What the Bible Is and Isn’t | Episode 02: The unBibled Podcast

Have you ever wondered what the Bible actually is? Or who wrote it? Christians believe that the Bible is God’s inspired, inerrant, and infallible Word. But what does that mean?

If you’re curious about these questions and want to have a better understanding of the Bible, this episode of the unBibled podcast hosted by Bible teacher Liz Cobo is for you.

CLARIFICATION: In this episode at 12:44 I misspoke and said, “the Gospel of Acts.” The Book of Acts is not a gospel account. – Liz

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Bible Cross References Rainbow Graphic

Liz’s Notes for this episode

• The Bible isn’t a single book. It’s 66 different books. Written by 40 or more authors, primarily Jewish men, over about 1,500 years of time.
  
• The Bible has multiple literary genres including law, historical narrative, wisdom, poetry, epistles, prophecy, and apocalyptic. 
  
• There are 39 books of the Old Testament and 27 books in the New Testament.
  
• The Bible is not in chronological order from cover-to-cover.
  
• It is divided into two different sections: the Old Testament and the New Testament.
  
• The word testament means covenant or agreement. The Old Agreement was between God and His people, the Jews. The New Agreement is between God and anyone, Jew or Gentile who puts their faith in Jesus.
  
• You’ve probably heard the word Gentile before, but if you’re not sure what or who a Gentile is, it simply means someone who is not Jewish.
  
• Christians believe that the Bible is the inspired, inerrant, and infallible Word of God.
  
• What does it mean that the Bible is inspired? It means that Christians believe the Bible was written by human authors who the Holy Spirit inspired to physically write down the text of Scripture. The Holy Spirit gave them the words to write. They were operating in their giftings and utilized their own unique ways of communicating through words the message of God. And this inspiration didn’t just extend to the authors whose names appear attached to the writings — but also to their scribes (sometimes referred to as an amanuensis). For example, we know that the Apostle Paul utilized scribes to write some of his epistles (or letters). That means both Paul and the scribe were operating in the power of the Holy Spirit to convey God’s message to God’s people.
  
• Christians also declare that the Bible is inerrant – without error in it’s original form. When the Bible was written in its original languages which include Hebrew, Aramaic, and Koine Greek by the authors of Scripture it was without error. It was exactly what God wanted to communicate. Over time, mostly through the process of copying the Scriptures, there have been some errors that have occurred. But those errors are never about issues relating to salvation. They don’t change the message God is delivering through the Bible.
  
• The belief that the Bible is infallible conveys the idea that the Bible cannot be wrong. Which is incredibly important to us in our day and age when popular culture has begun to think of truth as being relative, on a sliding scale. The truths of Scripture do not change. They are infallible meaning they are as true today as they were when they were first recorded. 
• So if as Christians we believe that the Bible is inspired, inerrant, and infallible then we have to recognize that the Bible is just as relevant to our modern lives today as it has been for thousands of years. And we’ll talk more about that in an upcoming episode.
  
• As Christians we are “living under grace” and not “under the law,” but we cannot unhook the Old Testament from the New Testament. Both testaments matter to us because together they create a full picture of God’s love for his creation, of which the greatest part is humanity. Not that as humans we are great. We are fallen. We sin. Romans 3:23 tells us that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” But we, all of us, made in God’s image.
  
• Being made in God’s image does not mean that we look like God. What it means is that we enjoy the status that God has given us to multiply and subdue the earth and we reflect the characteristics of God. We don’t do this perfectly – only Jesus did that. But we are capable of attributes like love and kindness and self-control because those are the fruits of God’s spirit.
  
• In upcoming episodes we’ll talk more about the attributes of God, about humanity’s fall from grace. But this episode is all about giving you some Bible Basics.
  
• Before we close let’s take a 30,000 foot view of the Old and New Testaments. As I mentioned earlier, the testaments are covenants, or agreements between God and his people. In the Old Testament there are actually multiple covenants, or agreements that God makes with His people. Including the Mosaic covenant which establishes the Hebrew people as God’s people. The entirety of the Old Testament tells the story of God’s relationship with His People.
  
• In Exodus 6:7 God says to Moses, talking about the Hebrew people, “I will take you to be my people, and I will be your God.”
  
• The New Testament tells the story of Jesus and the birth of the Christian church.
  
• Jesus was God incarnate, who left his throne in heaven, to be born as baby through the power of the Holy Spirit coming upon the virgin Mary. Who grew up, having a very normal childhood and life. Who in his early thirties began to minister to the Jewish people who had been awaiting the Messiah (the promised one) who the Old Testament prophecies about.
  
• Jesus would go on to die a criminal’s death on a Roman cross to pay the sin debt for all of humanity for all of time. And three days later he rose from the dead, defying sin and grave. He was seen by more than 500 people after his resurrection, including his disciples who knew him well.
  
• After 40 days he ascended into heaven and is coming back again to fulfill the Scriptures.

Episode Transcript

So no matter how familiar or unfamiliar you are with the Bible, whether you are unBibled, the way that I used to be, or you are totally bibleed, and you are living your life as a Bible Christian, there is always more to learn. 19th century English preacher Charles Spurgeon once famously said that nobody outgrows scripture. The book just widens and deepens with our years, and I have found that to be so true. I’m so excited for this episode of the unBibled podcast, because we’re going to look at what the Bible is and what it isn’t. It, friend, it is time for you to start living bibleed And stop living unBibled. Let’s get started.

Podcast Introduction

Welcome to the unBibled podcast. I’m your host, Liz Cobo, I’m a Bible teacher and seminary student who spent most of my life unBibled. I spent years as a Christian, believing in God, putting my faith in Jesus, but not knowing what the Bible actually says. If you want to know what the best selling, most reliable, relevant book of all time says, and you want to walk closer with Jesus, it’s time to stop living unBibled. If you’ve ever wondered what the Bible actually is, today is the podcast episode for you.

In This Episode…

Today, we’re going to talk about what the Bible is and what it isn’t. And you might be thinking, as a Christian, that either I know this or I should know this. I don’t know how many years, I went to church every Sunday, but did not actually understand what the Bible even was. I had heard it called the Word of God, but what does that mean? Did Did God write it? How did it get written? How did it come to be? So today, we’re just going to kind of walk through what the Bible is and what the Bible isn’t. Now the Bible, we often think about being a book, or we call it the book of the Bible, but it’s not actually a book. It’s really more like a library. It has 66 different books within it, and if you have your own copy of the Bible, maybe you’ve put tabs in it, or maybe you bought a Bible that had tabs that separates all the different books. But a Protestant Bible is going to have 66 different books, the Christian Bible, and it’s going to be divided into the Old Testament and the New Testament.

What a “Testament” Is

And if you’re not familiar with what the word testament means, it means covenant like an agreement. So the Old Testament is God’s agreement with his people, and the New Testament is also God’s agreement with his people. But things change a little bit between the old and the new, and the thing that changes is Jesus. In the New Testament, in the gospels, we meet Jesus, God incarnate, who came to earth to save us from our sins. So I’ve got some notes that I am going to work through today, some bullet points of things that I want to share with you, and I’m also going to put these in the show notes. So if you want more information about what the Bible is or isn’t or if we go through this info too fast in today’s episode, you’ll be able to find these in the show notes. So I mentioned that this is a library that the Bible is a library of 66 different books. It was written by more than 40 authors, primarily who were all Jewish men, and it was compiled written over about 1500 years, and it wasn’t just the authors of Scripture who helped to bring about the text of the Bible. It was also scribes, sometimes called eminences, and it was all inspired by God’s Holy Spirit. We’re going to talk a little bit about what does that mean? What does it mean that the Bible, that these 66 books, that these two different testaments, were inspired by God’s Holy Spirit.

The Bible Has Literary Genres

Now, something that you might not realize, or might not have been taught in church, is that the Bible, in its 66 different books, actually has different literary genres. There are about seven different literary genres of the Bible, and it sort of depends on who it is that you talk to. But there is law in the Bible, there is historical narrative in the Bible, there’s poetry in the Bible, there is prophetic texts in the Bible, and there are wisdom texts in the Bible. There are all these different genres. And if we think about genre in terms of books that we read today or television shows that we watch, movies that we go to see, the genre. Genre is really important because it tells us kind of what lens to look at the media through. So if we go to a comedy and it is, you know, action packed, and there’s lots of drama and there’s very little comedic lightness or laughter that happens, then we might think, well, this isn’t comedy at all. This is something else. This is this is action, or this is drama. And so the genre really matters. As we are reading through the Bible, understanding what type of genre we’re reading and a single book can have multiple genres. I actually have a little sort of a cheat sheet that I’ve put together here. That’s my Bible basics card. It shows me the 39 books of the Old Testament and the 27 books of the New Testament, and then what the different genres are. And this is just a tool that I use as I’m reading through the Bible to make sure that I’m understanding what genre it is that I’m reading. And we’ll talk about biblical genre more in upcoming episodes. We’ll look at the different genres, why they were written, why the text was written in these different ways by the various authors of scripture.

A 30,000 Foot View of the Bible

But today, we’re really kind of working on getting this 30,000 foot view on the Bible. So if you are familiar with scripture, you know that it’s divided into the Old Testament and the New Testament. The Old Testament really tells the story of God and His people, the Hebrew people, from the from the Exodus, when he saves them out of Egypt when he tells them in Exodus that you know you will be My people, and I will be your God. And there are various different covenants or agreements that take place between God and His people. Now you also probably know that the New Testament is mostly about Jesus, but also the birth of the Christian church. So we see the four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Those names are probably familiar to you, at the beginning of the New Testament, then the book of Acts, which is really when the Christian church is is birthed and starts to spread out after Jesus ascends into heaven following his death on the cross and his resurrection. And then there are all these letters, which in Greek are called epistles. So an epistle is it’s just a letter. There are all these letters, letters that Paul wrote to different churches, letters that the disciples wrote to different churches or to different people. And then there’s finally the Book of Revelation, which is an apocalyptic work that we read at the end of the Bible. Now it might kind of blow your mind to think about the fact or to learn that the Bible is not in chronological order. We tend to think of time and things just being linear. And when we read a book, you know, from cover to cover, we’re thinking that it’s telling a story, especially one that we consider to be sort of a history story, that it’s telling the story in chronological order. But the Bible is actually not in chronological order. Yes, it starts with Genesis, which is the beginning, and yes, it ends with Revelation, which is, you know, quote, unquote, the end. But in between that the Bible is really organized by category, and then within that category it even gets organized further. So when we look at the epistles of Paul, when we look at Paul’s epistles in the New Testament, for example, they start off with epistles to the churches, letters that Paul wrote to the churches, and they’re based on length. It’s organized based on length. And then we have Paul’s epistles to his letters to individuals, again, based on length. And so the way that the Canon was organized is something we’re going to talk about in future episodes as we go deeper into how the how the Bible actually came to be. We’ll talk about this more, but it’s important to understand that as you read through scripture, there are some things that may seem like they are out of order, and that is based on the organization and the categories that the Bible is given.

The Old Testament

Now our Old Testament is what the Jewish faith considers the entire canon of Scripture. The Old Testament for them is the Bible. It is the complete work. For us as Christians, we bring to the Old Testament, the New Testament that tells the story of Jesus, the Messiah. He was the promised one. That we see throughout the Old Testament, again and again and again, the authors of Scripture, who were inspired by the Holy Spirit, are prophesying about the coming Messiah, the promised one. So as we start. To think about the Bible as a library as we start to think about the Old Testament telling the story of God and His people before Jesus, and then the New Testament, telling the story of God and His people after Jesus, or through Jesus’ life and after then we can start to get a sense of the importance of keeping these two books connected, we can’t unhook the old from the new. That is, that’s something that sometimes Christians are tempted to do, because we say things like, Well, I live under grace. I don’t live under the law. I’m not bound by the Mosaic covenant, and that’s all true, right? We live under grace. We are not bound by the law. Jesus came and fulfilled the law. He didn’t overturn it. He came and He fulfilled the law, and we are no longer bound by the law. But there’s lots of important stuff in the law, in the Old Testament, because it’s still God’s Word, and the entirety of the Old Testament is not law, it’s also wisdom and poetry and prophecy, and it’s important for us to recognize that.

The Bible is Inerrant, Inspired, and Infallible

Now, as Christians, when we talk about Scripture, we talk about the Bible being inerrant, and we talk about the Bible being inspired, and we talk about the Bible being infallible, and those are all really important things for us to understand what they mean. So let’s actually talk about what it means that the Bible was inspired. Biblical inspiration means that we believe, as Christians, that the authors of Scripture, those 40 plus primarily Jewish men were inspired by God’s Holy Spirit when they wrote the text of Scripture, some of them wrote on scrolls. So the Old Testament, for example, was written on scrolls by the time of the New Testament, there was something called codexes, which is more like what we would call a book in book form, you know, pages that were bound together, and that was just something where technology had allowed them to go from recording things on scrolls to recording things in codexes. But when we say that the Holy Spirit inspired the authors, what we’re saying is that God used the talents, the abilities and the languages of the authors to record his message as he wanted it to be recorded. So through the power of the Holy Spirit, these authors in their different languages and in the different styles of their writings. If we look at the way that the apostle Paul, for example, writes and the way that Luke, who wrote the Gospel of Luke and the gospel of acts writes, they have different writing styles. They had different approaches to language, just like I might use a different word than you would use to convey the same message. So it’s important that we recognize that it also helps us to understand that God used these different authors who had different perspectives when we read through the gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, they all have very differ, differing, different perspectives on Jesus, and they all portray Jesus in a different light. It doesn’t mean that Jesus changed or that they each met a different Jesus. It means that their perspective based on their experience, their knowledge, their interactions with the Lord, they were all formed in different ways, so they present differing perspectives on Jesus, and some of them weren’t.

The Apostolic Authority of the New Testament

They had apostolic authority, but they had that authority because they were getting the stories from directly from the apostles. For example, the author of the gospel of Mark, Mark may have known Jesus. Mark may have walked, may have walked with Jesus, but it’s also possible that he didn’t. But Mark was primarily telling us the story of Jesus’s life and ministry through the perspective of the apostle Peter, who we know absolutely walked with the Lord, and so that gave mark that apostolic authority. And if that just feels like too much for your brain to handle right now, that’s okay. We’ll come back in future episodes and we’ll talk more about, what does it even mean to be an apostle? What does apostolic authority mean? And why does it matter? You don’t need to know all of these things right now. We’re just kind of getting that 30,000 foot view of what the Bible is. So got the Old Testament, and we got the New Testament. We’ve got 40 different authors, all inspired by the Holy Spirit. The text was written over about 1500 years. And in addition to us saying that the Bible is inspired, we would call it inerrant, what does it mean for something to be an. Parent. It means that the Bible is without error in its original form. So what was that original form? The Old Testament was written in Hebrew and in Aramaic. So Hebrew and Aramaic are the two languages of the Old Testament. There are a couple of books that incorporate a little bit of Aramaic. We see this, for example, in the book of Daniel, which is a book that contains a lot of prophecy, but also some historical narrative.

The Languages of the Bible

And then the New Testament was written in Koine Greek. And Koine just means common. It was the common language of the day. Was Greek, and it was the common version of Greek. So Koine Greek wasn’t a very fancy or lofty way of speaking. It was the way that the disciples, who were primarily, you know, fishermen and you know, who were blue collar guys. This is the way that they would have spoken, and this is the way that they wrote Now Luke, who was a physician, Luke had a slightly higher form of Greek writing, a slightly maybe more professional or a fancier way of speaking in Greek, but it was still written in what we would called Koine Greek so the Bible has three different languages, and we would say that it is inerrant. It doesn’t contain any errors. Now, over time, yes, there have been discrepancies that have popped up between different different, you know, copies of the Bible, and these are things that we can attribute to copyist error. And so there were the 40 original authors, some of them using scribes. Some of them, not some of them writing in their own hand, but some of them using scribes. And then later, other scribes would copy the text of Scripture. And errors could occur, right? Because they were human. They weren’t they weren’t perfect. And that copying of the Bible that actually, that part wasn’t inspired. It was the original authorship of the scriptures that was inspired. And so without the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, an error could be made. And you know, these guys were working, oftentimes in the dark with, you know, a candle, and they were working with ink that would, you know, leave blobs or that would smear. And so it wasn’t necessarily easy for them to copy over the the text of Scripture, which, you know, was written, if you if you look at how Hebrew and Aramaic and Greek were written, they had sometimes very small differences would in the way that a letter a character was formed, could have a really dramatic difference in what the meaning of that word was. But we don’t need to worry that our scriptures are full of copyist errors, because we have so many 1000s, actually, of fragments and pieces of the scriptures. And when we, you know, get all them, when the scholars get all of them together and they look at, you know where those differences lie. None of the errors that have ever been found, none of the discrepancies actually affect the salvific portions of Scripture. So the the

errors don’t change at all what salvation is and how we achieve salvation, which is not by our own work, but by submitting our lives to Christ. None of that in Scripture actually gets changed at all when we look at where those copyist errors have come up. So we’ve talked about the Bible being inspired, and we’ve talked about it being inerrant, but there’s also the infallible words. So these are the three eyes of Scripture. Inspire, inspiration, inerrancy and infallibility. So what’s the difference between inerrancy and infallibility? The infallibility of Scripture tells us that it can’t be wrong. Scripture can’t be wrong. It can’t have an error. It is in fallible, which means that the scriptures today for us are just as relevant in the 21st Century as they were in the first century, as they were in the Old Testament prior to the time of Christ, prior to the writing of the Gospels, prior to the letters that Paul sent. The Bible is just as relevant today as it was then. It is just as infallible today as it was. Then in its original form, when it’s properly translated, we can’t make it say something that isn’t true. And that’s important right now, you know, in the 21st Century, we are struggling very much here in the United States, but around the world, with this idea that truth is on a sliding scale, that truth is relative. But as Christians, we know truth is truth.

What is Truth

Truth is secure, and it doesn’t move just the way that God doesn’t change, the truth doesn’t change. And so scripture is infallible in that way, it doesn’t change. And what was true then is true. Now, whether we like it or not. I think, you know, there are a lot of things that we would like God’s word to say differently, because it would make it easier for us, especially in our modern day, where truth is on a sliding scale, it would make it a lot easier for us. But that’s not what the Scripture says, And the Scripture doesn’t change, and the Scripture can be used to interpret the Scripture. So that’s something that we’ll look at also in the future. What? What does that mean that scripture can and should be used to interpret Scripture? There is this really cool image. I’m going to link it in the show notes below so that you can take a look at it. But it is this graphical image that a couple of different researchers scholars created that shows the different connections just within scripture, within these 66 books of the Bible, where you can see the lines drawn, it actually ends up making a rainbow, but the lines drawn between scriptures and where they connect. And depending upon the Bible that you’re using, you probably have some cross references in your Bible. And this is similar to that, but it goes even further. It connects all the different, you know, obvious cross references, but also the ones that are not as obvious. And when we look at this picture, we start to get an idea of the richness of the Bible, of the richness of the Scripture. And a lot of times, people will talk about what’s called the red thread, from Genesis all the way to Revelation, we see this red thread that points us to Jesus. It points us to the redemption that Jesus offers to us as fallen people. You know, through his work on the cross, it’s not by anything that we could do. We cannot save ourselves, but our salvation has been accomplished if we will submit our lives willingly to Christ, and we’ll talk more about where the biblical support for salvation is within the text of Scripture. So that’s a lot of information about the Bible.

Free Bible Basics Course

If you want to know more, I have a totally free 20 minute video that you can watch that has a lot of graphics. It kind of breaks things down into even easier chunks and pieces, and all you have to do is go to biblebasicscourse.com I’m going to link that below in the show notes, but it’s completely free. It takes about 20 minutes to watch, and it’ll kind of walk you through the different parts of the Bible, the things that you need to do if you want to start to learn to study the Scriptures, things that will help you to do that, like always starting with prayer and asking the Lord to give you greater revelation and understanding you won’t ever understand everything in the scriptures. No scholar has ever understood all of this. No person other than Jesus has ever understood the scriptures perfectly. But we can work to understand the scriptures better, to have a better understanding of what the Bible says.

On the Next Episode

I hope you’ll join me for the next episode where we are going to dig deeper into what the story of the Old Testament is. We’re going to walk through that story of God’s unending love and mercy.

Episode Wrap Up

Thanks for listening to this episode of the unBibled podcast. Check out the show notes for links to helpful resources mentioned in or related to this episode. To join my email list, visit Liz cobo.com if you have an unBibled question you’d like me to answer in an upcoming episode, send me an email at hello@unbibled.com and if you’d like to leave a rating or a review on Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts that would be such a blessing. Thanks for tuning in. I’ll see you next time you.