The Bible: Collection of Religious Texts.

books of the New Testament form the Canonical gospels which recount the life of Christ and are central to the Christian faith.

Christian Bibles include the books of the Hebrew Bible, but arranged in a different order: Jewish Scriptures ends with the people of Israel restored to Jerusalem and the  temple, whereas the Christian arrangement ends with the book of the prophet Malachi. The oldest surviving Christian Bibles are Greek manuscripts from the 4th century; the oldest complete Jewish Bible is a Greek translation, also dating to the 4th century. The oldest complete manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible (the Masoretic text) date from the Middle Ages.

About forty different men from various backgrounds wrote the Bible. During the three centuries following the establishment of Christianity in the 1st century, Church Fathers compiled Gospel accounts and letters of apostles into a Christian Bible which became known as the New Testament. The Old and New Testament together are commonly referred to as the Holy Bible. Many Christians consider the text of the Bible to be divinely inspired, and cite passages in the Bible itself as support for this belief.

The canonical composition of the Old Testament is under dispute between Christian groups: Protestants hold only the books of the Hebrew Bible to be canonical; Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox additionally consider the deuterocanonical books, a group of Jewish books to be canonical. The New Testament is composed of the Gospels (good news), the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles (letters), and the Book of Revelation.

The Bible is the best selling book in history with approximate sales estimates ranging from 2.5 billion to

6 billion. The names for the Bible are as follows: A. English word Bible (used by the Christian/Hebrew/Judaism B. Latin word biblia sacra "holy books" or biblia a feminine singular noun in medieval Latin, and so the word was loaned as a singular noun into the vernaculars of Western Europe. (Medieval Latin and Late Latin)

I will discuss the Christian Bible, that Martin Luther King Jr. followed and preached throughout his life in comparsion to Malcom X who followed the teachings of the Quran. The Christian Bible consists of the Hebrew scriptures of Judaism, which are known as the Old Testament; and later writings recording the lives and teachings of Jesus and his followers, known as the New Testament. Testament is a translation of the Greek, also often translated covenant. It is a legal term denoting a formal and legally binding declaration of benefits to be given by one party to another. Here it does not connote mutuality; rather, it is a unilateral covenant offered by God to individuals.

Groups within Christianity include differing books as part of one or both of these "Testaments" of their sacred writings, most prominent among which are the Biblical apocrypha or deuterocanonical books. In Judaism, the term Christian Bible is commonly used to identify only those books like the New Testament which have been added by Christians to the Masoretic Text, and excludes any reference to an Old Testament.

The Old Testament consists of a collection of writings believed to have been composed at various times from the twelfth to the 2nd century BC. The books were written in classical Hebrew, except for brief portions (Ezra

4:8 nd 7:12-26, Jeremiah 10:11, Daniel 2:47:28) which are in the Aramaic language, a sister language which became the lingua franca of the Semitic world.

Much of the material, including many genealogies, poems and narratives, is thought to have been handled down by word of mouth for many generations. Very few manuscripts are said to have survived the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70. The Old Testament is accepted by Christians as scripture. Broadly speaking, it contains the same material as the Hebrew Bible.

However, the order of the books is not entirely the same as that found in Hebrew manuscripts and in the ancient versions and varies from Judaism in interpretation and emphasis (see for example Isaish 7:14). Christian denominations disagree about the incorporation of a small number of books into their canons (13) of the Old Testament. A few groups consider particular translations to be divinely inspired, notably the Greek Septuagint, the Aramaic Peshitta, and the English King James Version.

The Septuagint (Greek translation, from Alexandia in Egypt under the Ptolemies) was generally abandoned in favour of the Masoretic text as the basis for translations of the Old Testament into Western languages from St. Jerome's Bible (the Vulagate) to the present day.

In Eastern Christianity, translations based on the Septuagint still prevail. Some modern Western translations make use of the Septuagint to clarify passages in the Masoretic text, where the Septuagint may preserve a variant reading of the Hebrew text. They also sometimes adopt variants that appear in other texts e.g. those discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls.

A number of books which are part of the Peshitta

or Greek Septuagint but are not found in the Hebrew (Rabbinic) Bible are often referred to as deuterocanonical books by Roman Catholics referring to a later secondary (i.e. deutero) canon. Most Protestants term these books as apocrypha. Evangelicals and those of the Modern Protestant traditions do not accept the deuterocanonical books as canonical, although Protestant Bibles included them in Apocrypha sections until around the 1920s. Martin Luther King Jr. had great support from the Roman Catholic Church during the civil rights moverment, as well support from the Kennedy Administration. The Anglican Churches uses some of the Apocryphal books liturgically.