The Bible: How the Word of God was born from Tradition

The Bible: How the Word of God was born from Tradition

Almost every single household has a copy of the Bible read by Christians everywhere. We hold this precious book as sacred, but how exactly did we get the Bible?

What is the Bible?

According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “Sacred Scripture is the speech of God as it is put down in writing under the breath of the Holy Spirit” (CCC 81). “All scripture is inspired by God andprofitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Tim 3:16). The Sacred Scriptures within the Bible are a collection of writings which the Church has recognized as inspired by the Holy Spirit. The Bible is the Deposit of Faith which closed after the death of the last Apostle. The term “Bible” comes from the Greek expression ta biblia (the books), a term used in early Christianity to refer to the whole sacred volume. This became “Bible” through translations into Latin and ultimately singular to mean “The Book.”

The Old Testament

The books of the Bible are separated into two sections, the Old Testament and the New Testament. The Old Testament are the Hebrew Scriptures originally held in the Septuagint. The Hebrew Scriptures are separated into three categories, the Torah, Nevi’im, and Kethuvim which are also called the Pentateuch, the Prophets, and the Writings, respectively (Tanakh, V-VIII).

The Torah

The Torah (also called the Pentateuch) are the five books of Moses; Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. There are two main theories of how the Torah was developed, the first is that Moses wrote it and the second is that various Hebrew people wrote it.

Mosaic authorship

The traditional view of the Jewish people and the majority of Christians over the centuries is that Moses wrote the Torah in some way shape or form. There are indications within the Scriptures that Moses wrote the Torah, such as Exodus 17:14, “the Lord said to Moses, “Write this as a memorial in a book,” which is a reference to the Ten Commandments and other statues and laws given to Moses by God.¹ We also see in Numbers 33:2 that “Moses wrote down their starting places, stage by stage, by command of the Lord; and these are their stages according to their starting places.” In Deuteronomy 31:9, “Moses wrote this law, and gave it to the priests the sons of Levi.”

We also read about Moses as a mediator multiple times throughout his lifespan across Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers where we read that God spoke His word to Moses several times. Thus the Torah portrays Moses as the one who received and delivered almost all of God’s commandments to the people of Israel. We can also note that the Scriptures referring to this mediation do not make explicit clams about who was responsible for preserving this writing.² As in, there is attestation to Moses receiving and giving the law but nothing stating who it was that wrote all these things down, making it plausible that Moses utilized scribes, which would answer the “third-person” references to Moses that are often utilized as an objection to Mosaic authorship and authority.

Multiple authorship

Modern biblical scholars have reviewed the Scriptures and developed an alternative hypothesis called the “Documentary Hypothesis.”³ This hypothesis holds that there were various authors of the Torah which are categorized under four different traditions: Yahwist, Elohists, Priestly, and Deuteronomists. These scholars noticed various writing styles throughout the Torah. The writings believed to be “Yahwist” are those who wrote the Lord’s name, Yahweh. The “Elohists” are believed to have authored writings that refer to God as “Elohim” which means “mighty one.” The Elohists wrote this way due to the Hebrew tradition that holds people are not to say or write God’s name, thus Elohim offered an alternative reference to God. The “Priestly” tradition is believed to have written more intentionally about the law as a means to preserve Jewish identity. Lastly, “the Deuteronomists” are believed to be a class of authors who arose in around 622BC after discovering the book of Deuteronomy in the temple (New Catholic Bible, 11).

The Documentary Hypothesis holds that the Torah was originally passed down through oral tradition until the first tradition, the Yahwists, started to write these things down in 950BC. The belief continues that other traditions arose throughout the centuries up through Babylonian exile. The biggest crux of this hypothesis is that it would require for the Hebrews to have maintained an extremely strong oral tradition to pass down such fine details in a way that could be captured in writing. And this becomes an issue because such an intense oral tradition is considered statistically impossible by a number of these same scholars.

In regards to the Torah, the world may never know the true story of its authorship. While there is no concrete consensus on the authorship of the Torah, the best theory seems to be a mesh of the two. It would be reasonable to believe that Moses transcribed parts of the Torah himself, while utilizing scribes for other parts, with those same scribes writing about him in the third person while finishing the book of Deuteronomy after Moses’ death. Additionally, it is reasonable to believe that these various scribes wrote in different ways causing for there to be various writing styles wound together with different names applied to God. It is also quite possible that, through time, various traditions believed to be part of the Documentary Hypothesis, might have combined everything into the Torah itself or transcribed various manuscripts for the faithful to read, thus resulting in different manuscripts coming together into the Torah as we know it today.

The Nevi’im

The Nevi’im contains the writings of the prophets. Some of the books of the prophets were written by disciples of the prophets, such as Amos and Hosea, while others were written by the prophets themselves, such as Jeremiah and Ezekiel. The prophets spoke through various means such as visions, oracle statements, poems, parables, and prophetic actions. In retrospect, we can see the prophets often addressed their own times while the Holy Spirit gave another more profound meaning to their words and actions to foretell later events, particularly about the Messiah. Though there are prophets mentioned earlier in time, the age of the prophetic writings started around 750BC and ended around 445BC.⁴ Rabbinic traditions that developed later asserted that prophecy age ceased with the conquest of Alexander the Great in 332BC meaning anything written after that was not considered prophetic and was often included in the Kethuvim if it was to be part of the Hebrew Scriptures, such as Daniel.⁵

The Kethuvim

The Kethuvim contains “the writings” also referred to as wisdom literature. These writings contain the Psalms, proverbs, and others. It was originally a collection of sayings that were compiled to instruct princes on how to govern their people.

The Septuagint

These groups of Scriptures, the Torah, Nevi’im, and Kethuvim saw the first translations around the 300BC. As the Greek language replaced Hebrew and Aramaic among the Jews, the Torah was no longer commonly understood, thus a translation in Greek was made for the Jewish community of Alexandria, Egypt. This translation is known as the Septuagint, Latin for “seventy” because of the legend that the committee of translators was composed of seventy-two, six elders from each of the twelve tribes of Israel. There were also Aramaic translations called the Targums for the Jews who lived north and east of Judea. The Septuagint was utilized by the first Jewish Christians as their Scriptures.

The New Testament

The New Testament was developed over time as well, though in a much shorter timeframe than the Hebrew Scriptures. The New Testament is compiled of the Gospels, Acts, Epistles, and the Book of Revelation (Apocalypse). There is evidence that Paul’s letters, the bulk of the Epistles, were collected together by the end of the first century AD.⁶ Peter, James, Jude, and John also have letters attributed to them, although there is doubt that they were actually written by them, just as the Letters to Hebrews is likely not written by Paul, with these letters believed to have come from the Apostles themselves or a disciple of theirs.⁷

Around 150AD, the four Gospels were widely accepted as Scripture. Saint Athanasius of Alexandria noted the first complete list of the twenty-seven New Testament books that we use today. The council of Rome gathered in 382AD to determine the Biblical Canon of Scriptures. The council used three major criteria, 1) Authorship: whether the text was understood to have been written by an apostle or by someone who has apostolic authority behind him; 2) content: whether the content of the documents conformed to the traditions handed on by the apostles or contradicted them; 3) the use of the texts in the sacred liturgies of the major Churches founded by the apostles. The Septuagint and proposed New Testament books were reviewed. Most of the Septuagint was canonized for the Old Testament, except a few books such as 3 and 4 Maccabees, Psalm 151, and Prayer of Manasseh due to their content not showing evidence of being inspired by the Holy Spirit.

 The books of the Christian Scriptures of the Old Testament and New Testament were recognized as meeting these criteria to become the complete Biblical Canon in 382 in the Council of Rome.⁸ This decision was ratified by the councils at Hippo (393), Carthage (397, 419), II Nicea (787), Florence (1442), and Trent (1546).⁹

Conclusion

Ultimately, we see the Scriptures found themselves passed down through and with tradition that was sacred to both Jews and Christians. The history of the Bible is a long one and this post offers a summarized history. The Canon of Scriptures was established after extensive review and consideration from men who were blessed with inheriting the Apostolic teachings in Sacred Tradition, despite this, some people think they canonized the Scriptures incorrectly. And this leads us to the next post…Why do some Bibles have more books than others?

References

¹2024. The Ignatius Catholic Study Bible. San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press.pg47

² Ibid.

³ ibid pg48

⁴2020. New Catholic Bible. Totowa, NJ: Catholic Book Publishing Corp.pg11

⁵ Schiffman, Lawrence H. n.d. “Creating the Canon.” My Jewish Learning. Accessed October 27, 2025. http://myjewishlearning.com/article/creating-the-canon/.

⁶2020. New Catholic Bible. Totowa, NJ: Catholic Book Publishing Corp.pg13

⁷ibid pg14

⁸2024. The Ignatius Catholic Study Bible. San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press.pg21

⁹ Evert, Jason. 2000. “How to Defend the Deuterocanonicals.” Catholic Answers. September 1. Accessed October 27, 2025. https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/how-to-defend-the-deuterocanonicals.