why we should believe the Bible, we need to know how it’s organized. There are 66 books of the Bible. They are not chronological but sorted by theme into two major divisions: Old Testament and New Testament. The Old Testament is the story of God leading his chosen people, the Israelites, to know Him and love Him while they still awaited a promised Savior- who we know is Jesus. The New Testament tells about the coming of Jesus, who was long awaited to save us from our sins, his life, his death, and how we should respond because of his resurrection.

The Bible is the living word of God and our greatest tool to know and follow him. The goal of the entire Bible is to point to Jesus- He is the point.