When is the old testament

In the centuries to come, the Bible would only become more central to the lives and faiths of millions of people around the world, despite the mystery surrounding its origins and the ongoing, complex debate over its authorship. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Twice a week we compile our most fascinating features and deliver them straight to you. Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. Recommended for you. The Bible is not just one book, but an entire library, with stories, songs, poetry, letters and history, as well as literature that might more obviously qualify as 'religious'.

The Old Testament is the original Hebrew Bible, the sacred scriptures of the Jewish faith, written at different times between about and BC. The Hebrew Bible has 39 books, written over a long period of time, and is the literary archive of the ancient nation of Israel. It was traditionally arranged in three sections. The first five books , Genesis to Deuteronomy.

They are not 'law' in a modern Western sense: Genesis is a book of stories, with nothing remotely like rules and regulations, and though the other four do contain community laws they also have many narratives.

The Hebrew word for Law 'Torah' means 'guidance' or 'instruction', and that could include stories offering everyday examples of how people were meant to live as well as legal requirements. These books were later called the 'Pentateuch', and tradition attributed them to Moses. Some parts undoubtedly date from that period, but as things changed old laws were updated and new ones produced, and this was the work of later editors over several centuries. The Prophets is the largest section of the Hebrew Bible, and has two parts 'former prophets' and 'latter prophets'.

The books of 'latter prophets' preserve sayings and stories of religious and political activists 'prophets' who served as the spiritual conscience of the nation throughout its history, reminding people of the social values that would reflect the character of God. Sometimes, the prophets could be mime artists and dramatists, accompanying their actions by short spoken messages, often delivered in poetic form. These were the sound bites of their day, which made it easy for others to remember them and then write them down.

The final form of the Hebrew Bible developed over the next years when Judah was swallowed up by the expanding Persian Empire.

Known as the Septuagint, this Greek translation was initiated at the request of King Ptolemy of Egypt to be included in the library of Alexandria. The Septuagint was the version of the Bible used by early Christians in Rome. The Book of Daniel was written during this period and included in the Septuagint at the last moment, though the text itself claims to have been written sometime around B. It collects 27 books, all originally written in Greek. The sections of the New Testament concerning Jesus are called the Gospels and were written about 40 years after the earliest written Christian materials, the letters of Paul, known as the Epistles.

Scribes copied the letters and kept them in circulation. As circulation continued, the letters were collected into books. Some in the church, inspired by Paul, began to write and circulate their own letters, and so historians believe that some books of the New Testament attributed to Paul were in fact written by disciples and imitators.

The oral traditions within the church formed the substance of the Gospels, the earliest book of which is Mark, written around 70 A. It is theorized there may have been an original document of sayings by Jesus known as the Q source, which was adapted into the narratives of the Gospels.

Matthew and Luke were next in the chronology. Both used Mark as a reference, but Matthew is considered to have another separate source, known as the M source, as it contains some different material from Mark. The Book of John, written around A. All four books cover the life of Jesus with many similarities, but sometimes contradictions in their portrayals. Each is considered to have its own political and religious agenda linked to authorship.

What Other Proof Exists? The Book of Revelation is the final book of the Bible, an example of apocalyptic literature that predicts a final celestial war through prophecy.

Authorship is ascribed to John, but little else is known about the writer. According to the text, it was written around 95 A. Some scholars believe it is less a prophecy and more a response to the Roman destruction of the Great Temple and Jerusalem.

This text is still used by Evangelical Christians to interpret current events in expectation of the End Times, and elements of it find frequent use in popular entertainment.

Surviving documents from the 4th century show that different councils within the church released lists to guide how various Christian texts should be treated. It would spawn what is surely the most influential book of all time: the Bible.

If the early history of the Israelites is uncertain, so is the evolution of the book that would tell their story.

Catherine Nixey and Edith Hall discuss a pivotal moment in religious history, when Christianity became the dominant faith of the Roman empire:. Until the 17th century, received opinion had it that the first five books of the Bible — Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy — were the work of one author: Moses.

That theory has since been seriously challenged. Scholars now believe that the stories that would become the Bible were disseminated by word of mouth across the centuries, in the form of oral tales and poetry — perhaps as a means of forging a collective identity among the tribes of Israel. Eventually, these stories were collated and written down. The question is by whom, and when? A clue may lie in a limestone boulder discovered embedded in a stone wall in the town of Tel Zayit, 35 miles southwest of Jerusalem, in The boulder, now known as the Zayit Stone, contains what many historians believe to be the earliest full Hebrew alphabet ever discovered, dating to around BC.

The Zayit Stone does not in itself tell us when the Bible was written and collated, but it gives us our first glimpse of the language that produced it. And, by tracking the stylistic development of that language down the centuries, and cross-referencing it with biblical text, historians have been able to rule out the single-author hypotheses, concluding instead that it was written by waves of scribes during the first millennium BC.

From about the eighth century BC onwards, the Old Testament contains some real historiography, even though it may not all be accurate. Are we guilty of placing too much emphasis on this question? Much of the Old Testament is about seeing God at work in human history rather than in accurately recording the detail, and sometimes we exaggerate the importance of historical accuracy.

The Old Testament is not a work of fiction, but nor is it a modern piece of history-writing. After the exile of the Jewish people in Bablylon in the sixth century BC, scribes gradually turned into religious teachers, as we find them in the New Testament. But the collection is a work of early Judaism. It should be remembered that for a long time it was a collection of individual scrolls, not a single book between two covers. But messianic hopes were not widespread or massively important in first-century Judaism and are even less central to the Old Testament itself.