<P> By the 2nd century BCE, Jewish groups began calling the books of the Bible the "scriptures" and they referred to them as "holy", or in Hebrew כִּתְבֵי הַקֹּדֶשׁ (Kitvei hakkodesh), and Christians now commonly call the Old and New Testaments of the Christian Bible "The Holy Bible" (in Greek τὰ βιβλία τὰ ἅγια, tà biblía tà ágia) or "the Holy Scriptures" (η Αγία Γραφή, e Agía Graphḗ). The Bible was divided into chapters in the 13th century by Stephen Langton and it was divided into verses in the 16th century by French printer Robert Estienne and is now usually cited by book, chapter, and verse . The division of the Hebrew Bible into verses is based on the sof passuk cantillation mark used by the 10th - century Masoretes to record the verse divisions used in earlier oral traditions . </P> <P> The oldest extant copy of a complete Bible is an early 4th - century parchment book preserved in the Vatican Library, and it is known as the Codex Vaticanus . The oldest copy of the Tanakh in Hebrew and Aramaic dates from the 10th century CE . The oldest copy of a complete Latin (Vulgate) Bible is the Codex Amiatinus, dating from the 8th century . </P> <P> Professor John K. Riches, Professor of Divinity and Biblical Criticism at the University of Glasgow, says that "the biblical texts themselves are the result of a creative dialogue between ancient traditions and different communities through the ages", and "the biblical texts were produced over a period in which the living conditions of the writers--political, cultural, economic, and ecological--varied enormously". Timothy H. Lim, a professor of Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism at the University of Edinburgh, says 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 God and passed to mankind . Parallel to the solidification of the Hebrew canon (c. 3rd century BCE), only the Torah first and then the Tanakh began to be translated into Greek and expanded, now referred to as the Septuagint or the Greek Old Testament . </P> <P> In Christian Bibles, the New Testament Gospels were derived from oral traditions in the second half of the first century CE . Riches says that: </P>

When did the bible start to be written
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