What does it mean that the Bible is composed of different books? from Christian Truth
The Bible is really a collection of God’s Word to humanity, an anthology of different Scriptures. These individual messages were recorded over a fourteen-hundred-year period by forty different authors in three different languages depending on the language of the intended audience at the time. However, together, these messages share one common story of God working to restore His creation back to the paradise He originally created it to be by reconciling all creation back to perfect relationship with Himself (2 Corinthians 5:18–19). The Bible is composed of sixty-six different messages, or books, that are separated into the thirty-nine books of the Old Testament and the twenty-seven books of the New Testament. Interestingly, they were not even books in the way we currently think of books.
The Old Testament books were originally written as scrolls. Scrolls were long sheets of papyrus that rolled up for storage. They opened horizontally and had a wooden stick attached to one or both ends to make it easier to roll and unroll evenly. The text was written continuously in columns from left to right without paragraph breaks or headings. Thus each “book” of the Old Testament was actually a separate scroll. Because papyrus was a perishable material, God instructed the kings of Israel to write their own copies of the Law (Deuteronomy 17:18) and the Levites to be responsible for preserving and teaching the Law (Deuteronomy 31:26). After the Babylonian exile, an entire class of scribes had arisen to faithfully copy Scripture onto new scrolls (Ezra 7:6).
Around the first century AD, parchment was invented. Instead of using the papyrus plant to make long sheets of paper, animal skins were used to make pages that could be stacked and bound together. A group of pages all bound together opening on a hinge is called a codex, or what we currently consider to be a book. Even so, many of the New Testament “books” were simply letters sent to an intended recipient, the pages of which were not likely bound together like a book.
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