Bible

The Bible is a canonical collection of texts sacred in Judaism and Christianity. There is no single “Bible” and many Bibles with varying contents exist. The term Bible is shared between Judaism and Christianity, although the contents of each of their collections of canonical texts is not the same. Different religious groups include different books within their Biblical 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 all 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 from 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 of the Christian Bible is the New Testament, containing twenty-seven books originally written in Koine Greek, which discuss the teachings and person of Jesus, as well as events in first-century Christianity. The New Testament is divided into the four Canonical gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, twenty-one Epistles or didactic letters, and the Book of Revelation. By the 2nd century BCE Jewish groups had called the Bible books the “scriptures” and referred to them as “holy,” or in Hebrew כִּתְבֵי הַקֹּדֶשׁ (Kitvei hakkodesh), and Christians now commonly call the Old and New Testaments of the Christian Bible “The Holy Bible”, in Greek (, tà biblía tà ágia) or “the Holy Scriptures” (, e Agía Graphḗ).