Who Wrote the Bible

The most read book of all time is the Bible. It is recorded by?Business Insider?that the?Bible sold 3.9 billion copies over ?just the last 50 years! with about?50 English versions?in circulation, and well into the hundreds revised versions. The most popular of which is the 'King James Version' (KJV).

The Bible is a collection of religious scripts sacred to Judaism; Christianity; Samaritanism, and the like faiths. It is an anthology, originally written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Koine Greek.

Whereby, the Bible's Old Testament was assumed to have been first written (c. 1300–165 BC) in an ancient form of Hebrew. Although, Masoretic Text “tradition” the authoritative Hebrew and Aramaic text of the Hebrew Bible or "Tanakh" in Rabbinic Judaism. is held by scholars to have originated in 6th century BC because Hebrew writing is thought to stretch back no further.

Part thereof, is the "Pentateuch" or Torah (Teaching) one of the sections of the Hebrew Bible, consisting of the five books: Numbers, Exodus, Leviticus, Genesis, and Deuteronomy.

The Hebrew Bible consists of (24 books), believed to be determined by the?'Council of Jamnia'?(Jabneh) in CE 90 and 118 as the list of books to be part of the Bible. There is still debate over what all the Jabneh selected to be canonized, as it has only been mentioned in ancient Hebrew writings and no confirmation has been found that this Jabneh existed or canonized. Nonetheless, it is believed the Hebrew Bible has been in its current form since the second century BC.

Whereas, the Bible's New Testament books were written in Koine Greek, which, was common in the Eastern Mediterranean from the conquests of Alexander the Great (c. 335–323 BC) until the evolution of Byzantine Greek (c. CE 600).

The first widespread edition of the Bible was assembled by 'St. Jerome of Stridon' (Hieronymus) around CE 400. This manuscript included the Old Testament and (27 books) of the New Testament in Latin writing.

According to ‘Strong's Concordance’ (index of every word in the KJV, constructed under the direction of James Strong in 1890, while professor of exegetical theology at Drew Theological Seminary), the term God is mentioned 4473 times in 3893 verses.

More than 1,900 times in scripture, authors claimed their message was from God. Expressions such as "Thus says the Lord" appear approximately 500 times in the Torah and more than 1,200 times in the Prophets.

Actual historical evidence set aside, what religious tradition says and reveals on who wrote the Bible go far beyond what virtually all works of literature can ever conceive. Unlike other, the Bible is a text upon which billions of people have and still do base their entire lives.

According to both Jewish and Christian dogma, Genesis; Exodus; Leviticus; Numbers; and Deuteronomy (the first five books of the Bible and the entirety of the Torah) were all written about 1,300 BC. Although, the Talmud and Midrash hold that the Torah was written by Moses, with the exception of the last eight verses of Deuteronomy, describing his death and burial, being written by Joshua. There are a few issues with this, such as the lack of evidence that Moses ever existed!

Scholars have developed their own take on who wrote the Bible’s first five books, mainly by using internal clues and writing styles. Bible scholars can contrast the styles of these early books to create profiles of the different authors.

In each case, these writers are talked about as if they were a single person, but each author could just as easily be an entire school of people writing in a single style. These biblical “authors” include:

“E” standing for Elohist, the name given to the author(s) who referred to God as “Elohim.” In addition to a fair bit of Exodus and a little bit of Numbers, the “E” author(s) is/are believed to be the one(s) who wrote the Bible’s first creation account in Genesis chapter one.

“J” believed to be the second author(s) of the first five books (much of Genesis and some of Exodus), including the creation account in Genesis chapter two (the detailed one where Adam is created first and there’s a serpent). This name comes from “Jahwe,” the German translation of “YHWH” or “Yahweh,” the name this/these author(s) used for God.

“P” standing for “Priestly,” and it almost certainly refers to a whole school of writers living in and around Jerusalem in the late sixth century BC, immediately after the Babylonian captivity ended. These writers were effectively reinventing their peoples’ religion from fragmentary texts now lost. P writers drafted almost all of the dietary and other kosher laws, emphasized the holiness of the Sabbath, wrote endlessly about Moses’ brother Aaron (the first priest in Jewish tradition) to the exclusion of Moses himself, and so on.

“D” is for “Deuteronomist,” meaning “guy(s) who wrote Deuteronomy.” D was also, like the other four, originally attributed to Moses, but that’s only possible if Moses liked to write in the third person, could see the future, used language no one in his own time would have used, and knew where his own tomb would be (clearly, Moses was not who wrote the Bible at all).

The next answers to the question of who wrote the Bible come from the books of Joshua; Judges; Samuel; and Kings, generally thought to have been written during the Babylonian captivity in the middle of the sixth century BC, and are traditionally believed to have been written by Joshua and Samuel themselves, they’re now often lumped in with Deuteronomy due to their similar writing.

Next come those who wrote the Bible are those of the biblical Prophets, an eclectic group who mostly travelled around the various Jewish communities to admonish people and lay curses and sometimes preach sermons about everybody’s shortcomings.

Isaiah, an 8th-century BC Israelite Prophet after whom the Book of Isaiah is named and agreed to have been written in basically three parts:

The early part, or proto-Isaiah texts may have been written close to the time when the man himself really lived, around the eighth century BC, about the time when the Greeks were first writing down Homer’s stories, running from chapters one to 39, and they’re all doom and judgment for sinful Israel.

The middle part, is when Israel actually did fall with the Babylonian conquest and captivity, the works attributed to Isaiah were dusted off and expanded into what’s now known as chapters 40-55 by the same people who wrote Deuteronomy and the historical texts. This part of the book is frankly the ravings of an outraged patriot about how all the lousy, savage foreigners will someday be made to pay for what they’ve done to Israel.

The late part, was clearly written after the Babylonian captivity ended in 539 BC when the invading Persians permitted the Jews to return home. It’s not surprising then that this section of Isaiah is a burbling tribute to Persian Cyrus the Great, who is identified as the Messiah himself for letting the Jews return to their home.

Jeremiah, lived a century or so after Isaiah, immediately before the Babylonian captivity, the authorship of his book remains relatively unclear, even compared with other discussions as to who wrote the Bible. He may have been one of the Deuteronomist writers, or he may have been one of the earliest “J” authors. His own book may have been written by him, or by a man named Baruch ben Neriah, whom he mentions as one of his scribes. Either way, the book of Jeremiah has a very similar style to Kings, and so it’s possible that either Jeremiah or Baruch simply wrote them all.

Ezekiel ben-Buzi, was a priesthood member living in Babylon itself during the captivity. There’s no way he wrote the whole book of Ezekiel himself, given the stylistic differences from one part to the next, but he may have written some. His students/acolytes/junior assistants may have written the rest. These also might have been the writers who survived Ezekiel to draft the “P” texts after the captivity.

The ‘nest’ section of the Bible deals with what’s known as the wisdom literature. These books are the finished product of nearly a thousand years of development and heavy editing. Unlike the histories, which are theoretically non-fiction accounts of stuff that happened, wisdom literature has been redacted over the centuries with an extremely casual attitude that has made it hard to pin down any single book to any single author. Some patterns, however, have emerged:

The book of Job, is actually two scripts. In the middle, it’s a very ancient epic poem, like the E text. These two texts may be the oldest writings in the Bible. On either side of that epic poem in the middle of Job are much more recent writings. It’s as if Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales were to be reissued today with an introduction and epilogue by Stephen King as if the whole thing were one long text.

The Psalms and Proverbs, like Job, are also cobbled together from both older and newer sources. For, some Psalms are written as if there’s a reigning King on the throne in Jerusalem, while others directly mention the Babylonian captivity, during which time there was of course no King on the throne of Jerusalem. Proverbs was likewise continuously updated until about the mid-second century BC.

Ptolemaic period, writings from this time are of a high technical quality, partly thanks to the hated Greek influence, but they also tend to be melancholic. Books from this period include Ruth; Esther; Lamentations; Ezra; Nehemiah; Lamentations, and Ecclesiastes.

The four Gospels in the King James Bible, Matthew; Mark; Luke, and John, are texts dealing with Jesus and beyond are named after Jesus’ apostles, although these books’ actual authors may have just been using those names for street cred.

The Epistles, a series of letters, written to various early congregations in the eastern Mediterranean, by a single individual. Saul of Tarsus famously converted after an encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus, after which he changed his name to Paul and became the single most enthusiastic missionary of the new religion. Along the way to his eventual martyrdom, Paul wrote Epistles of James, Peter, Johns, and Jude.

The book of Revelation (Apocalypse), has traditionally been attributed to the Apostle John. Unlike the other traditional attributions, this one wasn’t very far off in terms of actual historical authenticity, though this book was written a little late for someone who claimed to know Jesus personally. John, of Revelation fame, seems to have been a converted Jew who wrote his vision of the End Times on the Greek island of Patmos about 100 years after Jesus’ death.

While the writings attributed him actually do show some congruity between who wrote the Bible according to tradition and who wrote the Bible according to historical evidence, the question of Biblical authorship remains thorny, complex, and much contested, for the Bible is not just a book but an incredible library written over 1500 year with over 60 books written by over 40 different authors, countless pharisees and a myriad?of scribes…

Food for thought!