You don't sound dumb. I know just as little, if not less, about the Torah.
There are actually 66 books in the Bible. It has two parts, the Old Testament and the New Testament. The Old Testament is the same or very similar to the Torah, I think. The New Testament is stuff about Jesus and his apostles. There are the four gospels and a bunch of other stuff like letters and poems too.
None of the Bible was written while Jesus was alive. After He died, people wrote down what they knew and had heard of his teaching and they traded scrolls around and read them aloud in home churches. In a way, it's glorified gossip, so naturally not all of the details lined up. All of the books are anonymous and yes, they're all by different people. Some people's interpretations and writings were very literal, some were only based on what Jesus taught and were very abstract and centered on the individual. There were dozens of different types of early Christians and it was something like a hundred or two hundred years before they were consolidated and the Bible was put into the form we see today in our hotel nightstand drawers.
If you can ever manage it, I highly reccomend watching that program on the Discovery Channel about the Gospel of Judas. It's a really interesting story- it was found in Eygpt, it was sold on the black market, stolen, ect. Apparently it's written in this obscure old language that only a handful of people in the world can understand.
Updated On: 4/18/06 at 07:36 PM