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This page is intended as a quick introduction to some basic concepts in biblical studies. It's not by any stretch an introduction to the field, but more of a very quick deconstruction of some concepts that people often bring to the Bible unaware.

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As of June 2014, the C.I.A. World Factbook estimates that 31.1% of the world's inhabitants are Christian, and a further 24.9% Muslim -- added together, these come to 56%, a majority of the world's inhabitants. Along with Judaism, Christianity and Islam all bear various sorts of relationships to biblical texts.

While not all, probably not even most, of the conflicts that occur in majority-Muslim, majority-Christian, and majority-Jewish societies are about the Bible, the Bible inevitably finds itself repeatedly invoked, by believers and non-believers, to make one point or another about how we should live. And it should come as no surprise to anyone that people are often at odds about what precisely the Bible is saying, and what this should mean, if anything, for today.

While the usual way of forming opinions about the Bible is to simply listen to what people around one are saying and adopt the prevailing opinions in one's social circles, every now and then someone wants to know for themselves. So they walk down to their local bookstore, grab a KJV or NIV or some other book with the label "Bible" on it, and then just start reading. This exercise is not necessarily a bad one. There's nothing like going straight to primary sources.

But buying a Bible isn't, quite, simply reading the original source straight. There is not, and never has been, a single undisputed text that everyone agrees is "the Bible". That NIV you're holding in your hands is the product of thousands upon thousands of decisions that other people have made for you before you even pick up the book. Those decisions include, but are not limited to, what texts "the Bible" even includes.

It is sometimes more clear to talk about "Bibles" than about a single entity called "the Bible". If you are given a Jewish Bible, that will contain one set of books. A Protestant Bible contains more books. A Catholic Bible will contain more books than a Protestant Bible, and the various Orthodox Christian churches have a variety of canons including even larger numbers of books.

Once one has settled on a list of books to include in a Bible, even more decisions await. In an individual work within the Bible, such as, for example, Daniel, some ancient manuscripts include a variety of stories that other manuscripts do not. Different manuscripts of Mark contain different endings to the gospel.

The typical Bible that one pulls off the shelves of a bookstore contains little to no trace of the massive decision-making process that has occurred over millennia prior to that Bible finding its way into a reader's hands.

Someone who wants to get acquainted with all the decisions that go into producing the finished products we call "Bibles" will have to acquire a lot of specialized knowledge of specialized literature, much of it accessible only through university libraries or to people willing to spend enormous amounts of money.

While a lot of pieces of the puzzle can be found online, especially if one finds old commentaries like the International Critical Commentary series, it is still fair to say that, despite the centrality of the Bible to the beliefs of billions of people, it is still remarkably hard for the average person to get a good look at the world of biblical scholarship.

While no one person can fix this situation, I would like to do a bit, here and there, to push some of the detailed backstory behind biblical translation out into the open.

We commonly speak as if there simply exists some well-known book out there called "The Bible", of knowable contents. This is a tricky thing for two reasons -- the idea of 'book' and the varying contents of various Bibles.

Let us take, for example, one particular Bible, the 1917 Bible by the Jewish Publication Society. Let's take a peek at its Table of Contents.

One of the first things we can notice is that this Bible is composed of "the books of the Holy Scriptures". The Bible is not a book, in the traditional sense of being a single work produced by a single author over a year or two, but is in fact an anthology of various works, traditionally called books, all collected together. This accords with the etymology of the term "Bible", which comes from the Greek ta biblia, meaning "the books", or, more exactly, "the scrolls". While it is certainly true today that most of the "Bibles" you can buy are sold in a single bound volume, the materials inside a Bible didn't start out that way.

Now let's try another Bible, this time a reprint of the famous 1611 version known commonly in the United States as the King James Version (KJV). Let's compare its Table of Contents.

This table of contents is divided up into three big sections. The first section, despite some differences of spelling and in the arrangement of the "books", contains the same works found in the Jewish Publication Society (JPS) translation above.

But we can also see two other sections. The third section contains what in Christianity is known as the New Testament -- a collection of works found in Christian Bibles, but not Jewish ones.

The second section is particularly interesting: "The Bookes called Apocrypha." These bookes, also sometimes known as the Deuterocanon, occupy a controversial position within Christianity. In Roman Catholicism, they are considered an integral part of Bible. In Protestantism, they are accorded a lesser status, and since the 1800's have even been removed from most Protestant Bibles.

If you go to a dollar store and buy yourself a "KJV", it will most likely not contain the apocryphal books, or any explanation of where they went. There are, in fact, entire Christian churches who believe the KJV is the only true Bible, perfectly inspired by God word for word, who still do not have the apocryphal books in their Bibles.

Nor does the issue of apocrypha limit itself to just whether or not to include something called "the Apocrypha". Various non-Protestant Churches have different collections of 'apocryphal' works included in their Bibles, from the smaller apocrypha of Roman Catholicism to the various larger collections associated with the various Orthodox Christian groups.

Let us return, now, to the Table of Contents of that JPS Bible.

This here is the collection of works that, collectively, make up a Jewish Bible. This same collection of works is known to Protestants as the Old Testament, although for Catholics and Orthodox Christians the Old Testament is a somewhat larger collection. In any case, this whole collection has come to be known as the Hebrew Bible in academia, and so I will call it here.

One might think it would be an uncontroversial question to ask how many "books" make up this collection, but no such luck. Judaism traditionally counts 24 books, and most Protestants will tell you their Old Testament contains 39. So what gives?

We have here a difference of fiteen books to explain. You may notice in the Table above that there is a heading, The Twelve, under which are the titles Hosea, Joel, Amos ... Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi. In the traditional Jewish way of counting, The Twelve is a "book", which is itself an anthology of twelve smaller works about twelve prophets. In Christianity, each of the twelve is usually counted as a "book" of its own. This in itself is enough to explain eleven of our fifteen-book gap.

Four to go. Where Christians see six books -- 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, and 1 and 2 Chronicles -- traditional Judaism's count sees only three: Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles. The Christian tradition simply divides each of those three books somewhere near the middle, producing smaller and more convenient-sized books to keep track of. This probably mattered most in the era of scroll-production. We have now accounted for fourteen of the fifteen-book gap.

The final gap comes from Ezra and Nehemiah. In Judaism, there's just one book, Ezra-Nehemiah, while in Christianity it is the book of Ezra and the book of Nehemiah.

And now for a tricky question. If the division of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles is from Christian tradition, why is it that the Jewish Publication Society is following that order of books. To understand this, we will need to take a brief detour.

Let us turn, now, to the 1611 KJV and its Table of Contents:

Each book, this table of contents informs us, hath a certain number of "Chapters". Seeing as this is the Bible, that most complex of anthologies, you may already have guessed that a biblical chapter is not quite what most of us mean by "chapter". In an ordinary modern book, the author will often divide his book into "chapters", to aid both the author and the readers in keeping the material organized in their minds and easy to follow.

With the partial exception of the book of Psalms, the biblical books were not written that way. They were not divided into chapters: a writer simply started at one end, and wrote words until he was finished writing, and that was a book. The truth is in fact even more complex than this, as we'll see when we get back to the discussion of what a "book" is, but for now this approximation will do. A biblical book, generally, just sort of runs on until it finishes, although there are some paragraph-like divisions in the Hebrew Bible which we won't worry about for now.

At some time in the 1200's CE, someone, likely Archbishop Stephen Langton, added 'chapter' numbers throughout a copy of the Bible in Latin.1 these 'chapters', then, are not an original part of the Bible, but a later convenience that helps readers to find what passage a person is referring to. Now, even before the division of the Latin Bible into chapters, the Hebrew Bible had been divided, at some point, into small, sentence-like units known today as "verses". Jewish readers then replicated the Latin chapter divisions in their own Hebrew Bibles.1

Now, because Christian tradition had already divided Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, and Ezra-Nehemiah from four books to four pairs of books, the Latin chapter numbers reflected that division. Thus, there was 1 Samuel 1, 1 Samuel 2, ... 2 Samuel 1, 2 Samuel 2, and so on. Even though Jewish tradition did not necessarily accept the Christian division of books as "correct", for the sake of convenience Jewish Bibles more or less universally adopted the Christian numbering, and thus it is that the "Christian" book divisions wind up appearing the JPS Table of Contents we were looking at earlier.

Let us return to the question of "books". Even the individual "books" of the Hebrew Bible are not necessarily unique, single-author, stand-alone works. See, for example, the first eight "books" of the JPS Table of Contents.

Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings, all together, make up a sequence sometimes called the Primary History. Each "book", more or less, picks up where the previous one left off, and some of the transitions, like that from Samuel to Kings, don't even necessarily look like they demand a book-level division. If one squints a little bit, one could almost see them as an eight-volume, or less than eight-volume, set -- a bit like one big book.

On the other hand, we can drill down a bit further and discover less unity than we might expect in individual books. Genesis, for example, contains a variety of sudden changes of style, jumps in the narrative, and repetitions of stories which, all taken together, make it clear that work from multiple authors has been pushed together by one or more editors into what is now presented as if it were a single unified book.

All this is quite a bit to keep track of, but it is enough to remember, in the beginning, that the book, chapter, and verse divisions are all questionable. The structure of it all becomes clearer as one goes through. And we can go ahead and go through the Hebrew Bible book by book, chapter by chapter, and verse by verse, all the while keeping in mind that these divisions are tentative.

The Primary Narrative, Genesis-Kings, is widely acknowledged to contain material written by multiple authors, but which have been brought together, by persons now unknown, to present a more or less unified story of Israel.

The first book of the Primary Narrative, Genesis, is a sort of prologue to the rest of the narrative, which deals with Israel as a people. Genesis begins with the creation of the world, followed by stories of the early humans, including a universal flood. Following this flood, the surviving humans spread out, forming the various nations of the world.

One of these nations is Israel, which grows from the family of Abraham. Abraham is chosen by God and promised the land of Canaan. Various stories are told about Abraham, then his son Isaac, and then his son Jacob, who is eventually renamed as Israel. Israel has twelve sons, who become the progenitors of the twelve "Tribes" of Israel. Various stories about the brothers are told, especially about Joseph. At the end of Genesis, Jacob/Israel, his twelve sons, and various sons of theirs go down into Egypt.

The book of Exodus picks up where Genesis left off, with the Israelites living in Egypt. After some time, they are enslaved, and cry out to God for help. Help arrives in the form of Moses, who with the assistance of his brother Aaron carries out a series of confrontations with the Pharaoh, culminating in the exodus from Egypt of the Israelites, now numbering 600,000 fighting-age men, along with women and children, into the desert. In the desert, a variety of episodes ensue, and various laws are given on various occasions by Moses to the people of Israel.

Like Exodus, Leviticus is set also in the desert. Primarily, it records God giving Moses extensive regulations dealing with the priestly cultus, which Moses then passes on to the Israelites. The minority of the book that is narrative is likewise narrative dealing with the cultus.

Like Exodus and Leviticus, Numbers is also set in the desert, and carries the narrative along from the second year of Israel's wandering in the wilderness, until the fortieth, when Israel is finally on the verge of conquering Canaan. Interspersed with the narrative material is a variety of legislation.

Finally, Deuteronomy is set on the eve of Israel's invasion of Canaan, and is mostly regulation, given through Moses. It could -- and probably once did -- stand alone as a code of Israelite law. After the main body of the book, a sort of Constitution for Israel, is completed, chapters 32 and 33 each record a poem, and chapter 34 closes with the death of Moses.

After the death of Moses, the book of Joshua begins. Joshua takes up the leadership of the Israelites, and settles the Israelites in the land of Canaan through a series of genocidal military campaigns. At the end of the book, Joshua dies.

The book of Judges describes a period in which Israel is ruled by a series of ad hoc warlord-style leaders, known in Hebrew as shoftim, traditionally translated as "judges". The book of Judges deliberately sets up a theological template that is used for judge after judge. After the death of a leader, the Israelites fall into worshipping gods other than Yahweh. Yahweh then "delivers them into the hands of" one nation or another, and the Israelites are oppressed. In their oppression, the Israelites cry out to Yahweh for help, and apologize for worshipping other deities. Yahweh sends them a rescuer, a "judge", who then rescues them from their enemies and rules over them for a period of peace. After the death of the judge, the people fall into idolatry, and the cycle begins anew.

The cycle of the judges is broken in Samuel, which opens with the story of the birth of Samuel, who would be Israel's last pre-monarchic leader. After a fiasco in which the ark of the covenant falls into Philistine hands, Samuel intercedes for the Israelite, and his prayers are answered with an Israelite victory over the Philistines, cementing his role as Israel's leader. Samuel's sons, however, are not up for the job of taking on Samuel's role, and after some grumbling, Samuel appoints a king for the Israelites: Saul. God is displeased with Saul, and indicates his choice of David to be the king of Israel while Saul is still alive.

After some fairly dramamtic episodes between David and Saul, Saul is killed, and David, in stages, takes over the kingdom. David brings the ark of Yahweh to Jerusalem, and defeats a number of Israel's enemies. Later, David impregnates the wife of one of his soldiers, and then has the soldier murdered so that he can marry the woman and cover up the affair. His kingdom is plagued from then on with problems: David's son Amnon rapes David's daughter Tamar, Absalom kills Amnon, and Absalom attempts to overthrow David and rapes his concubines. In his old age, David faces a succession crisis as his son Adonijah attempts to take the throne while David is still alive. Samuel ends with a variety of narratives and other material related to his reign that form a sort of appendix to the book.

After the transition to monarchy under Saul and David, the book of Kings covers, well, all the other kings of Israel (and Judah). David hands off his kingdom to Solomon's whose rule is portrayed as very prosperous, including important building projects. Upon the death of Solomon, the kingdom falls to Rehoboam, whose arrogance and high tax policies lead to the break-up of the kingdom. From then on, Rehoboam and his descendants, the house of David, will rule the southern kingdom of Judah, while the northern kingdom, called Israel, will come under a variety of kings, all treated unfavorably by the Hebrew Bible. In addition to recounting the kings, a large amount of text is devoted to the exploits of the miracle working Elijah and his successor Elisha.

Eventually, around 722 BCE, the northern kingdom falls to Assyria. The southern kingdom continues on for a bit more than a century, finally falling to the Babylonian Empire. The elite of the southern kingdom are taken as captives into Babylonia, this being the famous "Babylonian captivity", and the story ends with king Jehoiachin being granted a somewhat higher status than the other captive kings in Babylon.

Prior to the beginning of biblical studies as a critical academic discipline, it was generally believed that Moses had written the Pentateuch. Here and there someone would raise an exception, as there were some verses in the Pentateuch that knew of matters that happened after the death of Moses, most notably the end of Deuteronomy, which narrates Moses' death. We will not go over the whole set of anomalies here now.

Nevertheless, analysis of the biblical texts began to move forward in the early modern era, a physician, Jean Astruc, noticed a curious thing in Genesis. Some passages referred to the deity as "Yahweh", while other passages referred to the deity as simply "God". Furthermore, sometimes a story told with the name "Yahweh" would find itself retold, though with different details, using the name "God". This raised an interesting possibility: could different authors have been at play here -- one preferring "Yahweh" and another "God". Further analysis followed, and eventually the leading theory was the one outlined by Wellhausen in his Prolegomena.

In Wellhausen's telling, the Pentateuch had four authors, commonly referred to as J, E, P, and D, for "Yahwist" (cf. the German spelling Jahve), "Elohist" (from the Hebrew Elohim, 'God'), Priestly, and Deuteronomist. The four authors had different outlooks on a number of issues, along with differing vocabularies, and it was widely believed that the Pentateuch could be fairly accurately decomposed into its four sources.

In more recent decades, the classical J, E, P, D scheme has come under fire from a number of directions. There are debates about when some of the sources lived, how the sources came together, how many sources there were, and so on. It is a complex and seemingly unending debate that I would not pretend to be able to accurately summarize.

Some conservative authors, eager to try to revive the theory of Moses writing the whole Pentateuch, have misleadingly given the implication that the increasing doubts about the Documentary Hypothesis mean that scholarship is in some way returning to the theory of Mosaic authorship. This would be a misrepresentation, however, as, while modern scholarship continues to contain lively disagreements about the exact nature of the sources used to compose the Pentateuch, it remains clear that the Pentateuch is a work of composite authorship.

From time to time, I will refer to a passage as coming from J, E, P, or D, without going into great detail about what exactly the state of current debate is. Please consider any such identification just a provisional identification of how a given passage is regarded in terms of the traditional Documentary Hypothesis, without any pre-judgment on my part of how and in what ways the Documentary Hypothesis might be modified. When I speak of Genesis 1 as P's story of creation, this simply means that Genesis 1 has clear affinities with the other "Priestly" materials in the Pentateuch, whether or not it is actually true that there ever was a single "Priestly" document by a single author. Such an identification, when I use it, is more about noticing commonalities between various passages than it is a precise statement about how those passages came to find their present place in the Pentateuch.

When I examine a three-egg omelette, I can tell it has been made by scrambling multiple eggs, even if I do not have enough knowledge to know when it might have three eggs, or parts of four or five eggs in it. But it's composite nature is clear. When I examine a shirt made in a factory, I can see the seams where multiple pieces of cloth were sewn together, even if I cannot give a complete account of how the shirt-making process goes. And when I read the Pentateuch, I've learned enough that I can see seams and tell-tale signs of multiple authorship, even if I am in no position to settle once and for all exactly how all the parts came together.

People often talk about the original text of the Bible. However, by the time, say, 2 Peter was written, many different copies of Isaiah, say, were already in circulation. In the broadest possible sense there can be no single original text of the whole Bible, as if an entire Bible had been produced all at once. Still, we might try to speak of the original text of each individual book of the Bible. Even this gets tricky, though. In the case of a book like Genesis, in which multiple documents have been edited together, would the original text be the individual source documents that eventually became Genesis? If Genesis, say, is a composition of four documents, would the original text be simply the first of those four documents to be written? Would the original text be the first time a book of Genesis appeared that looks more or less like the Genesis we have today? In the long history of Genesis, it is hard to say whether there was ever a single authoritative copy of which everyone might say -- this one was the 'original'.

Likewise, some biblical books are largely rewritten versions of other biblical books. Chronicles, for example, rewrites large amounts of Samuel and Kings. We might say, in fact that Samuel and Kings are the 'original text' of Chronicles. An even better example of such a relationship would be the gospels of Matthew and Mark. Matthew contains almost all of Mark, though with various changes and additions. And Luke contains much of Mark. We might even go so far as to say that the original text of Matthew or Luke is Mark. Or consider Isaiah, in which most of chapters 1-39 are typically given a much earlier date than chapters 40-66. Could we say that the original text of Isaiah is simply 1-39? Or do we wish to know the earliest possible form of the text after 40-66 were added in?

To borrow an analogy which I think I read once in an essay by Jacques Berlinerblau, consider the city of Rome. What was the original city layout of Rome? We can certainly say that some things in Rome, like recently constructed buildings or roads, are not part of the original. But Rome is the product of over two thousand years of construction, and at no point was there a single original. We might prefer, for one reason or another, to try to reconstruct what the city would have looked like, say, when Julius Caesar ruled. But it would be peculiar if we thought that such an effort would reveal to us the definitive and true Rome.

In practice, I think most of the people who are hunting for the original text are in fact hunting for something like, the earliest recoverable text of passage of the book, while wanting to keep the book in a form very close to its current canonical form. Searching for such an original is fine, and the end result of a serious effort will be richly educational, but it would help to keep in mind, along the way, that the idea of an original text is a tricky one, and means different things to different people.

Hovering somewhere in the background of discussions of original texts is a theological presupposition. That, at some point in history, there was a single, perfect copy of each biblical book, a copy very similar, but not identical, to the later manuscripts that form the basis of our present Bibles. In some cases, perhaps in a fairly short book like Ruth, perhaps it is true that something very close to the present text issued all at once from someone's pen. But the implicit model of unambiguous, all-at-once authorship that is sometimes assumed for biblical books cannot be simply assumed a priori.

One complication introduced by books with complex histories is that authorial intent can become a bit tricky to determine. Take, for example, a Wikipedia page. Such a thing has no single author, or at least not necessarily. Perhaps individual sentences have individual authors, but if we ask, "Why did the author choose to structure this Wikipedia page this way?", we will likely be barking up the wrong tree. A Wikipedia page's structure grows, through the combined intentions of many different persons who grow the article bit by bit. The structure may still be logical, but it is not necessarily the product of a single person's thinking. A Wikipedia page, like a Bible, is a project produced in long and complex stages by a community with many different members, many of whom never met each other.

As discussed above, different religious communities have arrived at different biblical canons, or lists of books that are taken to make up the Bible in a theological sense. Various religious communities have also printed various Bibles, in the sense of single bound volumes containing the biblical books. The contents of a physical Bible in a given community do not always perfectly match the contents of a given canon.

Before the invention of the printing press around 1440, biblical books came in one of two forms. The older form, the scroll, was the form in which the first biblical collections existed. Due to the physical limits of the form, a scroll is not capable of containing an entire Jewish or Christian Bible, but instead can include one or several of the books that make up a Bible. The oldest major collection of biblical scrolls, the Dead Sea Scrolls, contains a variety of books, some of which are found in present-day Bibles, and some which are not. In a world where biblical books circulated in scroll form, there was perhaps less urge to precisely spell out the limits of the biblical canon, even if some scrolls were considered more religiously authoritative than others.

Around the time that Christianity began, a new form of book, the Codex, arrived on the scene. More like a modern book, a codex contained many individual pages bound on one end, pages that one could "flip through" in the modern way. This changed the game of biblical writing in a critical way: with the invention of the codex, it suddenly became physically possible to produce a complete Bible in a single volume, rather than "the Bible" just being a list of preferred scrolls.

A word on writing style before we move forward. The earliest Christian Bibles were in Greek, the language of the New Testament, and were written in what is known as an uncial script, roughly corresponding in shape to what we would call upper-case letters. Later, around the ninth century, the uncial script was replaced with miniscule letters, similar to what we now know as lower-case. So the uncial manuscripts are the oldest within the Christian tradition.

While the very oldest manuscripts of the New Testament are papyrus fragments containing small snippets of one New Testament book or another, only four uncial codices have survived more or less intact, and they are known as the Four Great Uncial Codices: Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus, from the fourth century; and Codex Alexandrinus and Codex Ephraemi, from the fifth. These are the oldest physical Bibles around today.

The compilation of a Codex forces the issue of canon to the fore in a way that collections of scrolls do not. In the Dead Sea Scrolls, for example, both canonical and non-canonical books are found in large numbers -- it is not clear, if the DSS community had an idea of a strictly bounded canon of Scripture, and, if they did, exactly which books they included. But when someone decides to create a Bible bound in a single volume -- a codex -- then one must, necessarily, decide which materials to include, and by implication, which to exclude.

This is not to say that the contents of a codex are necessarily identical with a strict canon -- it is possible for the compiler of a codex to include materials not considered part of Scripture in a strict sense, such an a Table of Contents or introductions to biblical books. It is also possible for a compiler to have left out one or more works considered canonical, perhaps due to not having a copy available to work with. Analogies exist to this in the present day. If one picks up, for example, a MacArthur Study Bible, a great deal of the text is John MacArthur's commentary on the Scripture, which even MacArthur would admit is not a part of the Bible itself, even if printed with it.

While I have not verified this for myself, consider what Wikipedia has to say about the Ethiopian Orthodox Church's biblical canon:

"It is not known to exist at this time as one published compilation. Some books, though considered canonical, are nonetheless difficult to locate and are not even widely available in the churches' home countries of Ethiopia and Eritrea."

Nevertheless, it is hard to escape the conclusion that a codex that contains more or less a whole Bible must, more or less, reflect its compiler's ideas about what belongs in a Bible. And so one way to survey the development of the biblical canon is to look at the history of physical codices. In Judaism, the codex did not appear as a way of transmitting the biblical text until well after the canon was settled, and so we will not at this point concern ourselves with Jewish codices, although I hope to circle back to this topic eventually.

For now, let us look at the Greek codices of Christianity. According to Gallagher and Meade's The Biblical Canon Lists from Early Christianity (Oxford, 2017), there are seven Greek manuscripts "that contain -- at least, approximately -- the whole Bible, Old and New Testaments" (p. 244). These are given as the fourth-century Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus, the fifth-century Codex Alexandrinus, and four from the twelfth century and later (p. 245). Unfortunately, Codex Ephraemi does not make the list, because although it presumably once contained a whole Bible, it underwent such rough treatment in the Middle Ages that most of its Old Testament is missing.

So, for our earliest glimpse at the contents of the earliest Christian Bibles, we may focus on three manuscripts: Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, and Alexandrinus, whose contents are summarized on p. 246-247 of Gallagher. As Christianity generally reached a consensus at a fairly early date about the contents of the New Testament, let us for now limit ourselves to looking at the Old Testament of each.

In addition to books found in the Hebrew Bible, and generally shared across all Christian traditions, Vaticanus contains the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Judith, Tobit, Baruch, and the Epistle of Jeremiah. The Old Testament of Sinaiticus is not quite so well-preserved as that of Vaticanus, but it is still possible to see that it contains Tobit, Judith, Maccabees 1 and 4, 151 Psalms, the Wisdom of Solomon, and Sirach. Alexandrinus, meanwhile, contains Baruch, the Epistle of Jeremiah, Tobit, Judith, and Maccabees 1, 2, 3, and 4, along with 151 Psalms, Odes, the Wisdom of Solomon, and Sirach.

And while this is left for now as an exercise for the reader to investigate further, the New Testament canon is not identical among the three either. And for further reading on the issue of the canon in Christianity, which was unsettled from the beginning and is still unsettled today, I highly recommend Gallagher and Meade. A familiarity with the history of canon lists should be enough to dispell the notion that there is such a thing as the biblical canon universally agreed upon throughout any period of Christian history.

This page is released under the CC0 1.0 license, which spells out in as much legal detail as possible my desire to waive any copyright I have over the work. Feel free to use it as you like.