How did the books now in the bible get chosen? Who chose and what was the criteria used? – and is that decision long ago still valid today?
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Well first it is important to point out, there are many different "bibles" in use today that can refer from different books or different takes on the same possible books.
How did it get chosen? Well most likely by which ever one most popular, most aggressive and won over the most "converts" eithir through clever proselytizing, force, or some other combination of many different techniques to survive and even expand in use.
The exact criterion? Who knows, that stuff is mostly lost in time, and what little record written is suspect without much actual tangible evidence to back it up, (could just be someones un supported opinion written in an old "historical" writing of how those decisions were made.
It is also likely there was work done to cover, hide, and remove any record of how the decisions were made.
Are those decisions still relevant today? Relevant yes, useful? Debatable. Many religions these days are finding they have to rapidly change if they want to survive with the rapidly changing social needs of people today, being tied down to how it was done 1000's of years ago may be directly harmful to total readership today. Even the very titles of: "new testament" and "old testament" gives clues to this process. It seems likely the people that wrote the new testament felt compelled to write something new because the old was no longer working as well.
The advent of the internet where anyone can google "is there a god" and be exposed to counter arguments for the various god ideas is increasingly requiring a re-think on how to approach religious text like bibles. I can google: "logic flaws in king james bible" and get dozens of well put together pages pointing out glaring logic flaws with KJB. The same can be done with any major religious text publication. This is similar to how religious text needed to be changed with advent of the printing press and religious books suddenly being affordable to the masses to read on their own instead of a "religious leader" reading select excerpts for the masses.
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The Old Testament was probably mostly compiled in the 6th century BC after the Babylonian exile of the Jews (although of course the Jews don't know it as the OT), and thus should mostly be understood in that context. The first five books (i.e. the Torah) were probably revised and expanded from older stories, with some new stories added in. The Book of Daniel is known to have been edited as late as the 2nd century BC.
The works are full of despair about how god could have abandoned them by allowing them to becoming exiled etc., and thus are keen to justify why others should continue to worship the "one true god" and follow all the correct rituals.
In a nutshell...
There was no "bible" as a single volume until the latter part of the 3rd Century CE. Up until then there were different and competing texts, some like the Ebionites collated theirs into loose leaf binders. The Marcionites had their own collection of texts as did the various gnostic and Syriac Sects. (described mostly by Eusebius and other enemies)
The Pauline sect (which became dominant) had the closest collection of texts that resemble the modern bible, collated in what is called a "Codex".
The earliest example of a "modern" complete codex (11 books of the NT and the Pentateuch) is the Codex Sinaiticus (google it)
The Roman bible content was decided by the conferences of Bishops at Nicea, with many texts discarded and yet others altered to fit the new Roman influences. The 'bible' has undergone many transformations, translations, apocrypha discarded, reinstated, then discarded by some sects.
Many texts and sects were destroyed by the Roman church (see Bishop of Rome 492CE,"anathema") for a list of texts that were to be destroyed on sight.
In short there is no definitive answer to your question. The 'bible' as a collection of texts has as many versions as there are sects in the Christian faith. Each chooses the passages that confirm its own position as the "holders of the truth" and disregard the rest.
Every time a new translation is created, that decision is made again. And to be clear I don't mean the actual process of translation (that is another can of worms). Take Exodus for example: there is no original copy of Exodus. What exists are fragments which often disagree with each other, or worse have extra text not reflected in the other works. For example fragment one might contain verse 1, 2, and 3 but then go right to verse 40; while some other work contains 1-35, then go to 40. So before the translation process can even start; someone has to choose which of the old versions will be translated for the new work.
Even if you believe the original work was the word of god; it hasn't been the word of god for a long, long time. Bible compilation is very similar to the way sausage is made, if you look too closely you will be disgusted. Almost assuredly most of the pastors you have ever met know this. Want to take a guess why a person who preaches the bible for a living might not want to tell the people who are paying him about this problem?
And the numbering of chapters and verses did not begin until the 1400s IIRC. Before that the scriptures were a playground for wilful editing.
Added after getting home from work:
from Wikipedia after typing "numbering of chapters and verses in the bible" in Google.
"Robert Estienne (Robert Stephanus) was the first to number the verses within each chapter, his verse numbers entering printed editions in 1551 (New Testament) and 1571 (Hebrew Bible)"
Bart Eherman has a wonderful book on this topic, "Misquoting Jesus."
He has several lectures on YouTube as well.
Another good source is Richard Friedman and his book "Who Wrote The Bible."
The Bible is a hodgepodge or ancient stories, quotes, random religious texts, massive alterations and editing over thousands of years, all thrown together in response to other religious texts appearing. It is fought with errors, forged passages and books, and direct contradictions. Eherman asserts that there are more contextual errors in the Bible as we know it today than there are words.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhM5lbVBgkk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5pRiwFjnag
Christianity Debunked (Richard Carrier)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nk5OXnQRr6M
Looks like another "fly by" didnt like the answers and flew off to its pentecostal lala land, shedding feathers and a fair amount of reality.
Just like Icarus, only instead of the sun he flew too close to the truth, and was burned, metaphorically speaking.
Gbdy,
"The Bible and how it came to be."
The Bible as a comprehensive collection of stories formatted into a book that we are familiar with today did not exist until the early 690s A.D. when a committee of story tellers, writers, and artists based in England produced three master copies in Latin, each weighing about 75 pounds. Before that time there might have been various manuscripts floating around but they were not in book format and they were not complete.
Around 640 A.D. Uthman in Arabia had a committee write the Koran. His committee incorporated some of the Jewish and Christian characters and stories. The Christians were caught flat-footed because they did not have their own book of fairy tales to counter the Koran. So they got busy and went all out on a major project to produce one. Over time they collected what source material they could and they devised a plan to produce their masterpiece. They even raised a huge herd of cattle for the vellum. The committee was based in England because it was remote from the marauding muslims who were sweeping through the Med and the Christian lands.
The committee added all of the dialogue and tied all of the stories into sequence from Genesis to Revelation. They did an excellent job of basing all of the stories on the Ten Commandments found in Exodus 34:12-28. Of course their version did not include numbered chapters and verses. That came much later by different revisionists. It is also noteworthy that the committee included a lot of clues to show that they were pulling an elaborate prank on the church hierarchy.
The committee's master copies included all of the books found in the current Catholic Bible versions. In the 1880s the Protestants came out with a new Bible and they deleted the 14 books of the Apocrypha. A couple of nut jobs, Westcott & Hort, led the movement to delete the Apocrypha books and since the committee wanted to save money on printing costs it tossed the 14 books. So the Protestant Bible with its 66 books has only existed for about 137 years. BTW, the Jesus character has only existed for about 386 years. That's when a couple of con men changed the character's original name to the one they pulled out of their butts = Jesus.