How the Bible came to us

Many parts of the Bible existed first as spoken tradition — stories, songs, laws and sayings carried in the memory of a community. Over time, these were written down and gathered into books. This pattern continues into the New Testament era, where the apostles’ teaching was treasured before it was put into letters and Gospels.

This is not unusual for ancient texts. What’s remarkable is the care with which both Jewish and Christian communities copied and preserved their writings.

For most of history, every copy of the Bible was made by hand. Scribes copied carefully, often with checking systems built in. Scholars today have thousands of manuscripts to compare, in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, with significant overlap between them.

The differences between manuscripts are mostly small (spelling, word order, occasional phrases). The big shape of the Bible is remarkably stable across the centuries.

‘Canon’ means the list of books recognised as Scripture. For the Old Testament, Jewish communities had largely settled on a recognised set well before the time of Jesus. For the New Testament, the early church recognised books that were apostolic in origin, widely used and consistent with the faith already received.

Different Christian traditions today recognise slightly different Old Testament lists (some include extra books called the Apocrypha or Deuterocanon). Most Bibles in the UK use the 66-book Protestant canon.

The Bible has been translated into more languages than any other book. Translators work from the best available Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek manuscripts. Different translations make different choices — some prioritise word-for-word accuracy, others prioritise natural English. Both approaches are valuable.

The invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, and English translations like Tyndale’s and the King James Version, made the Bible available far more widely. Modern translations continue to refine readability and accuracy together.