Consider the number of copies that have been sold over the centuries (around five billion to date, increased by another 100 million each year given away for free) and there’s no denying that the The Bible’s influence on Western civilization has been monumental.
but if the position of the bible as a cultural giant is beyond doubt, its history is quite the opposite. For centuries, some of the world’s greatest thinkers have wondered about the origins and evolution of this extraordinary document. who wrote it? when? and why?
You are reading: Where did the books of the bible come from
These are the most thorny questions, further entangled by the great antiquity of the Bible and the fact that part, or all, has become a sacred text for members of two of the world’s great religions: Judaism and Christianity. – with more than two billion people.
where does the bible originate?
Archaeology and the study of written sources have shed light on the history of the two halves of the Bible: the Old Testament, the history of the ups and downs of the Jews in the millennium before the birth of Jesus; and the new testament, which documents the life and teachings of jesus. These finds may be incomplete and highly contested, but they have helped historians paint a picture of how the Bible came to life.
Perhaps the best place to start the story is in sun-scorched northern Egypt, because it was here that the Bible and archeology can, only can, first collide.
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For centuries, the Old Testament has been widely interpreted as a story of disaster and rescue: the Israelites fall from grace before they rise up, dust themselves off, and find redemption. Nowhere is this theme more apparent than in Exodus, the dramatic second book of the Old Testament, which recounts the Israelites’ flight from captivity in Egypt to the Promised Land.
But has archeology uncovered one of the captivity sites of the Israelites?
That’s the question some historians have been asking since the 1960s, when Austrian archaeologist Manfred Bietak pinpointed the location of the ancient city of Pi-Ramesses on the site of the modern city of Qantir in the delta of the nile in egypt pi-ramses was the great capital built by ramses ii, one of egypt’s most formidable pharaohs and the biblical executioner of the israelites. It has been argued that Pi-Ramesses was the Biblical city of Ramses, and that the city was built, as the Exodus claims, by Jewish slaves.
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is an intriguing theory, and one that certainly has its skeptics. but if true, it would place enslaved israelites in the nile delta in the decades after 1279 bc, when ramses ii became king. so what happened next?
The Bible has few doubts. it tells us that moses led the israelites out of captivity in egypt (whose population had been struck down by ten plagues inflicted by god) before joshua led a brilliant invasion of canaan, the promised land. the historical sources, however, are much less communicative. As John Barton, a former professor of scriptural interpretation at Oxford University, puts it: “There is no evidence of a major invasion by the Israelites under Joshua; the population does not seem to have changed much in that period as far as we can tell from archaeological studies.”
In fact, the best corroborating evidence for the Bible’s claim that the Israelites stormed Canaan is the Merneptah stele.
what is the wake of merneptah?
Like any good autocrat, Merneptah, Pharaoh of Egypt, loved to brag about his achievements. and when he led his armies in a successful war of conquest in the late thirteenth century B.C. c., he wanted the world and succeeding generations to know all about it.
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Pharaoh’s chosen medium to proclaim his martial prowess was a three-meter-high carved granite slab, now known as the merneptah stele. The stela, which was discovered at the site of the ancient Egyptian city of Thebes in 1896, contains 28 lines of text, mostly detailing the Egyptians’ victory over the Libyans and their allies. but it is the last three lines of the inscription that possibly aroused the most interest among historians.
“Israel has been shaven,” he declares. “His seed of his no longer exists.” these few words constitute the earliest known written reference to the Israelites. It’s an inauspicious start, one that boasts of the near destruction of this people at the hands of one of the ancient world’s superpowers in their homeland of Canaan. but the Israelites would survive.
and the story they would go on to tell about themselves and their relationship with their god could dwarf any of merneptah’s accomplishments. would spawn what is surely the most influential book of all time: the bible.
the merneptah stela may describe more jewish grief at the hands of their perennial egyptian persecutors, but it at least suggests they may have been in canaan during merneptah’s reign (1213-1203 bc).
If the early history of the Israelites is uncertain, so is the evolution of the book that would tell their story.
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who wrote the bible?
until the 17th century, the general opinion was that the first five books of the bible (genesis, exodus, leviticus, numbers and deuteronomy) were the work of a single author: moses. that theory has since been seriously challenged.
scholars now believe that the stories that would become the bible spread by word of mouth over the centuries, in the form of oral tales and poetry, perhaps as a means of forging a collective identity among tribes From Israel. eventually, these stories were collated and written down. the question is by whom and when?
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One clue may lie in a limestone rock discovered embedded in a stone wall in the city of Tel Zayit, 35 miles southwest of Jerusalem, in 2005. The rock, now known as the Zayit Stone, contains what many historians they believe it to be the oldest complete Hebrew alphabet ever discovered, dating to around 1000 B.C. “What was found was not a random scraping of two or three letters, it was the entire alphabet,” Kyle McCarter of Johns Hopkins University in Maryland said of the stone. “everything about it says that this is the ancestor of the Hebrew script.”
The Zayit Stone itself doesn’t tell us when the Bible was written and collated, but it does give us a first glimpse of the language that produced it. and, by tracing the stylistic development of that language over the centuries and cross-referencing it with the biblical text, historians have been able to rule out single-author hypotheses, concluding instead that it was written by waves of scribes during the first millennium. BC
who was king david?
It has been suggested that the first wave of scribes may have begun work during the reign of King David (circa 1000 BC). Whether true or not, David is a monumental figure in biblical history: the slayer of Goliath, the conqueror of Jerusalem. David is also a very important figure in the quest to establish links between the Bible and historical fact, as he appears to be the oldest biblical figure confirmed by archaeology.
“I killed [the] king of the house of David.” so boasts the tel dan stele, an inscribed stone dating from 870-750 BC. c. and discovered in northern israel in the 1990s. like the merneptah stela before it, it documents a warlord’s victory over the israelites (the man gloating was likely the local ruler hazael of aram-damascus ). but at least it indicates that david was a historical figure.
the tel dan stela also suggests that no matter how capable their rulers were, the people of israel continued to be threatened by powerful and belligerent neighbors. and, in 586 a. c., one of those neighbors, the Babylonians, would inflict on the Jews one of the most devastating defeats in their history: sacking the holy city of Jerusalem, massacring its inhabitants and dragging many more back to Babylon.
for the people of israel, the fall of jerusalem was a searing experience. It created, in the words of Eric M Meyers, a biblical scholar at Duke University in North Carolina, “one of the most significant theological crises in the history of the Jewish people.” And according to many scholars, that crisis may have had a transformative impact on the writing of the Bible.
the old testament is much more than a formulaic history of the evolution of a nation, it is also a chronicle of that nation’s relationship with its god. did he convince the sack of jerusalem in 586 a. c. to a new wave of Jewish thinkers that they had not kept their end of the bargain? Did it prompt them to revise all previous editions of the Jewish scriptures to heighten the emphasis on the agreement or “covenant” between the people and their one god?
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Whether this theory holds or not, there is no doubt that when they returned from exile in Babylon, the Bible held a unique place in the consciousness of the Jewish people. however, it would be centuries before the book was revered as a secret text for non-Jews. And the reason for this transformation from national to international significance was, of course, the figure of Jesus Christ. It is the so-called New Testament, the account of the life and teachings of Jesus, which made the Hebrew Bible a global icon that shaped civilization.
who was jesus? did it really exist?
Most scholars agree that Jesus, a first-century religious leader and preacher, existed historically. He was born in c4 BC and died-reportedly crucified by order of the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate-in CAD 30-33. then, for about 40 years, news of his teachings spread by word of mouth until around 70 AD. c., four written accounts of his life emerged that changed everything.
The Gospels, or “good news,” of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are critically important to the Christian faith. It is his descriptions of the life of Jesus Christ that have made him arguably the most influential figure in human history.
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“We can’t be sure when the Gospels were written,” says Barton, “and we know little about the authors. But the guess is that Mark came first, in the 1970s, followed by Matthew and Luke in the 1980s and 1990s, and John in the 1990s or early 2nd century.
“in general, matthew, mark, and luke tell the same story with variations and are therefore called the ‘synoptic’ gospels, while john has a very different style, as well as telling a markedly different version of the jesus story . Mateo and Lucas seem to be attempts to improve the brand, adding more stories and sayings from now lost sources. John is a different conceptualization of the Jesus story, portraying a more obviously divine figure.”
Although the variations on the four Gospels may have been a source of frustration for those trying to paint a definitive picture of the life and teachings of Jesus, they offer a fascinating insight into the challenges facing the early Christian church as stretched across the Mediterranean. world in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD
mark, it has been argued, wrote for a community deeply affected by the failure of a jewish revolt against the roman empire in the 60s ad, while luke wrote for a predominantly gentile (non-jewish) audience eager to show that the Christian beliefs were able to flourish within the Roman Empire. Both John and Matthew hint at the growing tensions between Jewish Christians and Jewish religious authorities.
As a Jew, Jesus would have been well versed in the Hebrew Bible and, according to the Gospels, saw himself as the fulfillment of ancient Jewish prophecies. “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets,” Matthew reports that he said. “I did not come to destroy, but to fulfill”. but despite all that, by the time the gospels were written, the schisms between Judaism and nascent Christianity were clearly emerging.
How did Christianity spread around the world?
the epistles, or letters, written by the apostle paul to churches throughout the mediterranean world, which are our best source for the initial spread of christianity, confirm that christianity began in jerusalem but spread rapidly to syria and then to the rest of the Mediterranean world, and was accepted primarily by non-Jews, says John Barton, a former professor of scriptural interpretation at Oxford University.
“The Epistles [which make up 13 books of the New Testament] are our earliest evidence for Christianity,” Barton says. “The first dates from the 50s AD, just two decades after the death of Jesus.”
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As Paul’s letters to churches like the one in the Greek city of Thessaloniki reveal, early Christian communities were often persecuted for their beliefs.
and it is such persecution, particularly at the hands of the romans, that may have inspired the last book of the new testament, the revelations. With its dark descriptions of a seven-headed beast and allusions to an impending apocalypse, the revelations are now widely believed to be a prediction of the grisly fate the author believed awaited Christianity’s Roman oppressors.
despite that oppression, by the fourth century christianity had become the dominant religion in the mediterranean world, with the new testament widely revered as a holy text inspired by god. “It was around this time,” says Barton, “that the 27 books of the New Testament were copied into individual books as if they formed a single work.” an example is the Codex Sinaiticus, now in the British Library. “The first person to list exactly what books we now have as the New Testament is the fourth-century bishop, Athanasius of Alexandria, but it’s clear he was only reporting what was already widely accepted.”
by the end of the fifth century, a series of councils across the christian world had effectively approved the new testament we know today: the bible’s journey to become the most influential book in human history was well and truly under way .
This article first appeared in the June 2019 edition of the BBC’s Breaking Story
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