The Bible is not a book at all, but a collection of religious writings. It’s approximately 66 books (in the Protestant canon: 39 Old Testament and 27 New Testament) written over almost 1,500 years. These were written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Koine Greek by many contributors, The experiences of these authors range from antiquity to the early Christian era. Different books of the Bible were written more than a thousand years apart, with the earliest possibly dating to as far back as 1500–1400 BC and the latest to the period AD 37–93. So part of the external evidence about how the Bible was written requires us to grasp its composition as a product of many authors, from many centuries, and in a wide array of law codes, narratives, poetry, prophecy, and letters, brought together into a single volume or “library” of sacred literature.
Who Wrote the Bible and What did they Write?
The Bible’s writers are prophets, kings, priests, sages, apostolic witnesses and the like. Conventional attribution gives some of these to Moses (Torah/Pentateuch), David (many psalms), Isaiah, Jeremiah (prophetic books), and to the apostles Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John for the four Gospels. But scholars have noted that many individual biblical books underwent extended editorial processes and had multiple authors. For instance, the first five books (Genesis through Deuteronomy) are typically attributed to Moses, although scholars have recognized that they are an amalgamation of materials from various sources (the J, E, D, and P strands), compiled and edited over hundreds of years. Likewise the four Gospels were written in the 1st century AD–Mark in AD 70, Matthew and Luke between AD c. 85–90, and John ca. 90–110 — by early Christians writing about Jesus’s life. In total, about 40 different authors from three continents (Africa, Asia and Europe) wrote the Bible in three languages and in a variety of literary forms. Believers in divine inspiration believe that the authors wrote as divine sources in an unbroken chain of established religious motivation, or as the result of the inspiration of the respective author. Regardless of the religious history of these books, modern biblical scholarship divides the authorship of the Bible from the time when the secular text was written in two ways: source and form criticism.
How did you copy and preserve the Biblical texts?
Since we no longer have the original autographs of the books that make up the Bible, knowing how the Bible was written relies on studying the Bible manuscripts. For centuries scribes copied texts out by hand. Today, scholars possess around 5,800 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, along with approximately 10,000 in Latin and 9,300 in other ancient languages. For instance, there are some 1,276 “early” papyri fragments of the NT extant, the earliest of which range in date from the 2nd to the 4th centuries AD. These manuscripts (pictured) enable reconstruction of the original texts with an amazing degree of accuracy. The oldest extant Old Testament manuscripts include the Dead Sea Scrolls (dating ca. 300 B.C.–100 A.D.), which contain some of the oldest known copies of books like Isaiah and Psalms. They’re comparing these thousands of manuscripts to establish what the Bible says in a process known as textual criticism. There may be slight variant readings in individual manuscripts, but since there are so many of them, it serves as a check on variation. In brief, scripture transmission was a process of frequent copying, as well as translation (the 3rd-century B.C.E. Greek Septuagint, the 4th-century C.E. Latin Vulgate by Jerome, etc.), all for the purpose of retaining the Bible’s content from one generation to the next. It was not a sudden process, or even a uniform one, but by the late Middle Ages Christians on all continents had very similar Bibles owing to these manuscript traditions.
The manuscripts of the Bible were originally written in papyrus and parchment scrolls. Recent findings such as the Dead Sea Scrolls (pictured here) have shown that ancient Jews copied sacred texts very carefully indeed. Manuscripts such as these are a large part of why we have scriptures today.
How was the Bible canon formed?
That’s because the creation of the Bible’s canon — its official list of books that are considered authoritative — took some time. Early Christians read many writings (gospels, letters, apocalypses), but in time only some received universal acceptance. “Canonization” is the name given to this process of determining which books “have the divine authority to be included within the canon of Scripture.” By the 2nd–3rd centuries, these lists of texts included virtually the same books that became the New Testament. The canon of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) is by the 1st century was partially established in Judaism. In Christianity, synods and church councils were the ruling body of a local or translocal region which created the canon; thus, the decision to accept several books as a church’s sacred scripture became a local congregation and with time, several synods sanctioned several scriptures and the process of sanctioning was complete by the 5th century for the New Testament and by the 8th century for the Old Testament. Catholic/Orthodox and Protestant traditions would later canonize slightly different canons (e.g. Protestant: 66 books; Catholic: 73; Orthodox: ~76). In short, the compiling of the Bible into what it is today was “a long and flexible process,” with early Christians eventually coming to a consensus about which texts they considered to be inspired. Apostolic authorship (in the case of the NT) and use in worship were among the key factors, but inspiration itself tended to be taken for granted when the canon was more or less established.
So why does the writing of the Bible matter?
Knowledge of the way the Bible is written is useful for understanding its authority and interpretation. If scripture is really a book written over hundreds of years and compiled by many, many different authors then context, genre, history, become very important. One view, inspiration and inerrancy, believes that the human authors were taught and guided by God with the result that their words may be described as those of God in human language. But apart from issues of faith, understanding the Bible’s origins helps to explain the diverse range of writing styles the Bible contains (history, poetry, law, prophecy, letters) and that it was shaped by early communities. For example: knowing the New Testament books circulated prior to full on canonization goes a long way in explaining why certain writings (Revelation, for example) were disputed within the ancient church. Academically, the process connects the macro context (the ancient Near Eastern and Greco-Roman polities) with the micro situation (the individual manuscripts and editing process). In essence, whether for religious conviction or academic concern, understanding the nature of the composing, authoring, and compilation of the Bible is vital for reading it rightly and intelligently interrogating what it has to say.
How else do scholars investigate how the Bible was formed?
How did the traditional authorial view of books such as Moses’ Pentateuch differ from the modern scholarship?
The ancient tradition is that Moses authored the Pentateuch, but scholars suggest a more nuanced picture. A few literary clues (repetitions, changes in style) point to more than one origin. The traditional Documentary Hypothesis would have it that it consists of four major sources (J, E, D, P) which have been interleaved. Recent forms (Modern Prophecies) are found also. Indeed, scholars have determined that books such as Genesis–Deuteronomy have layers of writing, composed over centuries.
How much confidence can we have in the surviving manuscripts of the Bible?
It is little short of miraculous that the Bible has been transmitted so faithfully: yes, in its English translation, in its Greek or other language translation, in Hebrew or Aramaic, whatever — the copies we have are ones those made from a closed set of originals either by way of tradition or through stricter copying methods. The large number of manuscripts (i.e. ~5,800 for the Greek NT copies) is available for cross-referencing. And the textual critics gather together any and all copies they can to try to find the earliest text. There are exceptions, but generally only small errors (spelling, word order). Indeed, as one has observed, even a verse like Matthew 24:36 (no one knows the day or hour) is uniform across nearly all manuscripts. Given the continued survival of thousands of New Testament copies, as well as ancient copies of the Old Testament, we should be able to trace our text very closely back to original words.
How are the Biblical canons of different denominations formed?
Differences in canon formed as various communities had slightly different libraries. As when early Christians used the Greek Septuagint (including books like Tobit and Maccabees), while Palestinian Jews used the Hebrew-only canon. The Roman Catholic Church defined the 27-book New Testament canon at the Council of Trent in 1546 during reaction to the Protestant Reformation, whereas a 22-book canon had been promulgated in 1442 by the Council of Florence, and the much earlier Synod of Rome of 382, and Synod of Hippo of 393, and 2nd Council of Carthage of 397 (with identifiably similar canons). The Old Testament canon entered into Christian use in the Greek Septuagint translations and original books, and their differing lists of texts. More texts were included in Eastern Orthodox Bibles, such as 3 Maccabees, 1 Esdras. These discrepancies mirror historical practice and doctrinal choices, rather than a single “Bible-making” event. At the end of the day, however, every canon represents which books a tradition had already identified as inspired at any given point. (Controversy, of course, had been settled, so to speak, by councils and leaders.)
How did oral tradition shape the written Bible?
“Stories in the Bible were all oral before they were written. Poems, laws and stories (such as the Exodus and the chronicles of kings) were transmitted orally. When scribes finally did put them into writing, it was from traditions that had already formed them. This is to say that the Bible’s books frequently have a core oral history lying behind them. The recognition of this accounts for some repetitions or cliché expressions in the work. Oral culture also means that the “writing” of the Bible was in part a transition from spoken word to a more fixed record, a process that occurred through prophets, teachers, and scribes who fashioned the oral traditions into the written books.
What part did inspiration and belief have in sustaining the Bible?
Many communities were doing so right from the beginning, as because they believed that the scriptures were divinely inspired. For the Jews and Christians of antiquity, this belief was a spur to meticulous copying and preservation. In the process, copy errors were eliminated by comparing other manuscripts, and crucial passages were committed to memory. The belief that God “wrote” through human authors inspired such practices as the ornamenting and protection of scrolls, the chanting of texts in worship, and the rigorous translation of texts down the road. So while secular scholarship sees simply human processes where traditional theorizes a divine inspiration linked to care in transmission.
