How We Got the Bible

Have you ever wondered how we got the Bible? The history is more complex than you might think. Let's take a look.

How We Got the Bible

Christians talk a lot about how we got the Bible. What most don't realize is that its history covers a long, careful story. God did not drop a finished book out of heaven.

God knew what He was doing. He gave us the Bible over many centuries through an effective process. It went like this:

He spoke.
Guided human writers.
Preserved their words.
Brought Scripture into the languages we read today.

When you pick up a Bible, you are holding the end result of that whole process. Understanding how we got the Bible helps us see that it is not a random human collection, but the written Word of God carried to us through history.

From God’s Revelation to Our Bibles

Understanding how we got the Bible is very important to our Christian faith. God’s words moved from his mouth to our hands. This shows how much God loved us. He wanted to communicate with us, and He did just that.

Here's how God wrote His love down for us: inspiration, canonization, transmission, and translation.

Inspiration: God gave his Word through human authors.
Canonization: God’s people recognized which writings truly belong in the Bible.
Transmission: scribes carefully copied those writings through the centuries.
Translation: the Bible was brought into ordinary languages like English.

Each step tells part of the story of how we got the Bible and why we can trust the Scriptures we read today. It ultimately tells us of His great love for us.

Let's look at this more carefully.

God Gave His Word: Inspiration

The story of how we got the Bible starts with God himself speaking. God communicated His love to us through several methods:

He used events.
He spoke through prophets.
He supremely through Jesus Christ.
Finally, He moved certain men to write down his words for his children.

God's process we just looked at is called inspiration. That means that all Scripture is “God‑breathed.” Yes, it did come through real human authors in real places and times. But God still had His way in all of it.

How can that be? How can God be the author and man also be the author? That's a great question that we'll answer later.

All we need to know now is that God produced the Bible over roughly sixteen hundred years. He used about forty different writers in different cultures and situations.

The result? God used many men over great lengths of time to produce the books of the Bible. He did such an amazing job that they form one unified story centered on Christ.

Recognizing the Right Books: Canonization

So what's next? Was God done? How would people know what they were reading was actually from God?

That's the next step. Canonization. What does this say about how we got the Bible? It tells us what is inspired and what is not.

Canonization is the process by which God’s people came to recognize what the Bible is. They didn't create Scripture. They accepted the books that truly carry God’s authority.

Israel treasured their Old Testament Scriptures long before Jesus came. The Law, the Prophets, and the Writings were their Bible. These same Scriptures shaped Jesus and the apostles, who quoted them as the very words of God. Over time, the Jewish people treated this collection as a settled body of sacred writings.

For the New Testament, the early churches received gospels and letters. These were written by the apostles and their close companions. These writings were read in worship, copied, and shared between congregations.

The church accepted these as authoritative testimony about Jesus. They also instructed God's people. As the church grew, the people of God recognized the same core twenty‑seven books.

Some groups also used additional writings. The Old Testament Apocrypha or later so‑called “gospels” were respected but not accepted as inspired Scripture by the historic church.

We'll tackle why some Bibles have more books and what to think about “lost gospels” later. For now, we'll focus on what the church has historically canonized as Scripture.

Preserving the Writings: Transmission

Another key part of how we got the Bible is the copying and preserving of the text after the original books were written. This process is called transmission.

In the ancient world, there were no printing presses. Because of this, scribes copied Scripture by hand. These scribes were trained and able men. They copied the Scriptures onto materials like papyrus, parchment, and later paper.

For example, Hebrew Scriptures were copied and recopied. This process was overseen by trained Jewish scribes who developed careful practices to guard accuracy.

For the New Testament, early Christians made many copies of the Gospels and letters so that churches in different places could read them. These copies spread across the Mediterranean world in the first centuries after Christ. The whole world knew who Christ was because the Bible was transmitted in this way.

Over the years, the church continued to copy the Scriptures. Today, modern scholars can compare thousands of manuscripts and accurately reconstruct the original text, especially the New Testament.

Important discoveries have made a big impact on this process. The Dead Sea Scrolls for the Old Testament and early Greek codices for the New Testament show that the message of the Bible has been remarkably stable over many centuries.

What does this tell us? The Bible has passed down through the ages accurately. We can say with confidence that we know what God said.

From Ancient Text to Modern Translation

So how did we get the Bible in our own language? I mean, ancient Hebrew and Greek are very different from modern languages. What's the story here?

We needed translation.

This is a very important step in how we got the Bible. Scripture moved into everyday languages so that ordinary people could read it. The Bible was originally written mainly in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, the native languages of its authors.

As cultures changed, language changed with it. Greek‑speaking Jews had to switch to a Greek version of the Old Testament because they no longer read Hebrew. They wanted a Bible they could understand. That meant someone had to translate the original text into Greek.

Early Christians soon found they needed translations as well. Latin translations soon replaced Greek versions of the Bible for much of the Western church. These early versions spread the Scriptures across cultures and continents.

In English, pioneers like John Wycliffe and William Tyndale worked to put the Bible into the language of common people. These men risked their lives to produce an English translation.

Their work paved the way for so much more. The King James Version became the most revered translation in the English language. This spawned the modern translations that we can buy or download today.

There are many modern translations available today. Most mainstream modern translations are based on the same ancient Hebrew and Greek manuscripts.

Then why do some translations sound so different from others?

It's because they differ in style and translation approach. Some aim to be more word‑for‑word, others more thought‑for‑thought, and some are paraphrases designed for easy reading. That is why different translations sound different even when they are translating the same underlying text.

How We Got the Bible Matters

Learning how we got the Bible shows that Scripture did not appear by accident or through rumor. God produced it by breathing it out to faithful people across history who wrote it down.

God spoke.

His people wrote.

The church recognized it.

Scribes preserved it.

Translators carried it into our languages.

Understanding how we got the Bible helps us better answer common objections about the Bible. As we learn, it deepens our confidence that the words we read today truly reflect what God originally spoke through his prophets and apostles.

Can you open your Bible and know that you have the Word of God in your language?

Yes.

Can you read your Bible and know that it reliably relays God's message?

Yes.

Can you live out the realities of the Bible, knowing that what you're living is real?

Yes.

May God bless you as you live out the realities of His inspired, canonized, preserved and translated word.