How I Became a Humanist #16: Who Wrote the Bible?

You're probably sitting in a chair reading these words.  There's a good chance that this isn't the first essay of mine you've read.  If you've read all the essays in this series up to this point, you've probably picked up on my tone.  You know how my paragraphs flow.  You might have noticed that I break paragraphs up for ease of reading, rather than keeping large chunks of text together.  You have a sense that there will be a picture somewhere between the top of the page and the third paragraph.

If I inserted a paragraph from another person somewhere in this essay, you might notice.  You'd be more likely to notice if that person was from a different part of the country or a different part of the world.  If the person were much older or younger than me, he or she might use language differently from me.  Education would play a factor too.  If you had some question about whether or not I was the writer, you could even observe how I use commas.  Or you could put my essays from this series in a word cloud generator and see if the author frequently uses the same verbiage that I do.  There are any number of ways that you could figure out whether or I not I was the author. If the essay were written by someone else, you'd probably guess it.

Probably a German Bible

Scholars use this same sort of analysis to determine who wrote particular books of the Bible.  They look at the words they use in the Greek.  "Does this person write like they're from around 100 CE or from 300 CE?"  "Does the original manuscript look like it was written by someone who was born in Tarsus or from someone born in Alexandria?"  Dialects change with time and location.

Of course, this only concerns who wrote the books as a whole and not whether or not additions have been made to the books over time.  Consider the game of telephone you might have played as a child only now the game is being played with the written word.  Remember that the Bible was copied by hand for about 1400 years of Christian history.  Scribes sometimes wrote notes in the margins of their texts and sometimes those notes were mistaken for scripture by subsequent scribes (remember that for a time the Bible didn't have chapters or verses and the copy the scribe was working with was likely the only copy the scribe would have had.  He couldn't cross-reference with another copy.  He had to make his best guess.)

How do scholars know what belongs and what doesn't?  First, they take the earliest manuscripts we have and compare them.  They compare them for age, but also compare them for location and lineage to the degree that's possible.  When they see differences between the various manuscripts they try to discern when the difference took place and where the divergence began.

One of the most interesting cases of this, to me, is the case of John 8 - the story of the adulterous woman who nearly gets stoned.  This is the beloved story in which Jesus says, "let he who is without sin cast the first stone."  The problem is that this story didn't start showing up in copies of John until several centuries after Christianity had begun and it's wasn't in the majority of copies until about the tenth century.  We even have evidence of church leaders arguing over whether or not the story should be in the Bible.

Perhaps the strongest evidence that it doesn't belong in the John 8 is that when the early manuscripts include it in the Bible, they sometimes place the story later in John.  Other times they actually place the story in the book of Luke.  If you remove the story from John, the text flows just fine.  I'll add, it's a weird story for John.  John isn't concerned about grace for the disenfranchised in the way the other Gospel writers are.

Mark Twain's writing from less than 200 years ago is easily distinguishable from writing from this century

You might think that learning all of these thing would have destroyed my faith immediately.  It didn't.  While the evidence is overwhelming and the methods not what I had expected before my studies, the Bible is still a powerful book.  Moreover the New Testament is not adulterated in the way its detractors sometimes suggest.  There are only a few changes from the original manuscripts and they don't change the overall message of the New Testament.

The same this is true of authorship of various books.  We don't really know who wrote much of the New Testament.  We have confidence that Paul didn't write all of the books ascribed to him, but those other books do reflect Pauline theology.  Maybe they were written by a secretary.  Maybe they were written by a student.  Perhaps they are apocryphal.  Here, I'm mostly talking about the pastoral letters, 1 & 2 Timothy and Titus and also Ephesians.  The other books ascribed to Paul are generally considered to have been written by him.  And again, the central message of these other texts coheres with the New Testament as whole.

While this information was troubling to me in some ways, it never made me question my faith in God
.  It did lead me away from certain kinds of Evangelical theology.  When I look back, I have to admit that these things were difficult to digest even if they didn't quite challenge my faith.  It's hard letting go of one understanding and picking up a new one when the belief in question is central.  Heavens, we even resist admitting that we were wrong about a referee's call during a sporting event.