The Bible was written and divided into two parts...The Bible has an Old Testament and a New Testament...The Old Testament consists of thirty nine books, and the New Testament has twenty seven books...The Old Testament describes the history of the Hebrew people, the people of Israel, that God chose to be the chosen ones through whom He would send the Messiah...Therefore, it contains the history of God’s people, the Jewish people (who were originally known as the Hebrew people) and also it includes the prophecies of the coming of the Messiah, the Anointed One...The two parts are two time periods...The entire Old Testament was written before Jesus, the Messiah, came to earth...While the New Testament is about the life of Jesus and written after He was born...Malachi, the last book of the Old Testament, was written four hundred years before the first book of the New Testament...The New Testament has the four gospels of Jesus written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John...Then the epistles or letters written for Christianity...Many of the epistles were written by Saul (Paul) of Tarsus), and the final book of Revelation...Revelation is an act of revealing or communicating Divine Truth to us and what will happen in the future, when the Messiah returns to earth...St. John writes about the permanent significance of Revelation which lies in his conviction that right and goodness will ultimately triumph over evil...
The Old Testament was written over a period of about 1,000 years, from about 1400 to 400 BC...The New Testament was written over a period of about 60 years, from about 50 to 110 AD...The Old Testament contains a history of the Hebrew people with their relationship with God...It starts with the story of Creation, and goes on to discuss how the Hebrew people's history and relationship with getting to know God...The Old Testament tells how and why the Hebrew people went to Egypt, and about their Exodus from Egypt...It includes the Books of the Prophets telling the Hebrew people of their sins, and warned them of the problems of sinning and how sin separates people from God...
The New Testament contains the story of the gospel, the Good News of a Messiah coming...Jesus Christ, who Christians believe is the Messiah, and the Savior of the World from our sinning...The New Testament also contains the teachings of Jesus, what He did and His deeds and actions...The New Testament also writes about the people who were the first leaders of the Christian church...
C. S. Lewis in his book, God in the Dock, writes about the Bible and how it works its way into being and how it all comes together in his opinion...Lewis writes: The Bible can be divided into two parts – the Old and the New Testaments...The Old Testament contains fabulous elements...The New Testament consists mostly of teaching, not of narrative at all: but where it is narrative, it is, in my opinion, historical...As to the fabulous element in the Old Testament, I very much doubt if you would be wise to chuck it out...What you get is something coming gradually into focus...First you get, scattered through the heathen religions all over the world – but still quite vague and mythical – the idea of a god who is killed and broken and then comes to life again...No one knows where he is supposed to have lived and died; he’s not historical...Then you get the Old Testament...Religious ideas get a bit more focused...Everything is now connected with a particular nation...And it comes still more into focus as it goes on...Jonah and the Whale, Noah and his Ark, are fabulous; but the Court history of King David is probably as reliable as the Court history of Louis XIV...Then, in the New Testament the thing really happens...The dying God really appears – as a Historical Person, living in a definite place and time...If we could sort out all the fabulous elements in the earlier stages and separate them from the historical ones, I think we might lose an essential part of the whole process...