New Evangelizers Post: Where Did the Bible Come From? Part 1

                                                               

 

I have a new article up at NewEvangelizers.com.  

The Bible is God’s Word written down in human language, so it is absolutely correct to say that the Bible comes from God. But the Bible did not magically drop out of the sky and into the lap of the pope. It is a single book, but it is also a library-comprised of several books like Genesis, Psalms, Romans, and Luke. And each of these books is a different type of book. Some are poems, some are letters, some are stories, and some are (and I have to be very careful about how I say this) mythology or “pre-philosophy philosophizing.” And these books were not written all at the same time like at some sort of ancient Biblical convention in Jerusalem. They were written over the course of several thousands of years. It is important to recognize the two major divisions of the Bible: The Old Testament and the New Testament. “Testament” is a latinized translation of the word “covenant.” It signifies the distinction between the Old Covenant that God made with the Hebrew people and the New Covenant made with Jesus.

When exactly were the books of the Old Testament written? That is a difficult question to answer. We have references to the books of the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) throughout the Old Testament, but we have no manuscripts from that era that have survived. In fact, the oldest writings we have intact are from the Dead Sea Scrolls which date somewhere around the beginning of the 1st Century AD. But even these are copies, written centuries after many of these books were supposedly written. The Torah is attributed to Moses, the Psalms to David, and Wisdom to Solomon. But there is a question as to whether these are reliable attributions. One of the issues is that the above books that we have today may not be the exact same books that are being referenced. You see, the Babylonians and Romans were excellent at conquering and then destroying the nation of Israel, from their cities to their writings. This means that much of what could have been written may have been destroyed. A predominant theory is that much of what we call the Old Testament was probably written in the 6th-5th Century BC. And even some others were composed later, like the book of Daniel.

The formation of the Old Testament “canon” (which means the list of inspired books), took shape over several hundred years. It wasn’t until the first century AD that this thing we call the Old Testament took the form that is familiar to us today. The Pharisees (who were the teachers of the Law) finalized their scriptures, which they called the TANAK, around the year 70 AD. These include most of the books that we have in our Old Testament. In addition to these, we include the books that were part of something called the Septuagint, which is the Greek translation of the Old Testament. These included books that were not Hebrew in Origin, but only written in the Greek language. These books were then translated into Latin by St. Jerome in the 4th Century.

You can read the whole article here.