The collection or collections of the Scriptures varied from group to group and from time to time. There are three main canons in the different Bibles used today. For example, the one Book of the Twelve Minor Prophets in the Jewish canon becomes the twelve books of the Minor Prophets in the Protestant Bible. The Roman Catholic Old Testament contains exactly the same four divisions and thirty-nine books as the Protestant Bible, but also includes further writings. The real explanation, however, is more complicated and goes back to two ancient Bibles.
All modern Bibles are translations of older texts.
Scholars believe that the books in these three texts are from pre-Christian times. Translations were made from the oldest available manuscripts, most of them medieval, in the belief that these late documents were accurate copies of far more ancient texts. Text of the Hebrew Bible. Another important manuscript is the Aleppo Codex, which forms the basis of a new edition of the Hebrew Bible currently being produced at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. This form of the Old Testament text now found in the Masoretic Text grew and was finalized in three periods, or stages.