How the English Bible Came to Be

The Old Testament 39 books of the Bible we know today were originally Hebrew individual books written by various Hebrew authors completed by 400 B.C.E. (Before Common Era), approximately 400 years before Yeshua. It is known as the Tanach today.

14 other Hebrew manuscripts, known today as the Apocrypha (Deuterocanonical in Catholic Bibles), were added  200 years later with the completion of the Septuagint Greek translations for a total of 53 manuscripts. Interesting is that the Deuteroncanonical contains 17 books instead of 14, which includes Maccabees 3, Maccabees 4, and Psalms 151.

The New Testament 27 books of the Bible we know today were originally individual books written by the Apostles in either Hebrew or Greek. The completion of all of them into Greek occurred within 100 years after Yeshua’s death and resurrection. 

It would be almost 400 years after Yeshua’s death and resurrection that the first complete set of manuscripts known as the Latin Vulgate (all 80 books) was produced.

100 years later these Scriptures had been translated into over 500 languages, but the institutional church only allowed LATIN translations for Scripture. Today the Catholic biblical canon is of 73 books.

It would be almost 1400 years after Yeshua’s death and resurrection before the first English translation of the 80 manuscripts into English from the Latin Vulgate. All of the above were handwritten.

It would not be until 1455 A.D. (Anno Domini, Latin for “in the year of the Lord”), known today as C.E (Common Era) that a printed version of the Bible would be developed with all 80 books, but written in Latin only. In 1525 the first New Testament would be printed in English and 10 years later the first complete English Bible would be printed containing all 80 books.

The Catholic Church would finally relinquish the “only Latin” printing of Scriptures in 1582 and developed it’s own English version called the Doway/Rheims Version. This English version was disputed by Dr. Fulke of Cambridge.

The original King James Version of the Bible was printed with all 80 books in 1611 A.D., not to be officially reduced to 66 books until 1885 A.D. However, the first Bible to appear with only 66 books was printed in America by Robert Aitken (known as the Robert Aitken’s Bible) in 1782 A.D.

Today, there are so many different English versions of the Bible available which can be found at Modern_English_Bible_translations from Wikipedia. This Ministry uses the following Scriptures:

SNB (Restoration of Original Sacred Name Bible), The Stone Edition Tanach, The Hebrew-English New Covenant (New Testament), current KJV of 66 books, and the KJV of The Apocrypha.

This Ministry also uses other sources for research such as Stong’s Exhaustive Concordance, Gesenius’ Hebrew Lexicon, Thayer’s Greek Lexicon, and more- including internet research.

This website english-bible-history is from Greatsite.com. Please go to their website for more information and  research on how the English Bible came into being than we have listed above.