What is the Bible?

What is the Bible?

The Bible is the sacred Book, or collection of books, accepted by the Christian Church as uniquely inspired by God, and thus authoritative, providing guidelines for belief and behavior.¹
Many verses throughout the Bible attest to its divine origin (Genesis 6:9-13, Exodus 20:1-17, 2 Timothy 3:16, 2 Peter 1:20-21, Revelation 1:1-2, etc.) But the Bible was not simply dictated word-for-word by God; it is also the work of its many different human authors.

How the Apostles Died

There is a tradition that the Apostles divided the entire world into sections and then cast lots to see who would go to which part of it, that the Gospel might be preached to the whole world.

Of course, we know where Paul went (as is recorded up to the end of the book of The Acts of the Apostles).  Some think that he later went to Spain on a fourth missionary journey, as he had hoped to do.  Here are some of the traditions telling where the other Apostles traveled as missionaries, and how their lives are said to have ended:

Tetragrammaton

The ancient Hebrew language that the Old Testament was written in did not have vowels in its alphabet. In written form, ancient Hebrew was a consonant-only language. In the original Hebrew, God’s name transliterates to YHWH (sometimes written in the older style as YHVH). This is known as the tetragrammaton (meaning “four letters”). Because of the lack of vowels, Bible scholars debate how the tetragrammaton YHWH was pronounced.