How the Old Testament Became the Old Testament

There is an old saying that the Church does not decide what the Bible is; it discovers what the Bible is. This distinction is essential.

The process of the Bible becoming the Bible, took place as the Church recognised that certain books and letters were "the Word of God", whereas other pieces of literature were not.

However, the Old Testament became the Old Testament in a slightly different way.

The Jews never used the phrase "Old Testament", since they only had one collection of Scripture.

This was called the TANAK. The TANAK derived its name from the first letters of the three types of writings. We referred to these writings above: the Law, the Prophets and the Writings.

This collection of writings was written between about 1500 B.C. and 400 B.C. Around 200 B.C., a group of 70 Jewish scholars translated the TANAK into Greek, since Greek was the language of the day.

This effort took 70 days, and the resulting Greek translation of the TANAK was called the Septuagint (meaning "70").

However, the Septuagint included seven books that were not part of the TANAK. These books are known today as the Apocrypha.

Around 90 A.D., another group of Jewish scholars met at the Council of Jamniah, and decided to include only the 39 books found in the original Hebrew collection.

They excluded the books of the Apocrypha, which were entirely written in Greek. The collection of the Old Testament was now closed and finalised.

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