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Dating of the Bible commences with the compilation of the various books of the Tanakh into a fixed canon in Judaism which according to the Talmud was undertaken by the "Men of the Great Assembly" by 450 BCE, and have since remained unchanged. However, Modern era scholars are less certain, and believe that the process of canonization of the Tanakh became finalized between later.

Regarding the dates of the individual books of the Tanakh, the dates of many of the texts of the Hebrew Bible are recorded in Jewish sources, notably the Talmud, and date to 12th century BCE although modern academic analysts find this difficult to correlate. Textual criticism places all of them within the 1st millennium BC, although there is considerable uncertainty as to the century in some cases. The constituent parts of the Hebrew Bible are usually dated as follows:


 * Traditional Jewish dates according to the Talmud are typically a few centuries earlier than the dates accepted by academia, putting the redaction of the Tanakh by the "Men of the Great Assembly" before 450 BC and the books of the Torah to before 1200 BC. Current research believes that the Torah may have been redacted into its final five books form around 450 BC, with its oldest parts dating back to as early as 1000 BC.


 * the Nevi'im, similarly, while dated in Jewish texts, is believed by the various modern academia for the older books to be 6th century BC compilations of 8th to 7th century BC material, while the younger books are post-exilic, dating to the 5th to 2nd centuries BC.


 * the Ketuvim, also having fairly precise dating in Jewish sources, but currently argued by some textual critics to be sometimes exilic (6th century BC) compilations, while the bulk of the texts are post-exilic (5th to 3rd centuries BC), the Book of Daniel possibly as late as the 2nd century BC.

A canon of the New Testament begins to emerge in the 4th century, but remained in flux between the various Christian denominations. With the exception an extensive manuscripts and fragments (found among the Dead Sea scrolls, discussed below), no Old Testament manuscript predates the 2nd century BC. The texts of the New Testament may be dated with some confidence to the 1st to 2nd centuries AD. The earliest manuscript of the New Testament is the Rylands Library Papyrus P52, a manuscript fragments of the Gospel of John dated to the first half of the 2nd century. The Chester Beatty Papyri P46, which contains most of the Pauline epistles, the Magdalen papyrus P64/67, and the Bodmer Papyri P66 are other noted early manusript, dated c. 200, over a century after the New Testament books were most likely composed. For this reason, dating of the older texts cannot be done directly by dating manuscripts, but relies on textual criticism, philological and linguistic evidence, as well as direct references to historical events in the texts.

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