Bible Trivia Quiz Questions With Answers

Trivia quiz questions with answers about the Christian Bible.

Bible Trivia Quiz Questions With Answers

What is the Bible?
A: The Bible is a collection of sacred texts or scriptures that Jews and Christians consider to be a product of divine inspiration and a record of the relationship between God and humans.

With estimated total sales of over 5 billion copies, it is widely considered to be the what?
A: The most influential and best-selling book of all time.

What is regarded as canonical text differs depending on what?
A: Traditions and groups.

A number of Bible canons have evolved, with contents that do what?
A: Overlap and diverge.

The Christian Old Testament overlaps with what Bible?
A: Hebrew and the Greek Septuagint.

The Hebrew Bible is known in Judaism as what?
A: The Tanakh.

The New Testament is a collection of writings by early Christians, believed to be mostly what?
A: Jewish disciples of Christ, written in first-century Koine Greek.

These early Christian Greek writings consist of what?
A: Gospels, letters, and apocalyptic writings.

Among Christian denominations there is some disagreement about the contents of the canon, primarily the what?
A: Apocrypha, a list of works that are regarded with varying levels of respect.

Attitudes towards the Bible also differ amongst whom?
A: Christian groups.

Roman Catholics, high church Anglicans and Eastern Orthodox Christians stress what?
A: The harmony and importance of the Bible and sacred tradition.

Protestant churches, including Evangelical Anglicans, focus on what?
A: The idea of sola scriptura, or scripture alone.

When did this concept arise?
A: During the Protestant Reformation, and many denominations today support the use of the Bible as the only source of Christian teaching.

The Bible has been a massive influence on literature and history, especially where?
A: In the Western World, where the Gutenberg Bible was the first book printed using movable type.

According to the March 2007 edition of Time, the Bible has done what?
A: It has done more to shape literature, history, entertainment, and culture than any book ever written.

Its influence on world history is unparalleled, and shows no signs of what?
A: Abating.

As of the 2000s, it sells approximately how many copies annually?
A: 100 million.

The English word Bible is from what Latin word?
A: Biblia.

Medieval Latin biblia is short for what?
A: Biblia sacra "holy book".

The biblical scholar F.F. Bruce notes that Chrysostom appears to be the first writer (in his Homilies on Matthew, delivered between 386 and 388) to use what Greek phrase?
A: Ta biblia ("the books") to describe both the Old and New Testaments together.

By the 2nd century BCE, Jewish groups began calling the books of the Bible what?
A: The "scriptures" and they referred to them as "holy".

When was the Bible divided into chapters?
A: In the 13th century by Stephen Langton.

It was divided into verses in the 16th century by whom?
A: French printer Robert Estienne and is now usually cited by book, chapter, and verse.

What is the oldest extant copy of a complete Bible?
A: It is an early 4th-century parchment book preserved in the Vatican Library, and it is known as the Codex Vaticanus.

The oldest copy of a complete Latin (Vulgate) Bible is what?
A: The Codex Amiatinus, dating from the 8th century.

The Isaiah scroll, which is a part of the Dead Sea Scrolls, contains what?
A: Almost the whole Book of Isaiah.

When does the scroll date from?
A: It dates from the 2nd century BCE.

Timothy H. Lim, a professor of Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism at the University of Edinburgh, says what?
A: That the Old Testament is "a collection of authoritative texts of apparently divine origin that went through a human process of writing and editing."

He states that it is not a magical book, nor was it literally written by whom?
A: God.

In Christian Bibles, the New Testament Gospels were derived from what?
A: Oral traditions in the second half of the first century CE.

The period of transmission is short: how many years passed between the death of Jesus and the writing of Mark's Gospel?
A: Less than 40.

This means that there was little time for what?
A: For oral traditions to assume fixed form.

The Bible was later translated into what?
A: Latin and other languages.

John Riches states what?
A: The translation of the Bible into Latin marks the beginning of a parting of the ways between Western Latin-speaking Christianity and Eastern Christianity, which spoke Greek, Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopic, and other languages.
The Nash Papyrus (2nd century BCE) contains a portion of a pre-Masoretic Text, specifically the what?
A: Ten Commandments and the Shema Yisrael prayer.

The Masoretic Text is the authoritative Hebrew text of the what?
A: Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh.

It defines the books of the Jewish canon, and also the precise what?
A: Letter-text of these biblical books, with their vocalization and accentuation.

The oldest extant manuscripts of the Masoretic Text date from approximately when?
A: The 9th century CE.

The name Tanakh reflects what threefold division of the Hebrew Scriptures?
A: Torah ("Teaching"), Nevi'im ("Prophets") and Ketuvim ("Writings").

The Torah is also known as what?
A: The "Five Books of Moses" or the Pentateuch, meaning "five scroll-cases".

The Hebrew names of the books are derived from what?
A: The first words in the respective texts.

The Torah consists of what five books?
A: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy.

The first eleven chapters of Genesis provide accounts of what?
A: The creation (or ordering) of the world and the history of God's early relationship with humanity.

The remaining thirty-nine chapters of Genesis provide an account of what?
A: God's covenant with the Biblical patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (also called Israel) and Jacob's children, the "Children of Israel", especially Joseph.

It tells of how God commanded Abraham to do what?
A: Leave his family and home in the city of Ur, eventually to settle in the land of Canaan.

It tells how the Children of Israel later moved to where?
A: Egypt.

The remaining four books of the Torah tell the story of whom?
A: Moses, who lived hundreds of years after the patriarchs.

The Torah ends with the death of whom?
A: Moses.

The Former Prophets are what books?
A: Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings.

They contain narratives that begin immediately after the death of whom?
A: Moses with the divine appointment of Joshua as his successor.

Joshua then leads the people of Israel into what?
A: The Promised Land.

The Latter Prophets are divided into what two groups?
A: The "major" prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Twelve Minor Prophets, collected into a single book.

The five relatively short books of Song of Songs, Book of Ruth, the Book of Lamentations, Ecclesiastes and Book of Esther are collectively known as what?
A: The Hamesh Megillot (Five Megillot).

These are the latest books collected and designated as "authoritative" in what?
A: The Jewish canon even though they were not complete until the 2nd century CE.

The Torah has been considered canon by Israel as early as when?
A: The 5th century BCE.

The Former and Latter Prophets were canonized by when?
A: the 2nd century BCE.

The Old Testament has always been central to the life of what?
A: The Christian church.

Bible scholar N.T. Wright says what?
A: "Jesus himself was profoundly shaped by the scriptures."

He adds that the earliest Christians also searched those same Hebrew Scriptures in their effort to what?
A: Understand the earthly life of Jesus.

The New Testament is the name given to what?
A: The second and final portion of the Christian Bible.

Who is its central figure?
A: Jesus.

The term "New Testament" came into use in the second century during a controversy among Christians over what?
A: Whether or not the Hebrew Bible should be included with the Christian writings as sacred scripture.

Some other works which were widely read by early churches were excluded from the New Testament and relegated to the collections known as what?
A: The Apostolic Fathers (generally considered orthodox) and the New Testament Apocrypha (including both orthodox and heretical works).

The New Testament is a collection of how many books?
A: 27.

The original texts of the Tanakh were mainly in Hebrew, with some portions in what?
A: Aramaic.

The primary biblical text for early Christians was the what?
A: The Septuagint.

In addition, they translated the Hebrew Bible into what?
A: Several other languages such as Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopic, and Latin, among other languages.

The Bible continues to be translated to new languages, largely by Christian organizations such as whom?
A: Wycliffe Bible Translators, New Tribes Mission and Bible societies.