All right, well, welcome to the second lesson. This lesson is entitled, What is the Bible and How to Interpret it? We came a long way just from our first lesson, laying the foundation of what revelation is, why we need it, how it comes from God, how it's necessary, that must come from God, how it's transmitted through the church, the sacred tradition and sacred scripture, to every generation so that way we could know what the revelation of Jesus Christ is. So that was essentially the content of our first lesson.
Now we want to dive in and do some groundwork on understanding generally what is the Bible, some basic Bible trivia stuff, of course, in terms of the books and the language and stuff, but really diving in and understanding, well, what is the Bibles of the Word of God? What does that mean, inspiration, an erancy, which books are formed the Bible, which books do not form the Bible? How do we interpret the Bible, these types of things? So that's what we're going to be doing right now.
Okay, so if you have your notes in front of you, what we want to do is look at this first paragraph, What is the Bible? Now, this is some introductory kind of Bible trivia, Bible factoid stuff, but essentially it's really important to understand. Now the word Bible itself comes from both the Greek and the Latin, beblea, which means book or books, specific books, and there are many books of the Bible. So you could really think of it both as one book, but also as a library of books.
And in both perspectives is really important. So yes, while there are many books, 73 to be specific, and they're written by 40 plus human authors over the course of a thousand plus years, this truly is a remarkable library of different works of literature. So yes, you have some history, you have some law, you have different kinds of literature there in the scripture, but it really truly is one book, you know, the good book, as it's often called, it's one book that conveys one story, and that's the story of salvation history that we're going to be looking at over the next number of lectures here together. So 73 books written in different languages, you may know that the languages of the Old Testament are Hebrew and Aramaic, those are the original languages, but we also have the Old Testament in a translation in Greek, this translation is known as the Septuagint, the story goes roughly about 200 years before Christ, the king in Alexandria wanted to have the Hebrew Old Testament, the Hebrew sacred writings in the Greek tongue.
And so he had brought 70 different scholars together, and that's where we get the word Septuagint from, from the 70 scholars, who each of them went into a cubicle of their own, so to speak, and they began to translate it, and when they all came out and tran, and brought their translation forward, every single one of their translations matched the others, it was a perfect match across all 70 attempts. So everybody saw this as a incredible con conformation that this Greek translation is an authentic translation of the original Hebrew. So on the one hand, yes, you do have the Hebrew originals with some Aramaic in there, you also have the Septuagint, which was used by Christ in the apostles during their lifetime. So those are the languages of the Old Testament, the New Testament was written predominantly in Greek as well, there's some good reason to believe that Matthew might have been written in Aramaic, but that's a topic for another time.
Now, certainly when the Bible is written on parchment, and they didn't really have the divisions that we have, the Bible didn't come to us and all nicely divided into chapters and verses, there is a history behind this. And scholars typically agree that the English bishop, Stephen Langton, divided the Bible into chapters in the year 1226. So before this time, you essentially had just the scrolls, right, the writings of the scriptures, one sentence into another with no real easy way to separate them. And so Stephen Langton, Bishop Stephen Langton, divided all of these texts into chapters, which was super helpful.
But it wasn't another 300 years until Robert Stevens divided those chapters further into verses in the year 1551. So the Bible as we have it divided into chapter and verses has really only been around for 500 years of the year, history of Christianity, only 500 years of that, as we have this very convenient, very helpful way to quickly find different verses or really should say sentences, messages within the scripture. I mean, the early church fathers and the mystics in the saints, they had memorized and absorbed the Bible so well, they would just in their common language and their writings, they would have scripture scattered throughout it. But for average people, such as myself and you, it's just easier just to go, hey, look up Luke chapter 23 verse 50 or whatever it is, let's talk about the burial of Jesus.
And that's extremely convenient and easy for us to do that. And it's only been around for 500 years. But I do want to give one word of caution as easy as it is now to be able to reference a verse very easily. It can actually be sometimes a little bit misleading when it comes to finding a proper interpretation, because our brains typically think, okay, this chapter ends and the next chapter begins.
And so it's very easy to fall into this habit of thinking like almost resetting in our brains, the narrative flow. And often that's that's a mistake. It's misleading because the narrative flow is very, very important from one chapter to the next, from one verse to the next. So although it's easy and very helpful to reference particular verses quickly, when you're reading the scriptures, my advice to you is read them almost as if the chapters and verses aren't there, because then you're going to really begin to see a lot of the literary structure and the themes, the repetition, the things like that that comes forth.
So that's kind of a little bit of a little tidbit, little helpful advice there as you launch into your biblical studies. Okay, so these 40 human authors 40 plus human authors, obviously they lived in very different times than we do today. Here we are in the 21st century, we have certain rules and expectations scientific approaches to how we approach history or literary descriptions of various kinds. They didn't, I mean, the ancient world, whether it's the Hebrews or the Romans or the Greeks or the ancient Chinese, whatever they are, you they really write differently than we do.
And they have certain rules that guide the intention of the author. Okay, so it's really important to keep that in mind. While you have all these 73 different books written over a thousand years by all these authors, you really have to understand that there are all kinds of different literary forms and techniques that are used in various books and even within a single book itself. You've got history and poetry, you've got dialogue, prophecy, genealogies, law, allegory, philosophy, liturgy, prayers, like the Psalms are beautiful hymns, you know, just the way they tell stories is unique and it's just incredible.
It's literary devices. The synoptic, presumptive technique we're going to look at here next lesson with a creation account, the use of repetition, doublets, chiastic techniques, just, classic techniques, we'll study that later on as well. These are all very important things to keep in mind when trying to understand the scriptures. And this is going to be very important when we discuss interpretation in the second half of this lesson.
So these, this is a little bit of an introduction to what the Bible is in terms of its authorship. It's dating. I mean, you can look at the dating for in each individual book, but it's a class of a thousand years, all these authors. And I promise you one thing, the more you study scripture, the more you begin to, you begin to see how the older the New Testament fit together, the more you begin to see how all scripture speaks Christ and prepares for Christ, the more you're going to absolutely be convinced that this truly is the Word of God.