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The Writing of the Original Manuscripts
The Bible was written many hundreds of years ago by God’s prophets and apostles as God directed them to write it. The people of Israel spoke Hebrew, so most of the Old Testament books were written in Hebrew. When they lived as strangers in Assyria and Babylon, they learned to speak Aramaic, so some later parts of the Old Testament were written in Aramaic.
About three hundred years before Christ was born, Greek became the language of wider communication. Many people in Europe and the Middle East spoke Greek as a second language. So the Old Testament was translated into Greek. When Christ was born, many people in those areas of the world still spoke Greek as a second language, and the New Testament books were all written in Greek.
Back then there were no printers, so the authors wrote these books by hand. These were the original manuscripts. The scribes who copied these manuscripts also did so by hand. These were also manuscripts. These books are extremely important, so the scribes got special training and were very careful to try to copy them accurately.
Over hundreds of years, scribes (and other people as well) made thousands of copies of the Bible books. The manuscripts that the authors originally wrote have all been lost or have fallen apart, so we do not have them. But we do have many of the copies that were written by hand long ago. Some of these copies have survived for many hundreds and even thousands of years.