Christian Scriptures — Which Bible?
By: Ruth Neigut
Tags: Bible, Catholic, Protestant, Religion

Dead Sea Scrolls — Photo credit: Illustrative: Three fragments from the Temple Scroll, one the Dead Sea Scrolls, is displayed at the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage in Beachwood, Ohio, March 28, 2006. (AP Photo/Jamie-Andrea Yanak, File)

Easy to Read & Simplistic Explanation:

Christian scriptures are contained in the Holy Bible. It is called the Holy Bible, because Christians consider these to be sacred scriptures. Sacred means that these are books set apart from all other literature, because Christians believe that they hold the revelation of God,

the revelation of God that brings salvation to all believers,

including eternal life. When one opens up a modern Bible, you immediately see a table of contents.

What you perceive immediately is that bibles are a compilation

of a variety of different works. They are usually divided into two parts — the Old Testament and the New Testament.

The Old Testament is made up of books from the Hebrew scriptures,

so in the Old Testament it is a compilation of the Bible in Hebrew, a modern edition. These scriptures that it contains are writings

from a 2000-year-old history of Israel. It is written in Hebrew but has been translated to many languages, although some of these books also are written in Aramaic, which was a later language of the Persian Empire.

Once we turn to the Christian appropriation of these books,

we will see that they included also some works in Greek.

Jesus and his followers were all Jewish, and so this was for them

the books of the Torah, of the law, the books of the prophets,

and the scriptures of Jesus and his followers and, indeed, of the early Christians.

The Jewish scriptures, the Hebrew Bible, is only one part of the Jewish scriptures. A point I wanted to emphasize is that even though Christians share with Jews the books of the Hebrew Bible, they read them in terms of the coming of Jesus and his teaching and his life.



There are some Bibles that have the Hebrew text, the Latin text, and the Greek text in columns next to each other.

The second main part of the Bible is the New Testament.

It was written in the Greek language.

Jesus himself probably spoke Aramaic.

But He may not have known Greek at all.

But Greek was the language that was used around the eastern Mediterranean,

and it was the language in which Christianity first circulated.

All the books in the New Testament were written after Jesus died.

Jesus himself didn’t write any books that we know of or that are left.

All the writings of the New Testament were written by his followers.

And indeed, the oldest book in the New Testament, so far as we know,

was written by Paul. Paul actually never knew Jesus, but only knew about his teachings from other apostles and through revelation.

If we look more closely, however, we will

see that not all bibles have the same books in them,

and they do not have those books in the same order.

All Christian bibles have in them the book that are in the Jewish scriptures, the Tanakh. This is a set that are produced by the Jewish Publication Society,

and it contains within it the Torah, the five books of Moses, the prophets, and a set of other texts called the Writings, the Ketuvim. This had the psalms, which were songs and proverbs and other kinds of materials. All Christian bibles will include these books.

All Christian bibles also contain the same 27 books of the New Testament,

but Catholic and Orthodox bibles contain a set of other books and “chapters.” So the Christian Bibles contains an additional 10 books or so

more than one finds in the Jewish Bible. Bible text is translated in many different languages.

The Roman Catholic church prides itself on having a magisterium who are there to help Christians interpret the Bible. In comparison, the Prostestants believe in “sola scriptura” and the “Bible Only” concept and thus may also explain why there are over 33,000 Protestant churches around the world versus the ONE Holy Apostolic Roman Catholic Church that has existed for over 2000 years.

The orthodox Bible has slightly more books in it than the Catholic Bible.

Some bibles, in addition, contain books called 2 Esdras and 4 Maccabees.

But the largest Bible, that is to say the Bible with the most sacred books

in it, is the Ethiopic Bible. The Ethiopic Bible contains, depending what

one counts, usually around 81 books. Among these is a book not contained in any of the other bibles, First Enoch.

Protestant bibles are actually the smallest bibles. They contain in their Old Testament the Jewish scriptures in the Jewish Bible and the 27 books of the New Testament. They may sometimes also contain books that are in the Catholic and Orthodox bibles additionally, but these are relegated to a third section called the Apocrypha. There, you see the Old Testament, the list of the Apocryphal books, and here again, are those books first and 2 Maccabees, additions to the Book of Daniel like Bel and the Dragon, 3 Maccabees, Psalm 151, and so forth. But these have a separate section, and then the texts of the New Testament.

Mormons have the same Bible as Protestants with the New Testament and the Old Testament. They do not contain the Apocrypha. But in addition to that, they include new scripture, the Book of Mormon. Many Christians believe that Mormonism is a cult and do not consider Mormon’s christians. The basis of the Mormonism religion also known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), traces its origins to an American religion founded by Joseph Smith in the United States in 1830.



If you have a Bible or several Bibles, see what is in it and who the publisher is. Many Catholics and Protestants actually assume that they are reading their “own” Bible but in reality may be reading a Bible that is different then their denominational faith. However, regardless of this, the Holy Bible of all Christians consider their own Bible to be sacred scriptures.