The Reality of the Biblical Canon (Books of the Bible) - Exactly How Many Different Versions Are There in the World?

The Bible as we know it has been with us for a very long time. Many stories are told about how it was assembled, many of them untrue or distorted. The truth is that the Bible canon developed over the course of centuries and was not a sudden decision, event, or declaration.

Canonical Roots

The earliest Christian canon — that is, by the early 2nd century CE — was the Septuagint. This was a collection of Judaic scriptures translated from Hebrew into κοινη (koiné, “common”) Greek, the cosmopolitan Greek spoken around the eastern Empire, which functioned as a lingua franca. The name “Septuagint” comes from the Greek for seventy, a reference to the 72 reputed Jewish scholars who drafted the translation. (In reality, the translation only of the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, were translated by a single large team of scholars; the others were all translated later and in scattered fashion. In fact, many of these were poor translations.) By this time, of course, Christians had…