Bible

The word Bible refers to the canonical collections of religious writings or books of Judaism and Christianity. Books included as canon in the Bible vary according to these religious traditions and among their denominations. more...

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These variations reflect a range of histories, traditions and myths.

The Jewish version of the Bible, the Tanakh, includes the books common to both the Christian and Jewish biblical canons. The Torah is traditionally considered by believers to be God's direct words and thus thought to be the most sacred part. Much of the Jewish religious law is derived from the Torah.

The Christian version of the Bible is often called the Holy Bible, Scriptures, or Word of God. It divides the books of the Bible into two parts: the books of the Old Testament primarily sourced from the Tanakh (with some variations), and the 27 books of the New Testament containing books originally written primarily in Greek. Some versions of the Christian Bible have a separate Apocrypha section for the books not considered canonical by the publisher. The Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Old Testament canons contain books not found in the Tanakh, but that are found in the Greek Septuagint, the oldest of several ancient translations of the Hebrew Bible into Greek.

The Bible, or some portion of it, had been translated into more than 2,300 languages or dialects as of 2003.

Etymology

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word bible is from Anglo-Latin biblia, traced from the same word through Medieval Latin and Late Latin, as used in the phrase biblia sacra ("holy books"). This stemmed from the term (Greek: τὰ βιβλία τὰ ἅγια Ta biblia ta hagia, "the holy books"), which derived from biblion ("paper" or "scroll," the ordinary word for "book"), which was originally a diminutive of byblos ("Egyptian papyrus"), possibly so called from the name of the Phoenician port Byblos from which Egyptian papyrus was exported to Greece.

Biblical scholar Mark Hamilton states that the Greek phrase Ta biblia ("the books") was "an expression Hellenistic Jews used to describe their sacred books several centuries before the time of Jesus," and would have referred to the Septuagint. The Online Etymology Dictionary states, "The Christian scripture was referred to in Greek as Ta Biblia as early as c.223."

Tanakh

The Tanakh (Hebrew: תנ"ך) consists of 24 books. Tanakh is an acronym for the three parts of the Hebrew Bible: the Torah ("Teaching/Law" also known as the Pentateuch), Nevi'im ("Prophets"), and Ketuvim ("Writings," or Hagiographa), and is used commonly by Jews but unfamiliar to many English speakers and others (Alexander 1999, p. 17). (See Table of books of Judeo-Christian Scripture).

Read more at Wikipedia.org