The Bible tells an overall story about the history of the world: creation, fall, redemption and God’s Last Judgement of the living and the dead.
The Bible tells an overall story about the history of the world: creation, fall, redemption and God's Last Judgement of the living and the dead.
The Old Testament (which dates to 300 BCE) begins with the creation of the world and of Adam and Eve, their disobedience to God and their expulsion from the garden of Eden.
The New Testament recounts the redemption of humanity brought about by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. It finishhes in the book of Revelation, with the end of history and God's Last Judgement.
During the first 400 years of Christianity, the church took its time deciding on the New Testament. Finally, in 367 CE, authorities confirmed the 27 books that make it up.
But who wrote the Bible?
Broadly, there are four different theories.
All Christians agree the Bible is authoritative. Many see it as the divinely revealed word of God. But there are significant disagreements about what this means.
At its most extreme, this is taken to mean the words themselves are divinely inspired - God dictated the Bible to its writers, who were merely God's musicians playing a divine composition.
As early as the second century, the Christian philosopher Justin Martyr saw it as only necessary for holy men
In other words, God dictated the words to the Biblical secretaries, who wrote everything down exactly.
This view continued with the medieval Catholic church. Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas put it simply in the 13th century: "the author of Holy Writ is God". He qualified this by saying each word in Holy Writ could have several senses - in other words, it could be variously interpreted.
The religiusous reform movement known as Protestantism swept through Europe in the 1500s. A new grup of churches formed alongside the existing Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions of Christianity.
Protestants emphasised the authority of "scripture alone" ("sola scriptura "), meaning the teks of the Bible was the supreme authority over the church. This gave greater emphasis to the scriptures and the idea of "divine dictation" got more dukungan.
So, for example, Protestant reformer John Calvin declared:
[we] are fully convinced that the prophets did not speak at their own suggestion, but that, being organs of the Holy Spirit, they only uttered what they had been commissioned from heaven to declare.
"Divine dictation" was linked to the idea that the Bible was without error (inerrant) - because the words were dictated by God.
Generally, over the first 1,700 years of Christian history, this was assumed, if not argued for. But from the 18th century on, both history and science began to cast doubts on the truth of the Bible. And what had once been taken as fact came to be treated as myth and legend.
The impossibility of any sort of error in the scriptures became a doctrine at the forefront of the 20th-century movement known as esensialism. The Chicago Pernyataan on Biblical Inerrancy in 1978 declared:
