Three Different Bibles

What I mean by calling myself "The Bible Guy."

The headline at the top of this blog claims that I’m The Bible Guy. So maybe I should explain what I mean by “the Bible.” (You can read a longer version of this post here; learn more in Episodes 2 and 3 of my “Many Voices” podcast.

“The Bible” means different things to different people. There are three different books all called by different groups “the Bible”: a Jewish Bible, a Protestant Bible, and a Catholic Bible. (Apologies to Orthodox Christians; I’m tossing you into the Catholic basket for purposes of this post.) Historically, the Catholic Bible should obviously come before the Protestant Bible. But I’m going to introduce the Bibles in order of size, from the smallest to the largest.

• The Jewish Bible

The books in the Jewish Bible are the oldest. The writings here date from the 12th century BCE to the 2nd century BCE. (You can learn more about the use of BCE/CE rather than BC/AD in my WordPress post on the subject.) All of them were originally written in Hebrew, with the exception of a few chapters in Aramaic, a cousin language to Hebrew. All of the books in the Jewish Bible are found in the two Christian Bibles as well, though they are arranged in a different order there. (You can read more about that different arrangement here or listen to my podcast on the subject here.)

• The Protestant Bible

The Protestant Bible has all of the books of the Jewish Bible plus a separate section of books dating from the mid-1st to mid-2nd centuries CE and written originally in Greek. These books are “The New Testament,” focused on the life of Jesus and on his early followers. The books of the Jewish Bible are grouped into a collection called “The Old Testament,” contrasting with this “New Testament.”

• The Catholic Bible

The Catholic Bible is the biggest Bible of the three. But instead of adding yet newer books to the Old and New Testaments of the Protestant Bible, it fills in the missing centuries with Jewish literature of the “intertestamental” period – the 2nd and 1st centuries BCE. Most of it was written in Hebrew or Aramaic, but two of the books were written in Greek. These books were outside the canon of the Hebrew Bible, but were preserved in the Greek translations of the Bible that were used by the early Christians.

That means that a Catholic/Orthodox Bible – the most inclusive – contains three different parts. Here’s a chart of who accepts what:

Jews: books of the “Old Testament”*
Catholics: Old Testament incorporating the Apocrypha, New Testament
Protestants: Old Testament without Apocrypha, New Testament

[*As noted, the Old Testament contains the same books as the Jewish Bible, but in a different order.]

So, caveat emptor. When someone calls himself “The Bible Guy,” you always have to ask which Bible he talking about. In this newsletter, “the Bible” means my Bible – the Jewish Bible.

Reminder: You can go here for a longer version of this post.