My LORD’s BibleLearn
Short, plain guides to the questions people actually ask about the Bible and the books that grew up around it — where they came from, why the canons differ, and where to read each one in full.
How Was the Bible's Canon Decided?
No single council voted the Bible into existence. The Old and New Testaments each took shape through a slower, messier process spanning centuries — here is how it actually happened.
What Are the “Lost Books of the Bible”?
“Lost books of the Bible” covers the Apocrypha, the pseudepigrapha, and the New Testament apocrypha — writings read alongside scripture but left out of the Protestant canon. Here is the map.
What Is the Apocrypha?
The Apocrypha are the books in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles that most Protestant Bibles leave out — Tobit, Judith, Sirach, Wisdom, Maccabees, and more. What they are and why the canons differ.
What Are the Pseudepigrapha?
The Old Testament pseudepigrapha are Jewish and early Christian writings from about 300 BC to AD 200 written in the names of Enoch, Moses, Abraham and others. What they are, how they differ from the Apocrypha, and where the New Testament echoes them.
What Is the Book of Enoch?
The Book of Enoch (1 Enoch) is an ancient Jewish work attributed to the patriarch Enoch. Here is what it contains, when it was written, why it matters, and where to read it in full.
Why Isn't the Book of Enoch in the Bible?
The New Testament quotes the Book of Enoch, and it was read widely in the early church. So why was it left out of the canon? The history is clearer than most people expect.
What Is the Book of Jubilees?
The Book of Jubilees retells Genesis and Exodus as a revelation given to Moses on Sinai, dated year by year in 49-year “jubilees.” Here is what it contains, when it was written, and why only Ethiopia kept it as scripture.
What Are the "Gnostic Gospels"?
The Nag Hammadi discovery of 1945 turned up dozens of texts describing a very different religion from the Bible's own — a flawed lesser creator and salvation through secret knowledge. What they actually teach, and which of them you can read on this site.
What Is Gnosticism?
Gnosticism was a family of ancient movements teaching salvation through secret knowledge and a flawed lesser creator. What its main schools believed, how early Christians answered, and why scholars still argue over the word.
What Is the Nag Hammadi Library?
Thirteen papyrus books found in Egypt in 1945 preserved more than fifty ancient texts in Coptic, from the Gospel of Thomas to Hermetic treatises. What was found, who hid it, and what it does and doesn't tell us.
What Is Coptic?
Coptic is the last stage of the ancient Egyptian language, written in Greek letters, and the language of the Nag Hammadi library, the earliest Egyptian Bible translations and the Coptic Orthodox liturgy.
Who Were the Apostolic Fathers?
The Apostolic Fathers are the earliest Christian authors outside the New Testament — writing around AD 95 to 160, some within living memory of the apostles. Who they were and what they wrote.
What Language Did Jesus Speak?
Jesus's everyday language was Aramaic, not the Latin of Roman power or the Greek the New Testament itself was written in — and that same layered, multilingual world is why the Bible exists in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Syriac, and Ge'ez translations at all.
What Is the Masoretic Text?
For roughly a thousand years, Hebrew scripture was written with no vowels at all. The Masoretes are the scribal family who fixed that, and their finished text is what nearly every Old Testament translation, including the King James Version, is actually built on.
What Are the Dead Sea Scrolls?
In 1947, ancient scrolls turned up in a cave near the Dead Sea. What was in them, who wrote them, and why they changed what we know about the Bible's text — and about 1 Enoch and Jubilees.
What Is the Septuagint?
The Septuagint is the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible — the Old Testament most of the New Testament actually quotes from. Its legendary origin, what it included, and why it still matters.
What Is the Latin Vulgate?
Jerome's Latin translation became the Western church's Bible for over a thousand years — and its numbering, inherited partly from the Septuagint, still causes real confusion for readers comparing translations today.
Who Were the Pharisees, Scribes, and Levites?
Pharisees, scribes, and Levites were three different things in Jesus's world — a lay movement, a profession, and a priestly tribe. Who each one was, and why Jesus called them hypocrites.
Who Were the Sadducees?
The Sadducees ran the Temple, controlled the priesthood, and denied the resurrection outright. Who they were, why they clashed with Jesus over the afterlife, and why they vanished after AD 70.
Who Were the Essenes?
The Essenes were a strict, separatist Jewish sect, likely behind the Dead Sea Scrolls — yet no book of the Bible names them. Here is what ancient historians say they believed and practiced.
What Was the Sanhedrin?
The Sanhedrin was the Jewish world's highest court — the council that tried Jesus, arrested Peter and John, and stoned Stephen. Here is what it was, who sat on it, and what power it actually had under Rome.
Who Were the Herodians and the Zealots?
The Herodians backed Rome's client kings; the Zealots wanted Rome overthrown by force. Jesus had both kinds of Jew in his own following, and the two groups even teamed up once — against him.
Which Herod Is Which?
The New Testament mentions six different rulers named Herod, spanning three generations of one family — the king who ordered the slaughter of the innocents is not the Herod who beheaded John the Baptist. Here's how to keep them straight.
Who Was Pontius Pilate?
The Roman governor who alone held the power to execute Jesus, tried to avoid the decision, and put his verdict in writing anyway — nailed to the cross itself.
Who Were the Publicans (Tax Collectors)?
Publicans collected Roman taxes from their own people and were despised for it — treated as traitors and grouped with "sinners." Jesus called one to be an apostle and was criticized for eating with the rest.
Who Were the Samaritans?
Centuries of mutual hostility separated Jews and Samaritans by Jesus's day — yet Jesus talks theology with a Samaritan woman at a well, makes a Samaritan the hero of his most famous parable, and sends the gospel straight into Samaria.
Synagogue vs. Temple: Where Did Jewish Worship Happen?
One Temple, staffed by priests, for sacrifice — and synagogues in every town, run by laypeople, for prayer and reading scripture. Jesus and Paul both moved constantly between the two.
What Were Phylacteries and Tzitzit?
Small boxes of scripture bound to the forehead and arm, and blue-corded fringes on every garment's hem — literal fulfillments of two Old Testament commands, and the very hem a desperate woman reaches for to touch Jesus.
What Is the Shema?
"Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD" — the single verse at the center of Jewish daily prayer, and the passage Jesus himself names as the greatest commandment in the law.
Who Was Josephus?
Flavius Josephus is the single most important non-biblical source for Second Temple Jewish history — the Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, and Sanhedrin, plus independent notices of John the Baptist and James, the brother of Jesus. Here is who he was.
What Is the Talmud? Mishnah, Gemara, and the Two Talmuds
The Talmud is the great written record of rabbinic Judaism: the Mishnah, a law code compiled around AD 200, and the Gemara, centuries of discussion on it. There was no Talmud in Jesus' day; he met its tradition as spoken teaching. Here is how the pieces fit together, and when.
Who Was Melchizedek?
A king-priest with no recorded parents, birth, or death appears for three verses in Genesis, then resurfaces centuries later as the key to the New Testament's argument for Christ's priesthood. Here is who he was, and why he mattered so much.
Sheol, Hades, Gehenna, Tartarus: What Does the Bible Actually Call "Hell"?
The King James Version translates four different original words as "hell" — a Hebrew word for the grave, a Greek word for the realm of the dead, a Greek word for a valley outside Jerusalem, and a Greek verb found nowhere else in the Bible. Here is what each one actually says.
What Is Gematria?
Ancient Hebrew and Greek had no separate number symbols — every letter did double duty as a digit, so every word already added up to something. Here is what gematria and isopsephy actually are, and where the practice shows up inside scripture itself.
What Is Kabbalah?
Kabbalah is the mystical tradition of Judaism, taking shape in medieval Spain and Provence around the Zohar. What it teaches, how it uses Hebrew letters and numbers, and how Christians came to study it.
What Is Hermeticism?
Hermeticism is a body of Greek-Egyptian writings attributed to “Thrice-Great Hermes,” written around the first to third centuries AD. What the Corpus Hermeticum says, how it differs from Gnosticism, and why the Renaissance loved it.
What Is a Grimoire? The Key of Solomon and the Goetia
A grimoire is a handbook of ritual magic. Why so many were credited to King Solomon, where the Key of Solomon and the Goetia really come from, and why this site carries them as history, not scripture.
What Happened at the Council of Nicaea?
In AD 325, over 300 bishops gathered at Nicaea to settle a dispute over who Jesus was. Here is what the council actually decided — and the one thing it never touched: the Bible's contents.
What Was the Great Schism?
In 1054, the Latin and Greek churches excommunicated each other, splitting Western and Eastern Christianity for good. Here is what happened, and why it still shapes which Bible you're holding.
What Was the Protestant Reformation?
In 1517, a German monk's protest against the sale of indulgences split Western Christianity in two. What Martin Luther actually argued, and how it produced the Protestant Bible this site's own King James text descends from.
What Is the Council of Trent?
Meeting on and off for eighteen years, the Council of Trent was the Catholic Church's answer to the Reformation — and the moment the Apocrypha was formally declared scripture. Here is what it decided.
What Are the Clementine Octateuch and Heptateuch?
The Apostolic Constitutions, the Clementine Octateuch, the Alexandrine Sinodos (Heptateuch) and the Ethiopic Sinodos are collections of ancient church orders. Here is what each contains, who used it, and why none of them is scripture.
What Is the Ethiopian Orthodox Bible?
The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church holds the largest Bible of any Christian tradition — around 81 books, including 1 Enoch and Jubilees, which no other tradition treats as scripture. Here is what makes it different, and why.
What Is the Textus Receptus?
The Textus Receptus is the printed Greek New Testament the King James Version was translated from — assembled by one scholar in a hurry, in 1516, from a handful of late medieval manuscripts. Its real history, and where to read it.
Who Translated the King James Bible?
Around 47 scholars, working in six teams, produced the King James Bible in 1611 — building heavily on William Tyndale's earlier translation. Here is how it actually came together.