The Bible, as we know it, was compiled for the first time in history in the third century BC, when seventy Jewish wise men were invited by King Ptolemy II to come to Alexandria to contribute the history of the town to the famous library. of Israel (what we now call the Old Testament).
How was the Bible written? Historical background
For months, they wrote down the memory of thousands of years of the people of Israel, from Adam to Moses, including the historical, wisdom and prophetic books.
His work was translated from ancient Aramaic and Hebrew into Greek. This is how the so-called Bible of the Seventy or Alexandrina (also Septuagint) was born, on which the current Christian text is based.
A Hebrew compilation of the history of the people of Israel, called the Masoretic text (Hebrew tradition), was made in the 9th century AD. It is the Hebrew version that does not include the New Testament.
The New Testament and the compilation of the Gospels that portrayed the life of Jesus, had numerous sources and authors. The oldest papyrus in the New Testament is a fragment of John dating from AD 125-130.
no physical trace
Of those originals of the Alexandrian Bible, like the texts of the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, there is no physical trace.
All that vanished due to the looting and burning of the legendary library, but also due to its weak support for transmission: papyrus, vellum and leather do not stand the test of time. The same thing happened to the evangelical writings
Over the years, thousands and thousands of copies of copies have been made. However, that produced a hermeneutical doubt:
— The ancient texts were copied by battalions of scribes, frequently in monasteries, and suffered numerous affronts that range from the simple lack of spelling or attention of the copyist, to voluntary doctrinal correction, affirm Roselyne Dupont-Roc and Philippe Mercier in The manuscripts of the Bible (Ed. Verbo Divino).
As each copy always had some interpretation or transcription error, Christian paleography has taken pains to compare copies with other copies to recompose a text as similar to the original.
Had a good job been done or were there false or misleading passages? Were Christians around the world relying on the wrong texts?
When two Bedouin herdsmen mistakenly entered a cave in 1947 in search of a lost goat, and discovered ancient scrolls encased in jars, one of the most fascinating paleographic disputes in history broke out.
Those scrolls contained excerpts or entire passages from the books of the Bible. They were called .
They came from the year 150 BC to 70 AD Very soon curious theories about their content arose: some claimed that these texts gave a twist to the Sacred Texts, which had been distorted over the centuries by Christian historiography.
Others added that the Church did not want to make their content known because they contained revealing contradictions about Jesus.
There were those who said that it was the best testimony of the New Testament, and until Jesus was part of the community of the Essenes, the enigmatic sect that had written and kept those texts in jars…