When was the Bible written and formed?

Jono and his school have asked:

When was the Bible written and when did it reach its final form?

So I did a quick bit of Googling and this is my answer:

Obviously, scholars like to argue about this stuff and no one knows exactly for certain!

Traditionally it was thought that Moses basically wrote the earliest first five books of the Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy – sometimes knows as the Torah or Pentateuch). The early Rabbis date Moses birth to 1391BC and the early church Father, Jerome, says he was born in 1592 BC.

The rest of the Old Testament was written, edited and compiled by lots of different people over a long period, book by book and with collections of Psalms and Proverbs and so on.

The Old Testament finishes 400 years before the birth of Jesus. It had almost certainly reached its final form as we have it today by the time of Jesus and Jesus accepted our Old Testament.

Jesus almost certainly died in AD 33 and then the New Testament was written. Maybe some notes were taken in Jesus’ lifetime. It seems pretty certain to me that some, much, maybe all of the New Testament was written before the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70 but some people think bits of it might be rather later. For example, some people think John’s Gospel might not have reached its final form until AD 110. However, the oldest fragment of the New Testament we happen to have today is probably The Rylands Library Papyrus P52 which is 8.9 cm by 6 cm at its widest and is kept at Manchester University. It is part of John’s Gospel and is a copy which dates from 100 – 175 AD.

The letters and books of the New Testament circulated separately and together from very early on and the church basically agreed that the writings from the Apostles and their circle belonged to the Bible, but there continued to be some arguments about whether some books should be in or out.

The first official list of New Testament books as authoritative exactly the same as ours which we know of comes from Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria’s Easter letter of AD 367. The Catholic Church formally listed the decision on which books belong to the Bible in AD 382 at the Council of Rome.