βιβλία (the collection of original manuscripts) Add a review

The Bible is an anthology of religious texts that are central to Christianity and Judaism, and important in other Abrahamic religions such as Islam. The texts include instructions, stories, poetry, letters, prophecies, and other genres. The religious texts, or scriptures, were compiled by different religious communities into various official collections, called biblical canons. Believers generally consider the Bible to be a product of divine inspiration, but the way they understand what that means and how they interpret the text varies.

The Hebrew Bible, originally written in Hebrew, with some parts in Aramaic, is divided into three sections: the Torah ("Teaching"), Nevi'im ("Prophets") and Ketuvim ("Writings"). The acronym Tanakh (Hebrew: תָּנָ״ךְ‎, romanized: Tanaḵ) is an alternate term for the Hebrew Bible. The Masoretic Text, a medieval edition of the Tanakh, is considered the authoritative text of the Hebrew Bible by all branches of modern Rabbinic Judaism. The oldest parts of the Bible may be as early as c. 1200 BCE.

The Christian Bible is divided into the Old Testament and the New Testament. The Old Testament is a reorganization of the books of the Hebrew Bible and the deuterocanonical books, derived from historical editions of those texts. Christianity began as an outgrowth of Second Temple Judaism and the early Church continued the Jewish tradition of writing and incorporating what it saw as inspired, authoritative religious books. The gospels, which are narratives about the life and teachings of Jesus, along with the Pauline epistles and other texts quickly coalesced into the New Testament, originally written in Koine Greek, mostly in the 1st century CE.

With estimated total sales of over five billion copies, the Christian Bible is the best-selling publication of all time. Biblical texts have had a profound influence both on Western culture and history and on cultures around the globe. The study of these texts through biblical criticism has also indirectly impacted culture and history. Some view biblical texts as morally problematic, historically inaccurate, or corrupted by time; others find it a useful historical source for certain peoples and events or a source of ethical teachings. The Christian Bible is currently translated or in the process of being translated into about half of the world's languages.