10. The Holy
Bible.
The Old Testament.
The Bible is customarily divided
into two books: The Old Testament and the New Testament. We should note,
however, that the word testament is not totally appropriate to designate the
character of these two books, but rather the designations New Covenant and Old
Covenant. (Some Bibles, such as the Slavonic and Russian, use the designations
Old Law and New Law to refer to these two parts.) In any case, the Old
Testament may be described as the literary expression of the religious life of
ancient Israel.
This literary expression of Israel's
religious life extended over a thousand years from the first to the last books
of the Old Testament and reflects many facets of the life of Israel, taking
many forms: prose and poetry, myth and legend, folk tale and history, sacred
hymns and a superb love song, religious and secular laws, proverbs of the wise
and oracles of the prophets, epic poems, laments, parables and allegories. Yet,
despite these varied forms, a common theme emerges — this book is a history of
God acting in history, that is, Salvation History, It is a history of a people
chosen by God out of whom would come the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of
Mary and the Son of God, the Word, the Second Person of the Trinity.
In Jewish tradition, the Scriptures
were divided into three parts: The Law (the first five books), the Prophets
(Former Prophets: Joshua, Judges, 1st and 2nd Samuel and 1st and 2nd Kings;
Latter Prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Twelve “Minor” Prophets),
and the Writings (the remainder of the Old Testament books). Later, just before
the New Testament era, the Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Greek at Alexandria, Egypt
(the so-called Septuagint — LXX). This translation included books and portions
of books not found in the Hebrew Scriptures (the so-called Apocrypha or Deutero-canonical
books). It is this later Greek (LXX) Scripture that is considered the official
text for the Orthodox Churches. In any case, the original language of the Old
Testament was Ancient Hebrew, although parts were written in Aramaic (a more
recent Semitic language).
The New Testament.
More than 500 years before the birth
of Christ, the Prophet Jeremiah predicted that the covenant relation of God
with His people, instituted on Mt. Sinai, would give place in the future to a
more inward and personal one (Jer. 31:31-34). With this in mind, St. Paul
regarded the Christian Dispensation as being based on a new covenant, which he
contrasted with the old covenant of the books of Moses (2 Cor. 3:6-15). By His
sacrificial death, Christ became the mediator of a new covenant (Heb. 9:15-20).
The books of the New Testament, of
which there are twenty-seven, fall into four categories: 1) “Gospels” — from
Evangelion or Good News, because they tell the Good News of Jesus Christ — Sts.
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John; 2) Church History — The Acts of the Apostles; 3)
Epistles (or Letters) of which there are twenty-one, written by Sts. Paul,
James, Peter, John and Jude; and 4) an Apocalypse, that is, a Revelation or
disclosure of God's will for the future, hence the title: The Revelation to St.
John. All of these books were written in the koine or common Greek of the time,
which was in common use throughout the Roman
Empire at the beginning of the Christian
era.