For centuries, billions of people have read the Bible. scholars have spent their lives studying it, while rabbis, ministers, and priests have focused on interpreting, teaching, and preaching from its pages.
As the sacred text of two of the world’s major religions, Judaism and Christianity, as well as other religions, the Bible has also had an unparalleled influence on literature, especially in the Western world. It has been translated into almost 700 languages, and although exact sales figures are hard to come by, it is considered to be the world’s best-selling book.
You are reading: Who wrote the books of the bible
but despite the undeniable influence of the bible, mysteries continue to persist about its origins. Even after nearly 2,000 years of its existence and centuries of research by biblical scholars, we still don’t know for sure who wrote its various texts, when they were written, or under what circumstances.
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old testament: the single author theory
the old testament, or hebrew bible, chronicles the history of the people of israel for about a millennium, beginning with god’s creation of the world and mankind, and contains the stories, laws, and moral lessons that form the basis of religious life for both Jews and Christians. For at least 1,000 years, both Jewish and Christian traditions held that a single author wrote the first five books of the Bible—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy—collectively known as the Torah (Hebrew for “instruction”). ”) and the pentateuch (Greek for “five scrolls”). That sole author was believed to be Moses, the Hebrew prophet who led the Israelites out of captivity in Egypt and led them through the Red Sea to the Promised Land.
Nevertheless, almost from the beginning, Bible readers noted that there were things in the so-called Five Books of Moses that Moses himself could not have witnessed: his own death, for example, occurs near the end of Deuteronomy. A volume of the Talmud, the collection of Jewish laws recorded between the third and fifth centuries AD, addressed this inconsistency by explaining that Joshua (Moses’ successor as leader of the Israelites) probably wrote the verses about Moses’ death.
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“That’s one opinion among many,” says Joel Baden, professor at Yale Divinity School and author of Composition of the Pentateuch: Renewing the Documentary Hypothesis. “but they are already asking the question: was it possible or not that [moses] had written them?”
When enlightenment began in the 17th century, most religious scholars more seriously questioned the idea of Moses’ authorship, as well as the idea that the Bible could possibly have been the work of a single author. Those first five books were full of contradictory and repetitive material, often seeming to tell different versions of the story of the Israelites, even within a single section of text.
As Baden explains, the “classic example” of this confusion is the story of Noah and the flood (Genesis 6:9). “You read and say, I don’t know how many animals Noah took into the ark with him,” she says. “In this sentence he says two of each animal. in this sentence he takes two of some animals and 14 of any animal.” similarly, the text records the duration of the flood as 40 days in one place and 150 days in another.
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the old testament: various schools of authors
To explain the general contradictions, repetitions, and idiosyncrasies of the Bible, most scholars today agree that the stories and laws it contains were communicated orally, through prose and poetry, for centuries . beginning around the 7th century BC. different groups or schools of authors wrote them at different times, before at some point (probably during the first century BC) they were combined into the single, multi-layered work we know today.
Of the three main blocks of source material that scholars agree comprise the first five books of the Bible, the first is believed to have been written by a group of priests, or priestly authors, whose work scholars designate as ” p”. a second block of source material is known as “d”—for deuteronomist, that is, the author(s) of the vast majority of the book of deuteronomy. “The two aren’t really related to each other in any significant way,” Baden explains, “except that they both give laws and tell a story of Israel’s early history.”
according to some scholars, including baden, the third main block of source material in the torah can be divided into two different, equally coherent schools, named for the word each uses for god: yahweh and elohim. the stories that use the elohim name are classified as “e”, while the others are called “j” (for jawhe, the German translation of yahweh). other scholars disagree on two complete sources for the non-priestly material. instead, Baden says, they see a much more gradual process, in which material from numerous smaller sources was layered over a longer period of time.
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new testament: who wrote the gospels?
just as the old testament recounts the story of the israelites in the millennium leading up to the birth of jesus christ, the new testament records the life of jesus, from his birth and teachings to his death and subsequent resurrection, a narrative that constitutes the fundamental basis of Christianity. Beginning in AD 70, some four decades after Jesus’ crucifixion (according to the Bible), four anonymously written chronicles of his life emerged that would become central documents of the Christian faith. Named for Jesus’ most devoted earthly disciples or apostles (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), the four canonical Gospels were traditionally thought to be eyewitness accounts of Jesus’ life, death, and Resurrection.
But for more than a century, scholars have generally agreed that the Gospels, like many of the New Testament books, were not actually written by the people to whom they are attributed. indeed, it seems clear that the stories that form the basis of Christianity were first communicated orally and passed down from generation to generation, before being collected and written down.
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“names are attached to the titles of the gospels (‘the gospel according to matthew’),” writes biblical scholar bart ehrman in his book jesus, interrupted. “but these titles are later additions to the gospels, provided by editors and scribes to inform readers who the editors thought were the authorities behind the different versions.”
traditionally, 13 of the 27 books of the new testament were attributed to the apostle paul, who converted to christianity after meeting jesus on the road to damascus and wrote a series of letters that helped spread the faith throughout the world Mediterranean. But scholars now agree on the authenticity of only seven of Paul’s epistles: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, Philemon. These are believed to have been written between A.D. 50-60, making them the oldest known evidence of Christianity. The authors of the later epistles may have been followers of Paul, who used his name to authenticate the works.
By the fourth century AD, Christianity had established itself as the dominant religion in the Western world, with the Old and New Testaments as its most sacred texts. In the centuries to come, the Bible would become more central to the lives and faith of millions of people around the world, despite the mystery surrounding its origins and the complex and ongoing debate over its authorship.
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