History of the Bible
The history of the Bible starts with a phenomenal account of history! It's not one book -- It's an ancient collection of oral stories that eventually was put into writing, comprised of 66 separate books, written over approximately 1,600 years.
The oral stories of the Bible evolved slowly over centuries before the existence of orthodox religions. Many of the stories originally came from Egyptian and Sumerian cults. Many of the early religions practiced polytheism, to include the early Hebrews. Eventually, the oldest records of the stories that later entered the Old Testament came from thousands of small cylinder seals depicting creation stories, excavated from the Mesopotamia period. These early artifacts and artworks (Akkadian Cylinder Seal, 2330-2150 B.C.E.) established the basis for the Garden of Eden stories a least a thousand years before it impacted Hebrew mythology.
Beginning as early as 250 BC, the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) was translated into Greek by Jewish scholars in Alexandria, Egypt. This translation became known as the "Septuagint", meaning 70, and referring to the tradition that 70 (probably 72) men comprised the translation team. It was during this process that the order of the books was changed to the order we have in today's Bible: Historical (Genesis - Esther), poetic (Job - Song of Songs), and prophetic (Isaiah - Malachi).
We tend to read the Bible from our own viewpoint—that is, we tend to think of the Bible as if it came from a world of texts, books, and authors. But the Bible was written before there were the things we now call books. It was written down on leather scrolls and clay tablets over many centuries, and were very expensive to own. This is why they were the guarded knowledge of political and religious elites.
Christianity, however, quickly adopted the codex—the precursor of the modern book. Codices, with bound leaves of pages, appeared in the first century A.D. and became common by the fourth century. The codex could encompass a much more extensive series of texts than a single scroll could contain. In bringing together a collection of scrolls, the codex also defined a set and order of books and made possible a more defined canon. It was with the technological invention of the codex that the "Bible" as a book, that is, the Bible as we know it, first got its physical form. The adoption of the codex probably encouraged the authority of the written Scriptures in the early Church.
There exists no original writings of the Old Testament. There does exist, however, hundreds of fragments from copies that became the old testament. These fragments consist of Cuneiform tablets, papyrus paper, leather etchings and the famous Dead Sea Scrolls. The unknown scribes of the old testament wrote in classical Hebrew except for some portions written in Aramaic. The original Hebrew scribes wrote the texts with consonants but the Rabbis later added vowels for verbal pronouncing. In the second century A.D., or even earlier, the Rabbis compiled what they believed to be a complete text from manuscripts that had survived the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. and on this basis they established the traditional or Masoretic text, so called from the Hebrew word Massorah. This text incorporated the mistakes of generations of copyists, and in spite of the care bestowed on it, many errors of later copyists also found their way into it. The earliest surviving manuscripts of this text date from the ninth to eleventh centuries A.D. It comes mostly from these texts which religionists have used for the present Old Testament translations.
After approximately 400 years of scriptural silence, Jesus arrived on the scene in about 4 BC. Throughout his teaching, Jesus often quotes the Old Testament, declaring that he did not come to destroy the Jewish Scriptures, but to fulfill them. In the Book of Luke, Jesus proclaims to his disciples, "all things must be fulfilled which were written in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms concerning Me."
Scholars think that not until years after Jesus' alleged death that its authors wrote the Gospels. There exists no evidence that the New Testament came from the purported original apostles or anyone else that had seen the alleged Jesus. Although the oldest surviving Christian texts came from Paul, he had never seen the earthly Jesus. There occurs nothing in Paul's letters that either hints at the existence of the Gospels or even of a need for such memoirs of Jesus Christ. The oldest copy of the New Testament yet found consists of a tiny fragment from the Gospel of John. Scholars dated the little flake of papyrus from the period style of its handwriting to around the first half of the 2nd century C.E.
One of the Bible's most influential editors, Irenaeus of Lyon (early 2nd century – c. AD202, Bishop of Lugdunum in Gaul), decided that there should only exist four Gospels like the four zones of the world, the four winds, the four divisions of man's estate, and the four forms of the first living creatures - the lion of Mark, the calf of Luke, the man of Matthew, and the eagle of John. In a single stroke, Irenaeus had delineated the sacred book of the Christian church and left out the other Gospels. Irenaeus also wrote what Christianity did not include, and in this way Christianity became an orthodox faith. A work of Irenaeus, Against the Heresies, became the starting point for later inquisitions.