{"id":325,"date":"2018-08-22T02:34:22","date_gmt":"2018-08-22T07:34:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/?p=325"},"modified":"2018-08-22T13:13:08","modified_gmt":"2018-08-22T18:13:08","slug":"who-wrote-the-bible-and-why-does-it-matter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2018\/08\/22\/who-wrote-the-bible-and-why-does-it-matter\/","title":{"rendered":"Who Wrote the Bible and Why Does it Matter?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"The first question in this post’s title may seem an obvious area of discussion.\u00a0 There have been articles, books, and documentaries with the title ‘Who Wrote the Bible?’\u00a0 In any modern commentary on a book of the Bible, a significant amount of space is devoted to discussing the authorship of that book.\u00a0 Introductions to the Old and New Testaments, the latter in particular, will devote a large portion of their text to various theories of authorship for different texts.\u00a0 Beyond just the identity of an author for the text, texts of the Old Testament are frequently split into various source documents with various authors then proposed for various portions or layers of the text.\u00a0 In the debates between liberal and fundamentalist Protestants of the late 19th and 20th centuries, the Mosaic authorship of the Torah or Pentateuch became a shibboleth used to identify on which side of that divide one was located.\u00a0 Discussions of St. Paul must take into account whether material cited is from the seven ‘uncontested’ epistles or one of the other epistles which is ‘less Pauline’.\u00a0 More skeptical scholars will say, in an off-hand manner, that the four gospels are ‘anonymous’ or ‘circulated anonymously’ for some time before receiving their current names, and therefore attributed authors.\u00a0 In some cases, these skeptical scholars will even seek to enlist Church Fathers and other early Christian writers to argue that the authorship of the Biblical texts was doubted in the early church.\u00a0 This is why the second question posed in the title of this post is important.\u00a0 Why is it that this particular issue, who wrote which Biblical text, has become such a battleground?\u00a0 What precisely is at stake if Moses did not write the Torah, or if St. Paul did not write the Epistle to the Hebrews?\u00a0 Why would some scholars deny these attributions, while others so forcefully affirm them?<\/p>\n

It should first be noted that there is a great body of Biblical literature, particularly Old Testament Biblical literature, for which there is no attributed author.\u00a0 We have no clue who wrote, for example, significant portions of the book of Daniel.\u00a0 Portions of the book are written in the first person, and could therefore theoretically be attributed to Daniel himself, but other major portions are written in the third person, implying that they, at least, were written by a third party.\u00a0 The book of Isaiah, while recording the prophecies of Isaiah, does not claim to have been set down in writing by Isaiah himself.\u00a0 In fact, we are told in Isaiah that Isaiah’s disciples kept his prophecies, implying that they were compiled in written form after his death (Is 8:16f).\u00a0 The material of Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings show clear signs of having been written, or at least edited into the form in which we presently have them, by a single hand.\u00a0 This has sometimes been attributed by various traditions to the person of Samuel.\u00a0 This has two difficulties.\u00a0 First, the Prophet Samuel dies in 1 Samuel 25, and the material from 2 Samuel through 2 Kings takes place over centuries after his death.\u00a0 Second, in the Greek Old Testament tradition, these books are entitled 1-4 Kingdoms, and do not bear the name of Samuel.\u00a0 Many of the Psalms are attributed to no particular author.\u00a0 Not knowing exactly when, or by whom, these texts were set down in writing in their present form does not represent any difficulty in the authoritative canonical status which they have exercised for centuries.<\/p>\n

It should also be noted that there are significant portions of the scriptures concerning which no one contests the authorship.\u00a0 There are seven epistles which all scholars agree were written by St. Paul.\u00a0 There are no serious doubts that Sirach was written by Yeshua Ben-Sirach.\u00a0 Very little time is spent arguing that the portions of Proverbs attributed to particular wisdom teachers are the product of traditions associated with those teachers.\u00a0 That there is such little debate about these and other similar texts is revelatory regarding the current question, however.\u00a0 These texts are typically not doubted because there is no reason to doubt them.\u00a0 One could apply simple, systematic skepticism and insist that there is no way to know for sure who wrote any of the Biblical text.\u00a0 This, however, is not done by any major credentialed scholar.\u00a0 This means that when the authorship of a given text is called into question, it is because there is a reason to call it into doubt.\u00a0 What, then, are those reasons?<\/p>\n

One of the earliest examples of the authorship of a book being called into question come from the church historian Eusebius of Caesarea.\u00a0 Eusebius accepted the four gospels as authoritative scripture, as the church had for more than two centuries in his day.\u00a0 He further accepted that at least 1 John was written by the same author as St. John’s Gospel.\u00a0 On the other hand, he, as many in the East in the fourth century, rejected the book of Revelation as authoritative.\u00a0 This presented a difficulty to him, as he was wont to cite testimony from the second century Fathers, St. Irenaeus in particular, regarding the apostolic authorship of St. John’s Gospel and the First Epistle.\u00a0 However, this testimony also included Revelation.\u00a0 He expresses this difficulty openly, and describes how he found a solution through a close reading of a citation from the works of Papias.\u00a0 This citation exists today only in Eusebius’ quoting of it.\u00a0 It gives two different lists of persons whom Papias encountered, one of which includes St. John the son of Zebedee, and the second list names a ‘John the Presbyter’.\u00a0 While it appears to have been typical for Papias and other late 1st century authors to refer to the apostles as presbyters or ‘elders’, Eusebius theorizes that this is, in fact, a second person, and that this second person is the one who wrote Revelation, implying that Ss. Irenaeus and Justin were merely confused (Ecc Hist<\/em> 3.39).\u00a0 By calling the apostolic authorship of Revelation into question in inventing ‘John the Elder’, Eusebius sought to invalidate its authority.<\/p>\n

The questioning of the Mosaic origin of the Pentateuch began in a similar way.\u00a0 While it is clear that the Torah as we now possess it stands at the end of a tradition of translation and editing, that it originated in the Mosaic period was first questioned in the 16th century.\u00a0 This questioning did not arise from linguistic or textual issues or even from archaeological discoveries, but rather from the impression that, in particular, the narratives of the first 11 chapters of Genesis and the story of the Passover and Exodus offended against new found ‘scientific’ sensibilities.\u00a0 The desire to marginalize the Torah, and the Old Testament in its entirety, was further fueled by centuries of European anti-Semitism.\u00a0 To give antiquity to their criticism of the authorship of the Pentateuch, appeal was made to St. Jerome, in particular an off-hand comment made in his Contra Helvidius<\/em>.\u00a0 Blessed Jerome mentions in passing that there are those who believe that Moses simply wrote the Pentateuch, and those who believe that Ezra served as instaurator<\/em>.\u00a0 This Latin term was translated in the modern period with its later meaning of ‘editor’, and became the basis of dozens of theories regarding the Pentateuch being either written wholesale, or compiled from a whole series of disparate sources, in the post-exilic period of Ezra.\u00a0 In fact, however, instaurator<\/em> as used here by St. Jerome refers to one who restores a work.\u00a0 He is referring here not to the authorship of the book, but to the tradition, as record in 4 Ezra and other texts, that at the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem the Torah was itself destroyed, but was then miraculously rewritten perfectly by Ezra.<\/p>\n

A similar approach has been taken to the New Testament documents.\u00a0 Various scholars have made reconstructions of 1st and early 2nd century Christian history, with no primary sources apart from the Biblical texts, and then based on their view of the development of religious ideas, slotted in the various texts at various dates.\u00a0 Then because St. Matthew’s Gospel or the Pastoral Epistles of St. Paul have a ‘highly developed’ view of the church and its ordained leadership, they must have been written at a date too late for their attributed authors to have been alive.\u00a0 The ‘must’, however, is based solely on the necessity that the evidence match a given theory, rather than vice versa.\u00a0 Minimally, this produces circular reasoning on the subject of authorship by scholars.\u00a0 Our only sources for understanding ‘what St. Paul believed’ are the Pauline epistles, yet if some of those epistles teach certain things that ‘St. Paul could not have believed’ then they cannot be Pauline.\u00a0 The answer to all of these arguments is found in identifying the problematic presuppositions on which they rest.<\/p>\n

First, the concept of ‘authorship’ as it refers to the texts of scripture, must be defined.\u00a0 What does it mean that, for example, St. Paul wrote the Epistle to the Romans?\u00a0 It does not mean that he took papyrus and stylus in hand and wrote a letter to the church at Rome.\u00a0 There are places in his epistles (cf. Gal 6:11) in which St. Paul states that he is writing with his own hand, in large letters, meaning that the rest of his epistles were written by another hand.\u00a0 In the case of Romans, the actual writer of the epistle is identified as Tertius (Rom 16:22).\u00a0 This reflects the typical process of using an amanuensis<\/em>, or a secretary, to compose letters.\u00a0 St. Paul would have spoken the text of the letter to Tertius, who would have taken it down, making grammatical corrections and polishing the written style.\u00a0 St. Paul would have then reviewed the letter and made any corrections.\u00a0 Corrections made, the letter would have been delivered by a person who would have publicly read the letter aloud, and been prepared to answer questions from the recipient concerning its content.\u00a0 This would have been the case, certainly, with epistles such as Galatians, Romans, 1 Thessalonians, 1 Corinthians, and perhaps others.\u00a0 Other epistles, for example, list St. Timothy as a co-author (Col 1:1, Phil 1:1).\u00a0 There is good evidence that our 2 Corinthians is in fact at least two of St. Paul’s epistles to the church at Corinth (there is good reason to believe he wrote at least 4) which have been put together into one book.\u00a0 All of St. Paul’s epistles, including Hebrews, were brought together as a collection c. 100 AD, and circulated in that edited collection.\u00a0 This indicates that while all of the Pauline corpus authentically reflects the teaching of the Apostle, there were a variety of relationships between St. Paul himself and the text as we presently possess it in canonical scripture.\u00a0 This fact is not a secret, and so debating the exact details of this relationship does nothing to undermine the authority of a given text.<\/p>\n

Further, all of these arguments concerning authorship assume that any disconnect between the written text and the source of the teaching contained in the text implies a breach in the chain of authority.\u00a0 It presumes that, for example, teaching authority was vested in the person of St. Paul, or the person of Moses, or the person of the prophet Isaiah, such that if the written texts were composed or compiled by the disciples of these figures after their death, they are somehow less authoritative than if they were ‘written’ by the person themselves.\u00a0 The obvious flaw in this presupposition, from a Christian perspective, is that all that we know about the words and deeds of Jesus Christ was written down by his disciples and apostles after his death, resurrection, and ascension into heaven.\u00a0 This fact does nothing to make Christ’s teaching less authoritative.\u00a0 There are other epistles known to have been written by St. Paul, including one to the Laodiceans, and those mentioned before the Corinthians, which are not in the New Testament.\u00a0 The church never felt the need to seek out these texts, or the impression that somehow the Pauline corpus was incomplete without the teachings contained therein.\u00a0 This is because the authority of the scriptures is contained within the texts themselves, not with the (in many cases anonymous) authors, editors, or copyists.\u00a0 All of the scriptures speak with the authority of Christ himself (Matt 22:31, 2 Tim 3:16), though spoken through men in diverse times and places (2 Pet 1:21).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The first question in this post’s title may seem an obvious area of discussion.\u00a0 There have been articles, books, and documentaries with the title ‘Who Wrote the Bible?’\u00a0 In any modern commentary on a book of the Bible, a significant amount of space is devoted to discussing the authorship of that book.\u00a0 Introductions to the Old and New Testaments, the latter in particular, will devote a large portion of their text to various theories of authorship for different texts.\u00a0 Beyond just the identity of an author for the text, texts of the Old Testament are frequently split into various source documents with various authors then proposed for various portions or layers of the text.\u00a0 In the debates between liberal and\u2026 <\/i> <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-325","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"Who Wrote the Bible and Why Does it Matter? - The Whole Counsel Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2018\/08\/22\/who-wrote-the-bible-and-why-does-it-matter\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Who Wrote the Bible and Why Does it Matter? - The Whole Counsel Blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The first question in this post’s title may seem an obvious area of discussion.\u00a0 There have been articles, books, and documentaries with the title ‘Who Wrote the Bible?’\u00a0 In any modern commentary on a book of the Bible, a significant amount of space is devoted to discussing the authorship of that book.\u00a0 Introductions to the Old and New Testaments, the latter in particular, will devote a large portion of their text to various theories of authorship for different texts.\u00a0 Beyond just the identity of an author for the text, texts of the Old Testament are frequently split into various source documents with various authors then proposed for various portions or layers of the text.\u00a0 In the debates between liberal and\u2026\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2018\/08\/22\/who-wrote-the-bible-and-why-does-it-matter\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Whole Counsel Blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2018-08-22T07:34:22+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2018-08-22T18:13:08+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2018\/08\/amhara-creative-expression-ancient-bible-360x200.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Fr. Stephen De Young\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Fr. Stephen De Young\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"10 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2018\/08\/22\/who-wrote-the-bible-and-why-does-it-matter\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2018\/08\/22\/who-wrote-the-bible-and-why-does-it-matter\/\",\"name\":\"Who Wrote the Bible and Why Does it Matter? - The Whole Counsel Blog\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/#website\"},\"primaryImageOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2018\/08\/22\/who-wrote-the-bible-and-why-does-it-matter\/#primaryimage\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2018\/08\/22\/who-wrote-the-bible-and-why-does-it-matter\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2018\/08\/amhara-creative-expression-ancient-bible-360x200.jpg\",\"datePublished\":\"2018-08-22T07:34:22+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2018-08-22T18:13:08+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/#\/schema\/person\/247da0ea47cc50719afc0ec2a8ee5e90\"},\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2018\/08\/22\/who-wrote-the-bible-and-why-does-it-matter\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2018\/08\/22\/who-wrote-the-bible-and-why-does-it-matter\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2018\/08\/22\/who-wrote-the-bible-and-why-does-it-matter\/#primaryimage\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2018\/08\/amhara-creative-expression-ancient-bible.jpg\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2018\/08\/amhara-creative-expression-ancient-bible.jpg\",\"width\":640,\"height\":378},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2018\/08\/22\/who-wrote-the-bible-and-why-does-it-matter\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Who Wrote the Bible and Why Does it Matter?\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/\",\"name\":\"The Whole Counsel Blog\",\"description\":\"The Scriptures in the Orthodox Church\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":{\"@type\":\"PropertyValueSpecification\",\"valueRequired\":true,\"valueName\":\"search_term_string\"}}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/#\/schema\/person\/247da0ea47cc50719afc0ec2a8ee5e90\",\"name\":\"Fr. 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