What is the Bible?

In order for a text to have any authority, we have to give it authority in our lives. Some people could view romance novels as their bible, while the ‘Bible’ that I grew up reading consists of the Old Testament (without Apocrypha) plus the New Testament. What people view as a bible can be any readings that they base their life around and try to live accordingly. So many different writings with the title of ‘bible’ are not similar at all to the Old and New Testaments. For example, if you search any online bookstore, there will be different cooking bibles and guitar bibles, along with others. I think though that when most people refer to the Bible, they will be quoting similar scripture, but there is no guarantee.

‘The Bible’ is the name of the canon, and what is thought of as the Word of God, but I don’t think that God has stopped speaking to people, or has stopped inspiring people to write God’s words. I may view someone’s contemporary writings as having near the same authority as how I view the writings of Paul, depending on whether I believe the author is in line with my view of God and Jesus. The older texts have a wonderful context of being near the time when Christ lived, but having a modern author write in our context is valuable too, I believe. These are men and women who are following God, and who are trying to do God’s will, and share God’s words with everyone.

James Bowley in his book Introduction to Hebrew Bible talks about what we call The Bible as being more of a library than a book. There are so many different authors and writings that are compiled into our canon that to try to wrap it up into one ‘writing’ would be doing an injustice to it. There are also many different types of Bibles for different denominations and religions. Some versions might have a couple more books than the other one, but the majority of the writings will be the same.

A question this brings up then is what do we say when we quote scripture? Can we say, ‘The Bible says…’, or should it be, ‘The author of Deuteronomy says…’. But do we believe that all scripture is inspired by God, and therefore is all the Word of God? So can we just say, ‘God says in Matthew that…’? We also have to remember that not everyone gives every book we have in our Bible authority, and different people have different Bibles, so we need to be aware of this and be sensitive to what others believe and what they have canonized.