The oldest surviving Hebrew Bible manuscripts—including the

Dead Sea Scrolls The Dead Sea Scrolls (also the Qumran Caves Scrolls) are ancient Jewish and Hebrew religious manuscripts discovered between 1946 and 1956 at the Qumran Caves in what was then Mandatory Palestine, near Ein Feshkha in the West Bank, on the ...

—date to about the 2nd century BCE ( fragmentary) and some are stored at the

Shrine of the Book The Shrine of the Book ( he, היכל הספר, ''Heikhal HaSefer'') is a wing of the Israel Museum in the Givat Ram neighborhood of Jerusalem that houses the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Aleppo Codex, among others. History The building was construc ...

in Jerusalem. The oldest extant complete text survives in a Greek translation called the

Septuagint The Greek Old Testament, or Septuagint (, ; from the la, septuaginta, lit=seventy; often abbreviated ''70''; in Roman numerals, LXX), is the earliest extant Greek translation of books from the Hebrew Bible. It includes several books beyond t ...

, dating to the 4th century CE (

Codex Sinaiticus The Codex Sinaiticus ( Shelfmark: London, British Library, Add MS 43725), designated by siglum [Aleph] or 01 (in the Gregory-Aland numbering of New Testament manuscripts), δ 2 (in the von Soden numbering of New Testament manuscript ...

). The oldest

extant Extant is the opposite of the word extinct. It may refer to: * Extant hereditary titles * Extant literature, surviving literature, such as ''Beowulf'', the oldest extant manuscript written in English * Extant taxon, a taxon which is not extinct, ...

manuscripts of the vocalized

Masoretic Text The Masoretic Text (MT or 𝕸; he, נֻסָּח הַמָּסוֹרָה, Nūssāḥ Hammāsōrā, lit. 'Text of the Tradition') is the authoritative Hebrew and Aramaic text of the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) in Rabbinic Judaism. ...

(the basis of modern editions), date to the 9th century CE. With the exception of a few biblical sections in the Prophets, virtually no biblical text is contemporaneous with the events it describes. Internal evidence in the texts suggests dating the individual books of the 27-book New Testament canon in the 1st century CE. The first book written was probably 1 Thessalonians, written around 50 CE. Raymond E. Brown, ''An Introduction to the New Testament'',

Anchor Bible The Anchor Bible Series, which consists of a commentary series, a Bible dictionary, and a reference library, is a scholarly and commercial co-venture which was begun in 1956, with the publication of individual volumes in the commentary series. Ove ...

, 1997. pp. 456-466. The final book (in the ordering of the canon), the

Book of Revelation The Book of Revelation is the final book of the New Testament (and consequently the final book of the Christian Bible). Its title is derived from the first word of the Koine Greek text: , meaning "unveiling" or "revelation". The Book of ...

, is generally accepted by traditional scholarship to have been written during the reign of

Domitian Domitian (; la, Domitianus; 24 October 51 – 18 September 96) was a Roman emperor who reigned from 81 to 96. The son of Vespasian and the younger brother of Titus, his two predecessors on the throne, he was the last member of the Fl ...

(81–96).

Robert Mounce Robert Hayden Mounce (December 30, 1921 – January 24, 2019) was an American New Testament scholar, and president emeritus of Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington. Mounce was born in LaSalle, Illinois, in December 1921 and raised in Mino ...

. The Book of Revelation, pg. 15-16. Cambridge: Eerdman's
Books.google.com
/ref> Dating the composition of the texts relies primarily on internal evidence, including direct references to historical events—

textual criticism Textual criticism is a branch of textual scholarship, philology, and of literary criticism that is concerned with the identification of textual variants, or different versions, of either manuscripts or of printed books. Such texts may range in da ...

and

philological Philology () is the study of language in oral and written historical sources; it is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics (with especially strong ties to etymology). Philology is also defined as t ...

and linguistic evidence provide more subjective indications.

Table I: Chronological overview

This table summarises the

chronology Chronology (from Latin ''chronologia'', from Ancient Greek , ''chrónos'', "time"; and , ''-logia'') is the science of arranging events in their order of occurrence in time. Consider, for example, the use of a timeline or sequence of even ...

of the main tables and serves as a guide to the historical periods mentioned. Much of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament may have been assembled in the 5th century BCE. The New Testament books were composed largely in the second half of the 1st century CE. The

Deuterocanonical books The deuterocanonical books (from the Greek meaning "belonging to the second canon") are books and passages considered by the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Oriental Orthodox Churches, and the Assyrian Church of the East to be ...

fall largely in between.

Table II: Hebrew Bible/Protestant Old Testament

Table III: Deuterocanonical Old Testament

Table IV: New Testament

References

Citations

Bibliography

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