The oldest books in the world. The Bible is the oldest book in the world

The Bible was included in the Guinness Book of Records as the book published with the largest circulation. In the last 2 centuries alone, the total circulation of the Book of Books amounted to 8 billion copies. The Bible has been translated into over 2,500 languages ​​and dialects around the world. January 10, 1514 in Spain printed the world's first edition of the Bible in several languages. Today we offer an overview of the most unusual publications.

most expensive bible

The most expensive Bible is the Gutenberg Bible. This book, published in 1456, became the starting point for the history of printing in Europe. Gutenberg printed 180 copies of the Bible: 45 on parchment and the rest on Italian watermarked paper. To this day, only 21 books have survived in their entirety. Various copies of it are estimated from $25 million to $35 million.

The smallest bible

Scientists from the Israel Institute of Technology "wrote" the entire text of the Old Testament on a silicon plate with an area of ​​0.5 square millimeters. Visually, this plate cannot be distinguished from a grain of sand. To write the text, a focused beam of helium ions was used, which knocked out gold atoms from the gold coating of a silicon plate. The process took only 1 hour. During this time, 300 thousand words in Hebrew were applied to the silicon plate.

The biggest bible

The largest Bible in the world, 249 cm long (open) and 110.5 cm high, was created in 1930 by the American carpenter Louis Waynai. The Bible weighs 496 kg and contains 8,048 hand-printed pages. The text font is almost 3 cm high. The world's largest Bible was created using a homemade printing press. The project took 2 years and $10,000 to complete. The book can now be seen in the library of Abelian Christian University, where it is kept in an oak case.

bible in zion

The Deutsch Publishing House (Russia) has published the 6-volume Bible in Zion, the only edition in the world. The uniqueness of the Bible lies in the fact that the volumes of the Holy Book are placed in Zion - an ancient repository of church utensils, which is practically not found today. Zion is made of silver with gilding and bronze. Volumes of the book are inserted into niches covered with velvet. The weight of Zion with six volumes of the Bible is more than 40 kg. A special mechanism, developed at the Vadim Volfson Museum of Books, allows you to turn the zion so that you can take the desired volume.

In Soviet times, access to religious literature was very difficult. In the 1960s, Korney Chukovsky requested permission to publish biblical traditions adapted for children by famous writers. The project was allowed, but only on the condition that neither God nor Jews should be mentioned in the book. Chukovsky came up with a pseudonym for God, "The Wizard of Yahweh." The Bible for children was published in 1968 by the publishing house "Children's Literature" and was called "The Tower of Babel and Other Ancient Legends", but was almost immediately destroyed. The next edition of the book took place only in 1990.

Bible Salvador Dali

In 1963, the collector, millionaire and true Christian Giuseppe Albaretto invited Salvador Dali to illustrate a new edition of the Bible. Dali happily agreed. For 2 years, one of the most daring painters of the 20th century created his largest graphic cycle - 105 works in mixed media (gouache, watercolor, ink, pencil and pastel). It took another 3 years to translate the drawings into lithography. After the release of the first edition, a special copy was released in Italy, bound in white leather with gold. This book was presented to the Pope.

In 2013, the Bible with illustrations by Salvador Dali was released for the first time in Russian. The Russian text of the Holy Scriptures is provided by the publishing house of the Moscow Patriarchate.

It is worth noting that Dali was not alone in his creative impulse. Modern designers create .

largest handwritten bible

Sunil Joseph Bhopal from India created the world's largest handwritten Bible. The holy book consists of 16,000 pages and weighs 61 kg. The enthusiast copied by hand all the verses of the New Testament in 123 days.

We invite you to read the review.

Muslim: The Bible has been changed many times, so it cannot be considered authentic Scripture revealed to Moses, Jesus, and other prophets. What evidence do you have that the Bible is reliable and trustworthy?

Years ago, a young Muslim woman asked me, "Has the Bible ever been changed?" I told her, "Of course not." To this she said, "But doesn't she teach that Jesus Christ is the Son of God?" I confirmed: "Teaching again and again." In response, she stated, "Then she had to change."

Any Christian who reads the writings of Muslim authors will be surprised to find that the arguments put forward in them as a refutation of the authenticity of the texts of the Bible are often extremely weak and unconvincing. This happens for one reason only - Muslims do not believe in the complete safety of the Bible, not because they have found adequate evidence that changes were made to its text, but because they must deny its authenticity in order to support their conviction that The Quran is the Word of God. Two conflicting Books cannot both be the Word of God. When, in the early centuries of Islamic history, Muslims discovered that the Bible was clear and definite about basic Christian doctrines, such as the divinity of Jesus Christ and His atonement, they could no longer approach it objectively. Since then, they have been striving to prove what is really nothing more than a guess - the Bible had to change! The main reason Muslims do not believe in the authenticity of the Bible is that they have no choice: they cannot believe the Bible if they are supposed to be faithful to the Qur'an.

It is important to know the evidence for the invariance of biblical texts, especially the fact that there are genuine manuscripts that appeared many centuries before the birth of Islam and prove that the Bible that we hold in our hands today is the same Bible that the Jews and early Christians considered their only Holy Scripture. .

The three main manuscript lists of the Bible

Until now, there are three main manuscript copies of the Bible in Greek (including the Septuagint (Old Testament) and the original text of the New Testament), several centuries ahead of the appearance of the Koran.

1. Alexandrian list. This volume, written in the 5th century A.D. contains the entire Bible except for a few missing plates from the New Testament (namely, Matt. 1:1-25:6, John 6:50-8:52, and 2 Cor. 4:13-12:6). It does not include anything that is not part of the modern Bible. The manuscript is kept in the London British Museum.

2. Sinai list. This is a very ancient manuscript dating from the end of the 4th century. It contains the entire New Testament and much of the Old Testament. For centuries, it was kept in the St. Petersburg Imperial Library and was sold to the British government for one hundred thousand pounds. It is also currently in the British Museum.

3. Vatican list. This is probably the oldest complete manuscript copy of the Bible that has survived. It dates from the 4th century and is kept in the Vatican Library in Rome. The last part of the New Testament (from Heb. 9:14 to the end of Revelation) is written in a different hand than the rest of the manuscript (probably the scribe who started copying the text was unable to complete the work for some reason).

These manuscripts convincingly prove that the only Scripture given to the Church at least two centuries before the birth of Muhammad is the Old and New Testament known to us.

Other evidence for the authenticity of the Bible

There are many other testimonies that prove the authenticity of the Bible, which date back to an era several centuries ahead of the time of the birth of Islam. In discussions with Muslims, the following points should be highlighted.

1. Masoretic texts. Ancient biblical manuscripts belong not only to Christians, but also to Jews who revere the Old Testament as the only Scripture given to them. These are texts written in Hebrew, the original language of the Old Testament, and are at least a thousand years old. They are known as the Masoretic Texts.

2. The Dead Sea Scrolls. First discovered in caves in the Qumran desert near the Dead Sea in Israel, these scrolls contain many passages from the Old Testament in Hebrew and date back to the 2nd century BC. e. They include two copies of the Book of the Prophet Isaiah containing prophecies about the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ (see: Isaiah 53:1-12), about His virgin birth (see: Isaiah 7:14) and about His divinity ( see Isaiah 9:6-7).

3. Septuagint. The Septuagint is the title of the first Greek translation of the Old Testament. He corresponded in the 2nd century BC. e. and contains all the main prophecies about the coming of the Messiah, the statement that He is the Son of God (see: Ps. 2:7; 1 Chronicles 17:11–14), and some details of His suffering and atoning death (see: Psalm 21:68). The early Church made extensive use of the Septuagint.

4. Vulgate. In the 4th century A.D. e. The Roman Catholic Church translated the entire Bible into Latin using the Septuagint and ancient Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. This list is known as the Vulgate and contains all the books of the Old and New Testaments as we know them. This translation is approved as the standard text for the Roman Catholic Church.

5. Extracts from the Greek text of the New Testament. There are many passages of the original Greek text of the New Testament that have survived from the 2nd century CE. e. All of these, taken together, constitute the content of the New Testament as we know it. It is very interesting to compare the abundance of this evidence with the texts of ancient Greek and Roman classics, many of which were written no earlier than a thousand years after A.D. Truly, there are no other literary works of the same era that would have such a wealth of manuscript evidence as Greek text of the New Testament.

Most importantly, and this should be emphasized when talking to Muslims, is the absence of a source suggesting that the Bible presents the life and teachings of Jesus Christ in a distorted way. All the apocryphal books rejected by the Church, at least in general terms, follow the same line of narration as the manuscripts of the New Testament. There is certainly no historical evidence to suggest that Jesus was in fact the prophet of Islam, as the Qur'an makes Him out to be.

In conclusion, it would be a good idea to ask Muslims to provide historical facts to support their claim that the Bible we are reading is a modified Bible. What was she originally like? What was changed about it that made it the Book we have today? Who made these changes? When was it done? Ask your interlocutor to name the real people who, as he suggests, distorted the Bible, the time when this happened, the specific changes made to the original text of the Bible, and you will find that he is not able to do this, since such evidence simply does not exist. Always remember that the Muslim vicious attack is based not on the scientific evidence they have, but on assumptions. The Bible, in their mind, had to change, since it contradicts the Koran. Unfortunately, too often Muslims read the Bible not out of a desire to understand its teachings, but solely to find errors in it that justify their prejudice against it.

John Gilchrist "God or Prophet?"

Most of the biblical books were written in the 8th-6th centuries BC. e. More than three billion people consider it sacred. It has been called the best seller of all time, with over 6,000,000,000 copies of the Bible printed in whole or in part in more than 2,400 languages.

One of the oldest publications in the world is 1500 years old. This Bible was found in 2010 in Turkey. The book was written in Aramaic. The cost of the book, the pages of which are made of real leather, is about 40 million Turkish lira. The cost of even photocopied pages is high - about 3 million.

It is possible that this book is a copy of the famous Gospel of Barnabas, which was once forbidden. The oldest copies of it were created in the sixteenth century, that is, they are almost three times newer than this book.

Another ancient Bible was found a year later by a Bedouin in northern Jordan, in a cave in a remote desert area. The discovery was made in 2005-2007, but the discovery, which, according to scientists, will turn the whole biblical story, became known to the general public only in the spring of 2011.

By chance, a flood in one of the caves located in the north of Jordan opened two secret niches in which there were seventy lead books connected by wire.

Each ancient manuscript, embossed on lead plates, consists of 5-15 pages the size of a regular credit card.

Metal studies have shown that the artifact may date from the first century AD. It is believed that this ancient Christian relic was created in 70 AD. e., the first Christians who hastily left Jerusalem after its fall.

Scholars also believe that the manuscripts constitute the Book of Revelations mentioned in the Bible and are proof of the non-Jewish origin of Christianity. This is evidenced by the symbols depicted on the covers: seven-candle lamps (Jews were strictly forbidden to depict them) and crosses related to Roman culture.

Part of the text of the most ancient bible, written in Hebrew using hieroglyphs, has already been deciphered. It deals with the Messiah, the Crucifixion and the Ascension.

26.02.2012

Despite the fact that the Bible is one of the oldest books in existence, in fact, no one has ever seen really old editions of it before. And two years ago, during a raid in southern Turkey, a 1,500-year-old book was confiscated from smugglers. The book was written in Aramaic, that is, the same language that Jesus once spoke. This is the real value, and not refrigerators and TVs, which modern people are chasing!

Historians were delighted. Now the book is under reconstruction, it was provided for this only recently, and before that it was in court. The Vatican asked to study the book in more detail and try to translate it into a language accessible to modern society. The cost of the book, the pages of which are made of real leather, is about 40 million Turkish lira. The cost of even photocopied pages is very high - about 3 million.

It is possible that this book is a copy of the famous Gospel of Barnabas, which was once forbidden. The oldest copies of it were created in the sixteenth century, that is, they are almost three times newer than this book.

The gospel of Barnabas is close to the ideas of Muslims about the son of God, but at the same time it contradicts the modern canons presented in the New Testament.

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