I got so focused at work that I forgot to post what I promissed… sorry.
I had a long post in mind but I’ll do the short version.
The Old Testament writings gravitates around five of them, which are known as The Law (also called Torah or Pentateuch). These five writings are believed (including by me) to had been written by Moses, the prophet, around 1,400 B.C. The others are historical, writings of wisdom and poetical writings. All these OT pieces have in common what the Church calls “economy of salvation” and the promisse of a Messiah.
Thus, it is this consistency and coherence among OT writings that make them so special. Furthermore, the gravitating writings were written between the writing of The Law and the Incarnation of the Word (except one of them which I strongly believe was written around 2,000 B.C.)
Then, there are the Gospels. They are the most important of all the Sacred Scriptures. The whole OT points out to the Gospels.
And after the Gospels, men of God wrote letters, another historical writing and a prophetical one. They also point out to the Gospels. The ones that are consistent with the OT and the Gospels, faithful to truth, and original, made it to the Bible as part of the NT.
Unlike the OT, which took millennia to be written and fulfilled, the NT took no more than 90 years to be written. Many of these books were studied during the first centuries and some even became canonical for a period in some oriental churches, although they didn’t make it as canonical by the Council of Trent in the 15th Century. The ones that were defined as canon have been considered inspired by God for thousands of years before Trent.
This is how I would summarize the history of Sacred Scriptures.
I am preparing a course about economy of salvation so people can at least grasp the story that underlines the Bible. I’m using St. Augustine and a few Catholic American writers as inspiration, since they already did intensive studies about it. The difference is that I take into account a correction in their timeline that I think they missed which makes a lot of difference. This correction is so important that I think it even unlocks the book of Apocalipse, by St. John the Apostle.
