Dating the Bible

The oldest surviving Hebrew Bible manuscripts, the Dead Sea Scrolls, date to c. the 2nd century BCE. Some of these scrolls are presently stored at the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem. The oldest text of the entire Bible, including the New Testament, is the Codex Sinaiticus dating from the 4th century CE, with its Old Testament a copy of a Greek translation known as the Septuagint. The oldest extant manuscripts of the vocalized Masoretic Text date to the 9th century CE. With the exception of a few biblical sections in the Nevi'im, virtually no biblical text is contemporaneous with the events it describes.

Internal evidence within the texts of the 27-book New Testament canon suggests that most of these books were written in the 1st century CE. The first book written is thought to be either the Epistle to the Galatians (written around 48 CE) or 1 Thessalonians, written around 50 CE. The final book in the ordering of the canon, the Book of Revelation, is generally accepted by traditional scholarship to have been written during the reign of Domitian (81–96) before the writing of 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus and the Epistles of John. Dating the composition of the texts relies primarily on internal evidence, including direct references to historical events—textual criticism of philological and linguistic evidence provides more subjective indications.

Table I: Chronological overview
This table summarises the chronology of the main tables and serves as a guide to the historical periods mentioned. Much of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament may have been assembled in the 5th century BCE. The New Testament books were composed largely in the second half of the 1st century CE. The deuterocanonical books fall largely in between.