The oldest surviving
Hebrew Bible manuscripts—including the
Dead Sea Scrolls
The Dead Sea Scrolls (also the Qumran Caves Scrolls) are ancient Jewish and Hebrew religious manuscripts discovered between 1946 and 1956 at the Qumran Caves in what was then Mandatory Palestine, near Ein Feshkha in the West Bank, on the ...
—date to about the 2nd century
BCE (
fragmentary) and some are stored at the
Shrine of the Book
The Shrine of the Book ( he, היכל הספר, ''Heikhal HaSefer'') is a wing of the Israel Museum in the Givat Ram neighborhood of Jerusalem that houses the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Aleppo Codex, among others.
History
The building was construc ...
in Jerusalem. The oldest extant complete text survives in a
Greek translation called the
Septuagint
The Greek Old Testament, or Septuagint (, ; from the la, septuaginta, lit=seventy; often abbreviated ''70''; in Roman numerals, LXX), is the earliest extant Greek translation of books from the Hebrew Bible. It includes several books beyond t ...
, dating to the 4th century
CE (
Codex Sinaiticus
The Codex Sinaiticus ( Shelfmark: London, British Library, Add MS 43725), designated by siglum [Aleph] or 01 (in the Gregory-Aland numbering of New Testament manuscripts), δ 2 (in the von Soden numbering of New Testament manuscript ...
). The oldest
extant
Extant is the opposite of the word extinct. It may refer to:
* Extant hereditary titles
* Extant literature, surviving literature, such as ''Beowulf'', the oldest extant manuscript written in English
* Extant taxon, a taxon which is not extinct, ...
manuscripts of the vocalized
Masoretic Text
The Masoretic Text (MT or 𝕸; he, נֻסָּח הַמָּסוֹרָה, Nūssāḥ Hammāsōrā, lit. 'Text of the Tradition') is the authoritative Hebrew and Aramaic text of the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) in Rabbinic Judaism. ...
(the basis of modern editions), date to the 9th century CE.
With the exception of a few biblical sections in the
Prophets, virtually no biblical text is contemporaneous with the events it describes.
Internal evidence in the texts suggests dating the individual books of the
27-book New Testament canon in the
1st century CE. The first book written was probably
1 Thessalonians, written around 50 CE.
[ Raymond E. Brown, ''An Introduction to the New Testament'', ]Anchor Bible
The Anchor Bible Series, which consists of a commentary series, a Bible dictionary, and a reference library, is a scholarly and commercial co-venture which was begun in 1956, with the publication of individual volumes in the commentary series. Ove ...
, 1997. pp. 456-466. The final book (in the ordering of the canon), the
Book of Revelation
The Book of Revelation is the final book of the New Testament (and consequently the final book of the Christian Bible). Its title is derived from the first word of the Koine Greek text: , meaning "unveiling" or "revelation". The Book of ...
, is generally accepted by traditional scholarship to have been written during the reign of
Domitian
Domitian (; la, Domitianus; 24 October 51 – 18 September 96) was a Roman emperor who reigned from 81 to 96. The son of Vespasian and the younger brother of Titus, his two predecessors on the throne, he was the last member of the Fl ...
(81–96).
Robert Mounce
Robert Hayden Mounce (December 30, 1921 – January 24, 2019) was an American New Testament scholar, and president emeritus of Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington.
Mounce was born in LaSalle, Illinois, in December 1921 and raised in Mino ...
. The Book of Revelation, pg. 15-16. Cambridge: Eerdman's
Books.google.com
/ref> Dating the composition of the texts relies primarily on internal evidence, including direct references to historical events—textual criticism
Textual criticism is a branch of textual scholarship, philology, and of literary criticism that is concerned with the identification of textual variants, or different versions, of either manuscripts or of printed books. Such texts may range in da ...
and philological
Philology () is the study of language in oral and written historical sources; it is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics (with especially strong ties to etymology). Philology is also defined as t ...
and linguistic evidence provide more subjective indications.
Table I: Chronological overview
This table summarises the chronology
Chronology (from Latin ''chronologia'', from Ancient Greek , ''chrónos'', "time"; and , ''-logia'') is the science of arranging events in their order of occurrence in time. Consider, for example, the use of a timeline or sequence of even ...
of the main tables and serves as a guide to the historical periods mentioned. Much of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament may have been assembled in the 5th century BCE. The New Testament books were composed largely in the second half of the 1st century CE. The Deuterocanonical books
The deuterocanonical books (from the Greek meaning "belonging to the second canon") are books and passages considered by the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Oriental Orthodox Churches, and the Assyrian Church of the East to be ...
fall largely in between.
Table II: Hebrew Bible/Protestant Old Testament
Table III: Deuterocanonical Old Testament
Table IV: New Testament
See also
* Authorship of the Bible
Table I gives an overview of the periods and dates ascribed to the various books of the Bible. Tables II, III and IV outline the conclusions of the majority of contemporary scholars on the composition of the Hebrew Bible and the Protestant Old ...
* Biblical manuscripts
* Categories of New Testament manuscripts
New Testament manuscripts in Greek are categorized into five groups, according to a scheme introduced in 1981 by Kurt and Barbara Aland in ''The Text of the New Testament''. The categories are based on how each manuscript relates to the vario ...
* Development of the Hebrew Bible canon
* Historical criticism
Historical criticism, also known as the historical-critical method or higher criticism, is a branch of criticism that investigates the origins of ancient texts in order to understand "the world behind the text". While often discussed in terms of ...
* Historicity of the Bible
The historicity of the Bible is the question of the Bible's relationship to history—covering not just the Bible's acceptability as history but also the ability to understand the literary forms of biblical narrative. One can extend biblical his ...
* Marcan priority
* Nag Hammadi library
The Nag Hammadi library (also known as the " Chenoboskion Manuscripts" and the "Gnostic Gospels") is a collection of early Christian and Gnostic texts discovered near the Upper Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi in 1945.
Thirteen leather-bound papyr ...
* Synoptic problem
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Dating The Bible
Biblical criticism
Biblical studies
Chronology