The set of canonical or foundational books of the Judaic and Christian religions is known as the Bible. For believers, the Bible is the word of God. This term comes from the Greek and is the plural of papyrus, scroll or book, constituting a set of books or volumes.
Today, the Bible is known to be the most widely read (and best-selling) book in all of history, and it has been translated into more than 2,000 languages. It is known on five continents and is considered, with good reason, the "book of books."
The Bible is then divided into books or groups of scriptures. To cite one example, the book of Psalms, made up of 150 sentences. There are different "versions" of the Bible. While the Hebrew or Tanakh is divided into three sections (the books of Moses, the books of the Hebrew prophets and other books known as the Scriptures), the Christian recognizes the Hebrew as Old Testament and distinguishes it from her New Testament, which narrates the life of Jesus. This New Testament is divided into 4 Gospels, Acts of the Apostles, Letters (of the apostles Peter, Paul, James and John) and the Apocalypse, also written by Saint John.
In numbers, the Bible has 1,189 chapters, of which 929 belong to the Old Testament and 260 to the New.
In general, when speaking of the Bible, reference is made to the Christian Bible, but for the different groups of the faithful this differs, and there are even differences with respect to the texts considered as apocryphal, that is, texts that are false or not considered authentic by the Catholic Church. The definition of the books included in the Bible was formulated in the early days of Christianity, strongly influenced by Saint Jerome, who translated the Old Testament texts (written in their entirety in ancient Hebrew) and the New Testament (all written in Greek in its original version, with the exception of the Gospel of Saint Matthew, written in Aramaic) in the most widespread language of that time, that is, Latin. The version of that time is called Vulgate and it is the foundation of the translations into all the languages of the Earth that occurred in subsequent centuries. There are variations in translation and commentary between the different Christian creeds of the present time, although the homology between the texts of the different branches are usually relatively similar to each other.
It is interesting to note that the book known as "Gutenberg's Bible" was one of the most famous works printed with the movable type system attributed to the German inventor Johannes Gutenberg in the 15th century. This work gave rise to what would become known as the “Printing Age”, which made volumes of all kinds available to the popular masses, for example, such as this religious document.
It is worth noting that the biblical texts constitute, in addition, the universal foundation of numerous laws of the first Christian nations, especially in the states that emerged from the disappearance of the feudal system in medieval Europe. On the other hand, the contents of the Bible are an integral part of the liturgy of Hebrews and Christians, in its different variants. For believers, there is an ancient aphorism that states that "prayer is the voice of man for God to hear, while Scripture (that is, the Bible) is the voice of God for man to hear."
