Scripture Vs. Bible

A reader writes:

What is the difference between Scripture and the Bible?

Let’s start with the earliest term: "The Scriptures." This term literally means "the writings" and it’s used of a specific set of writings–the divinely inspired ones that you find between the covers of a Bible today. Originally, they weren’t all in a single volume. They were a collection of scrolls, so they were viewed as different writings. Hence: "The writings." The is the way that the term "the scriptures" is used in the Bible.

You’ll also find a similar term in the Bible: "scripture." It doesn’t have "the" in front of it (or, at least, it doesn’t ALWAYS have "the" in front of it). The key, though, is that it’s SINGULAR rather than PLURAL.

This term means something different.

When you encounter "scripture" in the singular in the Bible, it tends to refer to some PARTICULAR writing, not the collection of sacred writings as a whole.

For example, when John 19:12 says:

So they said to one another, "Let us not tear it, but cast lots for it, to decide whose it shall be"; this was to fulfill the Scripture: "THEY DIVIDED MY OUTER GARMENTS AMONG THEM, AND FOR MY CLOTHING THEY CAST LOTS."

John has in mind one particular writing–one particular scripture: the book of Psalms, and specifically Psalm 22:18, which is where the quotation is from.

But when John 5:39 says

"You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; it is these that testify about Me"

what is meant is the body of sacred writings as a whole: "the Scriptures."

Over the course of Church history, "the Scriptures" got bound in a single volume, which led folks to think of them more as a single unit rather than a collection of writings, and so the word "scripture" (in the singular) came to be used as a collective noun referring to all of them.

You’ll notice this usage particularly in Protestant circles. Protestants will often talk about "Scripture" where Catholics would say "the Scriptures" (though Catholics may also sometimes use "Scripture" collectively).

Now for "Bible": It’s a synonym for "the Scriptures."

"Bible" is adapted from the Latin word biblia, which was adapted from the Greek ta biblia, which means "the books." Way back when, books were the same things as scrolls, which is again related to the idea of the Bible as a collection of writings (books, scrolls). That’s the way the sacred writings/books were experienced in the Old Testament: as a collection of scrolls.

It was only with the introduction of Christianity that the modern form of book–the codex (which has a spine)–became popular. This was what made it possible (in the fullness of time) for all of the sacred scrolls to be bound together in one book.

Nobody would want a scroll with all of them, because you’d have to laboriously roll through a couple thousand pages of material, and the scroll would tear and get poorly wound and things like that. But with a codex (a book with a spine) you could flip to whatever passage you want quickly.

Codices are thus random access where scrolls are linear access: Kind of the same difference between computer disks and computer tapes or between DVDs and VHS. You can get just where you want to go much more quickly in the former than the latter.

And so codices replaced scrolls the way DVD is replacing VHS.

This replacement led to the creation of collective terms for the sacred writings: "Scripture" instead of "the Scriptures" and "Bible" instead of ta biblia.

The rest is history.