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Girls Life Application Study Bible - Flipbook - Page 16

he sixty-six books that were brought together to form the
Bible as we know it today were written by forty different
T
people over a period of 1,500 years! Second Peter 1:20-21
explains how the books of the Bible were written: “No prophecy
in Scripture ever came from the prophet’s own understanding,
or from human initiative. No, those prophets were moved by the
Holy Spirit, and they spoke from God.” This means the people
God used to write Scripture were not reporting what they figured
out on their own. No one ever decided, “I think I’ll write a book
of the Bible.” They didn’t know how their written words would be
used (or how long they would last), but they were “moved by the
Holy Spirit,” which means that God influenced them to write.
THE BIBLE IS AN ACCURATE
HISTORICAL BOOK
THE BIBLE BECOMES AN
OFFICIAL BOOK
All about the
THE BIBLE IS AN INSPIRED BOOK
For the first three hundred years the early church did not have
the Bible as we know it today. Instead, Christians would copy
by hand manuscripts of the Gospels and letters written by the
apostles so that every Christian could know the story of Jesus.
Then, in the fourth century AD, the church agreed that the
Bible would consist of the twenty-seven books we now find in
the New Testament and the Hebrew Bible, which is the thirtynine books we call the Old Testament. The Old Testament was
already accepted as a part of the Christian Bible because it was
the Bible of Jesus and the apostles.
For a book to be accepted as a part of the New Testament it
had to:
1) be drawn from eyewitness accounts or be a letter
written by an apostle;
2) proclaim Jesus Christ as the Son of God and Lord of
all and agree with other accepted teachings of the
church; and
3) be universally accepted by all Christians as accurate.
he people, places, and events in the Bible are historically
verifiable by archaeological findings. Of all the ancient books
T
we read today, we have more and older manuscripts of the New
1.2
Testament than any other book. The oldest portions of the Bible
were found in caves near the Dead Sea and nicknamed the Dead
Sea Scrolls. These earliest manuscripts are some of the world’s
most important ancient literary treasures today.
The Old Testament originated as stories told and passed
down through generations of Israelites before being physically
written down. Originally written in Hebrew and Aramaic, the text
was preserved on large scrolls by scribes who carefully checked
their work. Scholars have compared various scroll fragments with
our Bible today and have found the faithfulness to the earliest
texts to be remarkably accurate.
The New Testament was originally written in ancient Greek
by authors who either knew Jesus personally or knew someone
who did. The authors wrote down what they saw and heard.
Then they passed what they had written to other early Christians,
many of whom had met and heard Jesus and would have been
able to verify the accounts.
The shortest verse of the Bib
and the longest verse is Est le is John 11:35,
her 8:9.
The longest chapter of the B
ib
and the shortest chaptelre isis Psalm 119,
Psalm 117.
The New Testament quotes Is
ai
ah
m
or
e
than
any ot her O ld Testament book
(419 times!).
The Bible has 66 books, 1,189
31,092 verses—and 1 bigchstapters,
ory!
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