How did the different books of the Bible come together to make up the Bible?

Answer 1

This is a question that has puzzled scholars for centuries. Countless books have been written on the topic.

The Bible was not a book (in the sense we think of a book) until sometime around the 2nd century A.D. A book before the invention of the printing press was generally called a codex, since it was usually printed on papyrus or vellum, bound by threads, and all copies were made by hand. Before that, all of the "books" of the Hebrew Bible were scrolls, pieces of papyrus stitched together in a roll. Most of these didn't allow you to go beyond a certain number of lines, which is while Kings and Chronicles and other scrolls are divided into 1st and 2nd. They are not separate "books" but continuations on a second scroll.

For this reason, it is difficult to talk about the order of the Torah or other "books" in the Hebrew Bible. Only until they were bound in a codex in the 2nd century did an order get imposed, largely by genre and then by size (as in the prophets, where they are ordered from longest to shortest). This was an imposition by the editor of that early edition, working within a scribal tradition.

The Christian Scriptures are another question entirely. They are grouped by genre, too, with the gospels coming first. But the order of the Pauline epistles are debated all the time. Generally, all of the books of the Christian Scriptures were the earliest literature of the church, suitable for teaching. Over time, these teaching texts were bound together in collections. There was some variation among the collections at first, but by the third century the "canon" was settled through use and wide-spread acceptance of the core, historical documents of the church. This process was somewhat organic, reflecting what the Jesus-centered churches were doing in practice, but it was also reinforced by social and political developments at the time. Commentators at the time also weighed in on which books deserved to be elevated in esteem and authority and which did not. Within about a century, the canon was effectively closed.

It should be noted that the gospels were all included in their various forms. No one author or editor thought to impose a unity on the gospels, minimizing their differences or different perspectives. It must be considered that a later author or editor could have chosen one gospel over the others or woven the threads of different ones into a single new account or, as in the case of later gnostic writers, invented completely new stories to tell. These choices, right or wrong, were open to the editors or compilers of the text, but for reasons we must account for, they apparently chose not to do that. By including all four in the final canon, the Christian Scriptures were allowed to speak to different groups of Christians who may have favored one or another gospel in particular--perhaps a desire to accommodate different (oral?) traditions about the historical Jesus and their respective church communities. The choice to include all four also reveals the authority that the editors or compilers gave the original accounts as reliable testimony--that their accounts must be left intact, reproduced as they were original written for the most part.

No short answers to this general question should be tolerated, though. It is a complicated question, one that has many sub-answers, depending on the part of the Bible you are talking about.

Perhaps the best place to start further reading is a general overview like Who Wrote the Bible by Richard Elliott Friedman. His book concerns itself with the first five books of the Bible, called the Torah or the Books of Moses.

Another, more recent attempt to explain the culture of the Bible is Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible by van der Toorn. This book places the writing of the Bible in a cultural context, similar to those of ancient Babylon and Egypt. It is a denser book than Friedman's but well worth your while.