BIBLE ETYMOLOGY
ETYMOLOGY - the study of the origin of words and the way in which their meanings have changed throughout history.
The Bible is the most translated book in the world. The United Bible Societies announced that as of 31 December 2007 the complete Bible was available in 438 languages, 123 of which included the deuterocanonical material as well as the Tanakh and New Testament. Either the Tanakh or the New Testament was available in an additional 1,168 languages.
In 1999, Wycliffe Bible Translators announced Vision 2025—a project that intends to commence Bible translation in every remaining language community by 2025. As of 1 October 2015 they estimate that around 165 - 180 million people, speak those 1,800 languages where translation work still needs to begin.
Wycliffe also stated that parts of the Bible are available in approximately 2,900 out of the 6,877 known languages, and that there are currently 554 languages with a complete Bible translation. The New Testament is available in 1,333 languages and many more have at least one book of the Bible available.
With estimated total sales of over 5 billion copies, the Bible is widely considered to be the best-selling book of all time. It has estimated annual sales of 100 million copies, and has been a major influence on literature and history, especially in the West where the Gutenberg Bible was the first mass-printed book.
The Bible was the first book ever printed using movable type.
The Bible (from Koine Greek τὰ βιβλία, tà biblía, "the books]) is a collection of sacred texts or scriptures that Jews and Christians consider to be a product of divine inspiration and a record of the relationship between God and humans.
Many different authors contributed to the Bible. And what is regarded as canonical text differs depending on traditions and groups; a number of Bible canons have evolved, with overlapping and diverging contents.
The Christian Old Testament overlaps with the Hebrew Bible and the Greek Septuagint;
The Hebrew Bible is known in Judaism as the Tanakh.
The New Testament is a collection of writings by early Christians, believed to be mostly Jewish Disciples of Christ, written in first-century Koine Greek. These early Christian Greek writings consist of narratives, letters, and apocalyptic writings.
Among Christian denominations there is some disagreement about the contents of the canon, primarily the Apocrypha, a list of works that are regarded with varying levels of respect.
Attitudes towards the Bible also differ amongst Christian groups:
Roman Catholics, Anglicans and Eastern Orthodox Christians stress the harmony and importance of the:
1. Bible and
2. Sacred Tradition,
While Protestant churches focus on the idea of:
1. sola scriptura, or scripture alone.
This concept arose during the Protestant Reformation, and many denominations today support the use of the Bible as the only source of Christian teaching.
ETYMOLOGY
The English word Bible is from the Latin biblia, from the same word both in Medieval Latin and Late Latin and ultimately from Koine Greek τὰ βιβλία ta biblia "the books" (singular βιβλίον biblion).
Medieval Latin biblia is short for biblia sacra "holy book", while biblia in Greek and Late Latin is neuter plural (gen. bibliorum). It gradually came to be regarded as a feminine singular noun (biblia, gen. bibliae) in Medieval Latin. Latin biblia sacra "holy books" translates Greek τὰ βιβλία τὰ ἅγια ta biblia ta hagia, "the holy books".
The word βιβλίον itself had the literal meaning of "paper" or "scroll" and came to be used as the ordinary word for "book". It is the diminutive of βύβλος byblos, "Egyptian papyrus", possibly so called from the name of the Phoenician sea port Byblos (also known as Gebal) from whence Egyptian papyrus was exported to Greece.
The Greek ta biblia (lit. "little papyrus books") was "an expression Hellenistic Jews used to describe their sacred books (the Septuagint).
Christian use of the term can be traced to c. 223 CE.
The biblical scholar F.F. Bruce notes that Chrysostom appears to be the first writer (in his Homilies on Matthew, delivered between 386 and 388) to use the Greek phrase ta biblia ("the books") to describe both the Old and New Testaments together.
Textual History
By the 2nd century BCE, Jewish groups began calling the books of the Bible the "scriptures" and they referred to them as "holy," or in Hebrew כִּתְבֵי הַקֹּדֶשׁ (Kitvei hakkodesh), and Christians now commonly call the Old and New Testaments of the Christian Bible "The Holy Bible" (in Greek τὰ βιβλία τὰ ἅγια, tà biblía tà ágia) or "the Holy Scriptures" (η Αγία Γραφή, e Agía Graphḗ).
The Bible was:
1. Divided into chapters in the 13th century by Stephen Langton
2. Divided into verses in the 16th century by French printer Robert Estienne.
The oldest extant copy of a complete Bible is an early 4th-century parchment book preserved in the Vatican Library, and it is known as the Codex Vaticanus.
The oldest copy of the Tanakh in Hebrew and Aramaic dates from the 10th century CE. The oldest copy of a complete Latin (Vulgate) Bible is the Codex Amiatinus, dating from the 8th century.
Parallel to the solidification of the Hebrew canon (c. 3rd century BCE), only the Torah first and then the Tanakh began to be translated into Greek and expanded, now referred to as the Septuagint or the Greek Old Testament.
In Christian Bibles, the New Testament Gospels were derived from oral traditions in the second half of the first century CE. Riches says that:
Scholars have attempted to reconstruct something of the history of the oral traditions behind the Gospels, but the results have not been too encouraging. The period of transmission is short: less than 40 years passed between the death of Jesus and the writing of Mark's Gospel. This means that there was little time for oral traditions to assume fixed form.
The Bible was later translated into Latin and other languages. John Riches states that:
The translation of the Bible into Latin marks the beginning of a parting of the ways between Western Latin-speaking Christianity and Eastern Christianity, which spoke Greek, Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopic, and other languages.
The Bibles of the Eastern Churches vary considerably: the Ethiopic Orthodox canon includes 81 books and contains many apocalyptic texts, such as were found at Qumran and subsequently excluded from the Jewish canon.
As a general rule, one can say that the Orthodox Churches generally follow the Septuagint in including more books in their Old Testaments than are in the Jewish canon.
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