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"Biblical" redirects here. For the song by Biffy Clyro, see Biblical (song).

The Bible (from Koine Greek , t bibla, "the books") is a canonical collection of texts sacred in Judaism and Christianity. There is no single "Bible" and many Bibles with varying contents exist.[1] The term Bible is shared between Judaism and Christianity, although the contents of each of their collections of canonical texts is not the same. Different religious groups include different books within their Biblical canons, in different orders, and sometimes divide or combine books, or incorporate additional material into canonical books.

The Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, contains twenty-four books divided into three parts: the five books of the Torah ("teaching" or "law"), the Nevi'im ("prophets"), and the Ketuvim ("writings"). Christian Bibles range from the sixty-six books of the Protestant canon to the eighty-one books of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church canon. The first part of all Christian Bibles is the Old Testament, which contains, at minimum, the twenty-four books of the Hebrew Bible divided into thirty-nine books and ordered differently from the Hebrew Bible. The Catholic Church and Eastern Christian churches also hold certain deuterocanonical books and passages to be part of the Old Testament canon. The second part of the Christian Bible is the New Testament, containing twenty-seven books originally written in Koine Greek, which discuss the teachings and person of Jesus, as well as events in first-century Christianity. The New Testament is divided into the four Canonical gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, twenty-one Epistles or didactic letters, and the Book of Revelation.

By the 2nd century BCE Jewish groups had called the Bible books the "scriptures" and referred to them as "holy," or in Hebrew (Kitvei hakkodesh), and Christians now commonly call the Old and New Testaments of the Christian Bible "The Holy Bible", in Greek ( , t bibla t gia) or "the Holy Scriptures" ( , e Aga Graph).[2] An early 4th-century Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Bible is found in the Codex Vaticanus. Dating from the 8th century, the Codex Amiatinus is the earliest surviving manuscript of the complete Vulgate Bible. The oldest Tanakh manuscript in Hebrew and Aramaic dates to the 10th century CE.[3] The Bible was divided into chapters in the 13th century by Stephen Langton and into verses in the 16th century by French printer Robert Estienne[4] and is now usually cited by book, chapter, and verse.

The Bible is widely considered to be the best selling book of all time,[5] has estimated annual sales of 100 million copies,[6][7] and has been a major influence on literature and history, especially in the West where it was the first mass-printed book. The Gutenberg Bible was the first Bible ever printed using movable type.

The English word Bible is from the Latin biblia, from the same word in Medieval Latin and Late Latin and ultimately from Koine Greek ta biblia "the books" (singular biblion).[8]

Medieval Latin biblia is short for biblia sacra "holy book", while biblia in Greek and Late Latin is neuter plural (gen. bibliorum). It gradually came to be regarded as a feminine singular noun (biblia, gen. bibliae) in medieval Latin, and so the word was loaned as a singular into the vernaculars of Western Europe.[9] Latin biblia sacra "holy books" translates Greek ta biblia ta hagia, "the holy books".[10]

The word itself had the literal meaning of "paper" or "scroll" and came to be used as the ordinary word for "book". It is the diminutive of byblos, "Egyptian papyrus", possibly so called from the name of the Phoenician sea port Byblos (also known as Gebal) from whence Egyptian papyrus was exported to Greece. The Greek ta biblia (lit. "little papyrus books")[11] was "an expression Hellenistic Jews used to describe their sacred books (the Septuagint).[12][13] Christian use of the term can be traced to c. 223 CE.[8] The biblical scholar F.F. Bruce notes that Chrysostom appears to be the first writer (in his Homilies on Matthew, delivered between 386 and 388) to use the Greek phrase ta biblia ("the books") to describe both the Old and New Testaments together.[14]

Professor John K. Riches, in an Oxford University Press introduction to the Bible, explained that "the biblical texts themselves are the result of a creative dialogue between ancient traditions and different communities through the ages",[15] and "the biblical texts were produced over a period in which the living conditions of the writers political, cultural, economic, and ecological varied enormously".[16] Timothy H. Lim, a professor of Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism at the University of Edinburgh, says that the Old Testament is "a collection of authoritative texts of apparently divine origin that went through a human process of writing and editing."[17] He states that it is not a magical book, nor was it literally written by God and passed to mankind. During the solidification of the Hebrew canon (c. 3rd century BCE), the Bible began to be translated into Greek, now referred to as the Septuagint.[18]

In Christian Bibles, the New Testament Gospels were derived from oral traditions (similar to the Hebrew Bible) in a period after Jesus's death:

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