Table I gives an overview of the periods and dates ascribed to the various books of the Bible.
Tables II, III and IV outline the conclusions of the majority of contemporary scholars on the composition of the Hebrew Bible and the Protestant Old Testament, the deuterocanonical works (also called the Apocrypha), and the New Testament.
Some books are considered pseudepigrapha - the person traditionally cited as the author is not the person who actually wrote the text; for some books there appear to have been multiple authors.
Table I: Chronological overview (Hebrew Bible / Old Testament)
This table summarises the chronology of the Hebrew Bible, which has the same books as the Protestant Old Testament; these date from between the 8th and 2nd centuries BCE.
The additional books in the Catholic and Orthodox bibles can be found in the table on the deuterocanonical works, and date from the 3rd century BCE to the 3rd century CE (see Table III); the New Testament writings from the 1st and 2nd centuries CE (see Table IV).
Dates are approximate, and represent, as closely as Wikipedia's editors can judge, the opinions of the majority of current biblical scholars.
Table II: Hebrew Bible / Protestant Old Testament
The Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, is the collection of scriptures making up the Bible used by Judaism; the same books, in a slightly different order, also make up the Protestant version of the Old Testament.
The order used here follows the divisions used in Jewish Bibles.
Table III: Deuterocanonical Old Testament
The deuterocanonical books are works included in Catholic and Orthodox but not in Jewish and Protestant Bibles.
Table IV: New Testament
See also
Bible manuscript
Biblical canon
Dating the Bible
References
Citations
Bibliography
Translated from German (1996 edition).
Bible Category:Documentary hypothesis
