The About the Bible post talks about the physical Bibles, the books, and the versions available. That is where I began because the Bible is where I believe development of a personal theology begins. However, just having a Bible is a lot different than reading it or understanding what is between the covers. Or, if you have an audio Bible, just listening doesn’t provide understanding.
Reading the Bible as a book, starting at page 1 and going through to the end will be a long and difficult read. I do recommend starting with Genesis. After all, it starts, “In the beginning …” Also, Genesis contains many familiar stories. It should be fun reading it. But, what does it mean?
First thing I believe is that the Bible is not a history book, neither is it a science book. I believe it is a book that contains the religious writings and experiences of many people. It attempts to explain who we are, and why we are as we are. The Greek word biblia is a plural word meaning books. It has been Latinized and accepted into English with a singular meaning, but the Bible contains many books written and edited over a period of more than a thousand years.
My first post described how we came to have a Bible in the English language in the 21st Century. Now lets look at a Bible, any version, and see what is between the covers. For all Christian Bibles, the first part is the Jewish Bible, the TANAKH, called the Old Testament in Christian Bibles. TANAKH is an acronym that combines the first two letters of the Hebrew words for the three parts of the Jewish Bible, the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings.
In some Christian Bibles the second part is the Apocrypha. The Septuagint Bible was mentioned in my first post. It was the translation into Greek of the Hebrew scriptures. It also contained some recent (recent in 200 BCE) writings in Greek and a small amount written in Aramaic. This was the “scriptures” referred to by early Christians. Jews, however abandoned the Greek Septuagint in the second century and returned to a Hebrew Bible that did not include the books that make up the Apocrypha. The Latin Vulgate Bible included all the books from the Septuagint, as do modern Roman Catholic Bibles. At the time of the Protestant Reformation the Apocrypha was not included in many Protestant Bibles The books included in the Hebrew Bible were brought into the Protestant Old Testament. The remainder of the Septuagint books if included at all are included as the Apocrypha, “deuterocanonical” books, i.e. secondary books of value, but not of the same importance as the books of the Hebrew Bible.
