A casual reader enters a bookshop looking for a Bible. However, not all the Bibles on display have the same contents! Some have more books than others, some are study editions, some use gender-free language. How did this come about? This Introduction works back through the processes by which the Bible was written, transmitted, copied and declared to be authoritative by various churches. The following topics are dealt with: What is the Bible?; How Biblical Writers Wrote; The Making of the Old Testament; The Making of the Apocrypha; The Making of the New Testament; The Canon of the Bible; The Study of the Bible; The Use of the Bible in Social, Moral and Political Questions. This updated edition takes account of developments in scholarship since the book was first published in 1999 by Penguin. The original edition has been translated into Spanish and Portuguese.