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"Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ"

- St. Jerome

The word "Bible" was formed from a Greek term meaning books in the plural. Our Bible is, in fact, the collection of books written by various authors that possesses final authority in Christian communities. It has no rival in its pervasive influence upon Western culture, and increasingly over world culture. It is a perennial best-seller and has been translated into more than two thousand languages and dialects. 

Why does the Bible exist? The answer has to do with the transmission of the gospel down through the generations. Once God had revealed Himself and His plan of salvation to Israel and to the believers surrounding Jesus, the question arose how this truth would be passed along to posterity without its suffering distortion from later interpreters. The only obvious answer to this question was written documentation. It would be necessary to secure the revelation in a fixed, written, and authentic form so that the truth would not be lost in the transmission. Both from a human and a divine standpoint, then, a Bible was required to be the vehicle of transmission of the gospel, conveying the revelation intact to succeeding generations. 

SACRED SCRIPTURE

The Old Testament

The Pentateuch, which consists of the first five books of the Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy), enjoys particular prestige among the Jews as the "Law," or "Torah," the concrete expression of God's will in their regard. It is more than a body of legal doctrine, even though such material occupies many chapters, for it contains the story of the formation of the People of God: Abraham and the Patriarchs, Moses and the oppressed Hebrews in Egypt, the birth of Israel in the Sinai covenant, the journey to the threshold of the Promised Land, and the "discourses" of Moses.

The historical books include 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, 1 and 2 Maccabees. To these are added the special literary group of Tobit, Judith, and Esther.

The Books of Tobit, Judith, and 1 and 2 Maccabees, as well as parts of Esther, are called deuterocanonical: they are not contained in the Hebrew canon but have been accepted by the Catholic Church as canonical and inspired.

The wisdom books, the Books of Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, Wisdom, and Sirach, are all versified by the skillful use of parallelism, that is, of the balanced and symmetrical phrases peculiar to Hebrew poetry. With the exception of the Psalms, the majority of which are devotional lyrics, and the Song of Songs, a nuptial hymn, these books belong to the general class of wisdom or didactic literature, strictly so called because their chief purpose is instruction.

The prophetic books bear the names of the four major and twelve minor prophets, besides Lamentations and Baruch. The terms "major" and "minor" refer merely to the length of the respective compositions and not to any distinction in the prophetic office. Jonah is a story of the mission of the prophet rather than a collection of prophecies. Lamentations and Daniel are listed among the hagiographa in the Hebrew Bible, not among the prophetic books. The former contains a series of elegies on the fate of Jerusalem; the latter is apocalyptic in character. Daniel, who lived far removed from Palestine, was not called by God to preach; yet the book is counted as prophecy. Baruch, though excluded from the Hebrew canon, is found in the Septuagint version, and the Church has always acknowledged it to be sacred and inspired.The prophetic books, together with the oral preaching of the prophets, were the result of the institution of prophetism, in which a succession of Israelites chosen by God and appointed by him to be prophets received communications from him and transmitted them to the people in his name (Deu 18:15-20). The prophets were spokesmen of God intermediaries between him and his people. The communications they received from God came through visions, dreams, and ecstasies and were transmitted to the people through sermons, writings, and symbolic actions.

from: the NAB ©1986

The New Testament

The second major division of the  Bible with twenty-seven separate works (called "books") attributed to at least eight different writers. Four accounts of Jesus' life are at the core. The first three Gospels (called "Synoptic") are very similar in content and order. The fourth Gospel has a completely different perspective. 
A history of selected events in the early church (Acts) is followed by twenty letters to churches and individuals and the book of Revelation. The letters deal mainly with the interpretation of God's act of salvation in Jesus Christ. Matters of discipline, proper Christian behaviour, and church administration also are included. The book of Revelation is a coded message of hope to the church of the first century. 

The Gospels

Matthew	Mark
Luke	John

The collection of writings that constitutes the New Testament begins with four gospels. Next comes the Acts of the Apostles, followed by twenty-one letters that are attributed to Paul, James, Peter, John, and Jude. Finally, at the end of the early church's scriptures stands the Revelation to John. Virtually all Christians agree that these twenty-seven books constitute the "canon," a term that means "rule" and designates the list of writings that are regarded as authoritative for Christian faith and life.

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