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The
Bible (from Koine Greek τὰ βιβλία, tà biblía, "the books") is a canonical collection of texts considered sacred in
Judaism as well as in
Christianity. The term Bible is shared between the two religions, although the contents of each of their collections of canonical texts is not the same. Different religious groups include different books within their canons, in different orders, and sometimes divide or combine books, or incorporate
additional material into canonical books.
The
Hebrew Bible, or
Tanakh, contains twenty-four books divided into three parts: the five books of the
Torah ("teaching" or "law"), the
Nevi'im ("prophets"), and the
Ketuvim ("writings").
Christian Bibles range from the sixty-six books of the
Protestant canon to the eighty-one books of the
Ethiopian Orthodox Church canon. The first part of
Christian Bibles is the
Old Testament, which contains, at minimum, the twenty-four books of the Hebrew Bible divided into thirty-nine books and ordered differently than the Hebrew Bible. The
Catholic Church and
Eastern Christian churches also hold certain
deuterocanonical books and passages to be part of the
Old Testament canon. The second part is the
New Testament, containing twenty-seven books: the four
Canonical gospels,
Acts of the Apostles, twenty-one
Epistles or letters, and the
Book of Revelation.
By the 2nd century BCE Jewish groups had called the Bible books "holy," and Christians now commonly call the Old and New Testaments of the Christian Bible "The Holy Bible" (
τὰ βιβλία τὰ ἅγια,
tà biblía tà ágia) or "the Holy Scriptures" (
η Αγία Γραφή,
e Agía Graphḗ). Many Christians consider the whole canonical text of the Bible to be
divinely inspired. The oldest surviving complete Christian Bibles are Greek manuscripts from the 4th century. The oldest Tanakh manuscript in Hebrew and Aramaic dates to the 10th century CE,[SUP]
[1][/SUP] but an early 4th-century
Septuagint translation is found in the
Codex Vaticanus.
The Bible was
divided into chapters in the 13th century by
Stephen Langton and into verses in the 16th century by French printer
Robert Estienne[SUP]
[2][/SUP] and is now usually
cited by book, chapter, and verse. The Bible has estimated annual sales of 25 million copies,[SUP]
[3][/SUP][SUP]
[4][/SUP] and has been a major influence on literature and history, especially in the West where it was the first mass printed book.