My wife and I were teaching the Life of
Jesus as recorded in The Bible for ESL/EAL students. This series of lessons left many unanswered
questions about The Bible itself. Therefore, we took some time for lessons on The Bible itself, which I am sharing here.
The Old Testament
No one knows for sure how old The Bible is. Most Bible scholars believe the first written
parts of the Bible were recorded about 1200 years Before Christ (BC). These are the oldest sections of the Old Testament and we usually say they were first
written by a Jewish leader named Moses.
They are the first five books of the first part of the Christian Bible, which
we call The Old Testament. The Jewish people have only The Old
Testament as their Bible. It was first written in their Aramaic and Hebrew
language. The rest of The Old Testament was written over the next 800 years.
Some other writers are thought to be people like the famous Jewish King David
and his son, King Solomon. For the last 400 years before Jesus was born nothing
new was added to The Bible we have. However, there are a number of writings
that the Jewish people have which are sometimes included in the Bible between
the Old and New Testaments in what we call the Apocrypha. The parts of the
Old Testament on different subjects and written by different writers are called
‘books’. There are 39 books in The Old Testament. It is called The Old
Testament because it is the oldest part of The Bible, written before Jesus was
born.
Jesus himself said about The Old
Testament:
John 5:39 Search The
Scriptures; for in them you think you will find everlasting life: and they do
indeed talk about me.
The
Apostle Paul, one of he most prolific writers of the New Testament wrote:
Romans 15:4 For whatever
things were written in the past were written for our learning, that we through
patience and the comfort of The Scriptures might have hope.
The New Testament
Just as with The Old Testament,
no one knows for certain when the New
Testament was written. It is believed to have been written between about 30
to 65 years after Jesus died and was raised to new life. Also as with The Old
Testament, it consists of a number of smaller sections. There are 27 of these so-called books in The New
Testament. They were mostly written by Jesus’s followers or disciples, whom we
later knew as The Apostles. Two were also written by a doctor
named Luke, and many were written by a special apostle named Paul. The first 5 books tell the story
of Jesus and The Early Church. Most
of the rest of The New Testament consists of letters to churches in parts of
what we now call The Middle East and
Europe. Unlike the Old Testament, the
New Testament was written not in Hebrew but in Aramaic and Greek. This
is because those were the common languages of the time. What is recorded in The
New Testament fulfills predictions made in The Old Testament.
As Jesus himself said after he
rose from the grave:
25
Then he said unto them, O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that
the prophets have spoken:
26
Should Christ not have suffered these things, to be able to enter into
his glory?
27
And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he explained to them in all
The Scriptures the things about himself. Luke 24:25-27
44
And he said to them, These are
the words which I spoke to you, while I was still with you, that all things
must be fulfilled, which were written in the Law of Moses, and in The Prophets, and in The Psalms, concerning me. Luke 24: 44
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