Girls Life Application Study Bible - Flipbook - Page 17
Both parts of the Bible—the Old Testament and the New
Testament—have five major sections and include different
kinds of writing.
All about the
HOW THE BIBLE IS ORGANIZED
In Scripture God communicates to us in a variety of ways,
including stories, poems, commands, and letters. Each type
of writing makes a special contribution to God’s Word. The
next few pages will help you see how the parts of the Bible
fit together.
THE BIBLE MULTIPLIES
AND SPREADS
1.4
There were no printing presses in the ancient world, so people
began to carefully and exactly copy the Gospels and letters by
hand so they could be taken all over the known world. Parts of
the Bible were translated early on into other languages.
One of the most important languages at the time of the early
church was Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. A monk
by the name of Jerome created the first Latin version of the Bible,
known as the Vulgate, around AD 400. This Bible was used for
centuries as the translation of choice in Western Europe. Later, in
the 1500s, people like Martin Luther and William Tyndale began
to translate the Bible from the original languages into German,
English, and other languages so that people could have God’s
Word in their own language. The official church was so opposed
to using any other language than Latin that Luther and Tyndale
had to work in secret. William Tyndale was put to death for his
work of making God’s Word accessible.
In the 1440s, Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. The first book he printed was a Bible—known as the
Gutenberg Bible (1455). This leap in technology enabled the
Bible to become the most widely printed and distributed book in
the world.
Today, God’s Word has been translated in whole or in part
into over two thousand languages worldwide, but hundreds of
languages still don’t have translations of any part of the Bible. A
portion of the money used to purchase the Bible you are holding
in your hands was given to the work of making God’s Word available to all people in their own language.
1.5
