Bible Basics
What Is The Bible?
The Bible is a library made up of 66 books and letters written by 40 different authors. These writers spanned three continents, writing over 2,000 years apart from the start of Genesis to the finish of Revelation. The authors were under the direct influence of the Holy Spirit. This means that the contents of the Bible, called scripture, were written by God himself using these 40 Authors as a vessel. Scripture is infallible, meaning it contains no mistakes or contradictions. When we approach scripture, we understand it is written by God Himself, and the divine nature of the book is 100% true.
Literary Style.
There are various writing styles used within each portion of the Bible. Most of the writing styles are set up as narratives, as you might remember from writing classes in school. Narratives consist of the Introduction, rising action climax, falling action, and resolution. At times, the narrator is telling us what is going on as well as Dialogue between people. Other parts are poetic such as Job, Psalms, Proverbs, and Song of Songs.
The Two Testaments.
The Bible is split into two major sections. The Old Testament and the New Testament. As the names imply, the Old Testament is older. The Old Testament was given to Isreal as a guide from God in the early years of Jewish principles. The New Testament came from just nine authors who were Jesus's Apostles and Disciples. This stretches the time frame for the New Testament between 33. A.D. and 80 A.D. As for the Old Testament, the time the books were written is much harder to figure out because of the lack of information from so long ago.
Chapters and Verses.
The original material of the Bible was not written into segments like we see today. Most of the Bible is made of letters and personal accounts. Chapters were not introduced until Stephen Langton made them in the 12th century. Verses were not added until Robert Estienne added them in 1551. Most people do not know this, and it causes a lot of issues when people take verses out of context. It is extremely important not to pick verses out of context to form your own ideas. Chapters in the Bible are like chapters in most other books. Their job is to sort segments and help categorize a book. Although, in the Bible, chapters are normally not as big as in regular books. There may be several chapters per page. Verses split chapters into even smaller segments. A verse can be as small as a single sentence or as big as several sentences. Every chapter resets the verse count. For example, the Book of John Chapter 1 has 51 verses. When we get to chapter 2, that number resets to start at verse 1 again. Then, in Chapter 2, we have 25 verses that reset back to verse 1 in chapter 3.
Finding Chapter and Verse Example.
Do not let the chapters and verses confuse you. Once you get the hang of it, these tools help you navigate the Bible extremely quickly. You have probably seen car bumper stickers or signs that have the name of a Bible book followed by some numbers. Let's use John 3:16 as an example. What this tells us is that we are referring to the Book of John in the Bible. So if you are new, you can go to the front of the Bible to find the Table Of Contents page. Flip to the first page of John. The first number after John is the chapter number. In this case, chapter 3. So we can flip through the pages and find John 3. The top corners of the pages have guides to where you are as well. Once we are at John chapter 3, the next number, which is after the semicolon, is the verse number. In this case, verse 16. So we simply need to skim through chapter 3 till we find the 16th verse. When we find the verse, we can read it as follows; "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life." (John 3:16 NIV.)
When we break this down, it will look like this;
John 3:16
John -The Book
3 -The Third Chapter
:16 -The Sixteenth Verse
When we want to share with others several verses in continuation of each other, we follow the same concept and add a dash between the verses. We might choose to do this in order to get more context for the verse we are sharing. For example, in John 3:16, we might wonder a bit more why God gave His one and only Son. By reading verses 14 through 18, we understand that God gave His Son to save the world and not to condemn it. So if we want to share this set of verses, we would write it down as John 3:14-18. It follows the same concept as above but tells you to read verses 14 through 18. With this, we learn all about why God gave His only Son.
"Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him. For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God's one and only Son." (John 3:14-18 NIV.)
Different Bible Versions
As you may have seen above, after the example verses in John, I put NIV in parenthesis. That is the Version of the Bible I was referencing too. There are a lot of different versions with various translations of the text. The Bible was originally written in languages other than English. Primarily Hebrew in the Old Testament and Greek in the New Testament. That led to various translations as Scholars converted them to English. Some Hebrew and Greek words have various meanings, and these meanings have many synonyms of their own. This has caused many Bibles to have different words between the versions. Even the same versions through the years have variations between the years. For example, an "NIV" Bible written in 1984 differs from an "NIV" written in 2018.
Again, try not to get confused, as this is simpler than it sounds. The differences in the same translations are just the changes in our language evolving over the years. And for different translations, it is just the preference of the wording the Scholars decided to use. The main Bible translations hold the original truth of the messages given within the Books. Some Bible translations have better wording than others, and some are easier to read than others. It really just falls into your preference.
Popular Bible Versions;
NIV-New International Version
ESV- English Standard Version
NASB- New American Standard Bible
KJV- King James Version