How old is bible

But the oldest text would have to be the Hebrew Bible or the Tanakh. But not the oldest. So the oldest Biblical text we found is about years old. The first Biblical stories were passed down orally and only written down later by various authors. Most Biblical scholars believe the Book of Genesis was the first book to be written down. This would have happened around BC to BC.

So perhaps about years or so ago. Skip to content. So the charred logs were shelved for nearly half a century, with no one knowing what was written inside. Last year, Yosef Porath, the archaeologist who excavated at Ein Gedi in , walked into the Israel Antiquities Authority's Dead Sea Scrolls preservation lab in Jerusalem with boxes of the charcoal chunks. The lab has been creating hi-resolution images of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the earliest copies of biblical texts ever discovered, and he asked researchers to scan the burned scrolls.

She agreed, and a number of burned scrolls were scanned using X-ray-based micro-computed tomography, a 3D version of the CT scans hospitals use to create images of internal body parts. The images were then sent to William Brent Seales, a researcher in the computer science department of the University of Kentucky.

Only one of the scrolls could be deciphered. Using the "virtual unwrapping" technology, he and his team painstakingly captured the three-dimensional shape of the scroll's layers, using a digital triangulated surface mesh to make a virtual rendering of the parts they suspected contained text.

They then searched for pixels that could signify ink made with a dense material like iron or lead. The researchers then used computer modeling to virtually flatten the scroll, to be able to read a few columns of text inside. The researchers say it is the first time a biblical scroll has been discovered in an ancient synagogue's holy ark, where it would have been stored for prayers, and not in desert caves like the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The discovery holds great significance for scholars' understanding of the development of the Hebrew Bible, researchers say.

In ancient times, many versions of the Hebrew Bible circulated. The Dead Sea Scrolls, dating to as early as the 3rd century B. And when he led his armies on a successful war of conquest at the end of the 13th century BC, he wanted the world, and successive generations, to know all about it.

The medium on which the pharaoh chose to trumpet his martial prowess was a three-metre-high lump of carved granite, now known as the Merneptah Stele. But it is the final three lines of the inscription that has arguably excited most interest among historians.

But the Israelites would survive. It would spawn what is surely the most influential book of all time: the Bible. If the early history of the Israelites is uncertain, so is the evolution of the book that would tell their story. Catherine Nixey and Edith Hall discuss a pivotal moment in religious history, when Christianity became the dominant faith of the Roman empire:. Until the 17th century, received opinion had it that the first five books of the Bible — Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy — were the work of one author: Moses.

That theory has since been seriously challenged. Scholars now believe that the stories that would become the Bible were disseminated by word of mouth across the centuries, in the form of oral tales and poetry — perhaps as a means of forging a collective identity among the tribes of Israel. Eventually, these stories were collated and written down. The question is by whom, and when? A clue may lie in a limestone boulder discovered embedded in a stone wall in the town of Tel Zayit, 35 miles southwest of Jerusalem, in The boulder, now known as the Zayit Stone, contains what many historians believe to be the earliest full Hebrew alphabet ever discovered, dating to around BC.

The Zayit Stone does not in itself tell us when the Bible was written and collated, but it gives us our first glimpse of the language that produced it. And, by tracking the stylistic development of that language down the centuries, and cross-referencing it with biblical text, historians have been able to rule out the single-author hypotheses, concluding instead that it was written by waves of scribes during the first millennium BC. From about the eighth century BC onwards, the Old Testament contains some real historiography, even though it may not all be accurate.

Are we guilty of placing too much emphasis on this question? Much of the Old Testament is about seeing God at work in human history rather than in accurately recording the detail, and sometimes we exaggerate the importance of historical accuracy. The Old Testament is not a work of fiction, but nor is it a modern piece of history-writing. After the exile of the Jewish people in Bablylon in the sixth century BC, scribes gradually turned into religious teachers, as we find them in the New Testament.

But the collection is a work of early Judaism. It should be remembered that for a long time it was a collection of individual scrolls, not a single book between two covers. But messianic hopes were not widespread or massively important in first-century Judaism and are even less central to the Old Testament itself.

Christians discovered texts they saw as messianic prophecies — for example, in Isaiah 7 — though other Jews did not read them that way. The message, which was that all humankind was accepted through Jesus by the God worshipped by the Jews, proved a winner.

David is also a hugely important figure in the quest to establish links between the Bible and historical fact, for he appears to be the earliest biblical figure to be confirmed by archaeology.