What is the Bible?

The Protestant Bible is a collection of 66 books written by God’s people over the course of thousands of years. There are different versions of it (KJV, NIV, NASB, ERV, etc), and the Catholic and Orthodox Bibles have more books in theirs. In the Bible that we use today, the Protestant Bible, 43% of it is narrative. Poetic language makes up another 33%. The remaining 24% is discourse, which is a fancy word for speeches, letters or essays. Discourse attempts to persuade the reader, and it takes logic and reasoning to figure out what the writer is talking about. It began with the writings attributed to Moses, known as the Pentateuch or the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. They would be Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. No matter the version, accurate translations use the original Hebrew and Greek manuscripts.

Remember that when you are reading any part of the Bible, it is written for us, but not to us. In the case of the letters of Paul, Peter, and John, for instance, you are reading someone else’s mail. The Bible is divided into two major sections: the Old Testament (hereafter referred to as “OT”) and the New Testament (hereafter referred to as “NT”). The OT contains the Creation story, the flood, Moses’ story, the giving of the Mosaic Law, the story of Israel and the ancient Prophets. The NT contains the story of Jesus and His Apostles, as well as their letters written to the churches they planted or to their disciples, and the Revelation of Jesus Christ. There’s much more to it, but for now, that’s a brief overview.