For centuries, the bible has been treated as an historical document, mainly on the assumption that it is the word of God, who has protected and preserved it over the years. However, anyone who has played the telephone game in school will understand why such assumptions are almost certainly misguided. As a message is transmitted through different people over a period of time, mistakes and errors will be made. This is simply a fact, that no scribe is perfect and neither is every copy of a text, especially when it is translated from one language to another. The New Testament alone has been passed down from Greek to Latin to English, and Christian apologists today believe the bible is the product of at least 40 different authors.

Beginning in the 18th century, scholars like Hermann Samuel Reimarus, David Strauss, and Albert Schweitzer started applying a more critical eye to the bible, putting it to the same tests as secular documents. With the disciplinary refinement of archaeology later added to the fold, the field of biblical criticism caught on and started to reveal many new and interesting details on the origin of Christianity's sacred texts. Carrying on these practices today are scholars like Bart Ehrman and Elaine Pagels, as well as the panel of academics at the Jesus Seminar.

Yet not everyone appreciates the higher criticism that is being applied to the bible these days. Christian apologists have often outspokenly condemned these methods that reject or question the literal truth of the scriptures. For every book written on the dubious origins of the Christian texts, there are still plenty of dissenting opinions offered. This article is intended to provide a brief look at some of the problems surrounding the authorship and transmission of the bible. The Old Testament will be discussed on this first page, with the New Testament being covered on the second.

I. Who Wrote the Old Testament?

The Old Testament is made up of 39 books, most of which never disclose their author. Tradition has assigned authorship based on content and context. The first five books (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy) are referred to as the Pentateuch or the Torah, and are believed to have been written by Moses - a theory first expressed in the Jewish Talmud, but hinted at in the writings of Josephus Flavius and some of the New Testament canon. At the very least, this idea is already not entirely accurate because of the death of Moses described in Deuteronomy 34.

Academic scholarship has proposed a different idea of authorship though, including four sources nicknamed J, E, D, and P [1]. The J or Jahwist source is identified by frequent use of the tetragrammaton in the text. The tetragrammaton is the abbreviated four letter holy name of God, YHVH, interpreted as Yahweh (or 'Jahweh' in German) by most Jews, Christians, and scholars. The Jahwist source is considered to be the work of the southern kingdom of Judah. The E or Elohim source is identified by its use of the word 'Elohim', which is a general Hebrew name for any god or deity, and the Elohim source is considered to be the work of the northern kingdom of Israel. The D or Deuteronomist source is dated to the time of King Josiah of Judah and applies to the books of Deuteronomy through 2nd Kings. P or the Priestly source is identified by its focus on Levitical laws and the position of the Aaronite priesthood in Judaism. In the descending order just described, these sources are thought to have written some of their works from the 10th century to the 5th century BC.

The next part of the Hebrew bible is known as the Nevi'im, or 'Prophets', and includes Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Hosea through Malachi. You may notice that Daniel and Lamentations are not among the books of prophecy, unlike what you will find in the Old Testament organization of Christian bibles. At least in the case of Daniel, this seems to be for theological reasons that will be discussed in a moment. For the book of Isaiah, most scholars believe more than one author contributed to the text, based on a change in style and theology, the historical context of events described in the text, and the sudden cessation of Isaiah's name after chapter 40 [2]. The other books of the prophets may not have such questionable issues, but are also attributed authorship mainly on the basis of tradition and content.

The remaining books of the Hebrew scriptures compose the Ketuvim, or the 'writings'. This includes the poetic books of Psalms, Proverbs, and Job, the five scrolls of Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, and Esther, and also the books of Daniel, Chronicles, and Ezra (with Nehemiah as part of the text). Why is Daniel not among the books of prophecy, as Christian bibles place it? The narrative of Daniel describes events that occurred late in Jewish history, and the Talmud gives support to this by providing a late date of authorship for the book. Additionally, several anomalies exist that can only be explained by a later dating, like the presence of Aramaic instead of Hebrew for many passages, the absence of any reference to Daniel among lists of the great Hebrew prophets prior to the 2nd century BC, and the fact of Daniel not making the division of the prophets, which had been 'closed' by 200 BC [3].

In short, answers of precise authorship to the Old Testament can only be speculation. Copies of copies are all that we have for manuscripts, and each one typically shows evidence of multiple authors and/or editors, working over an extended timespan. Even if the traditional attributions are assumed true, the picture of the reliability and integrity of the authors would still be very much in dispute. All that we know of the characters of Moses, Isaiah, David, and the other alleged biblical authors come from writings that are supposed to be their own work, and which are also in dispute themselves. The question of who wrote the Old Testament may have some answers that are more plausible than others, but it is by no means a settled issue that corroborates religious traditions.

II. Evidence of Change

Between 1947 and 1956, nearly 900 documents were found in eleven caves at the ruins of Qumran, near the Dead Sea. The documents, some written on parchment and some on papyrus, comprise the oldest surviving collection of Hebrew scriptures, with various texts dated as early as 150 BC and as late as 70 AD. Known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, they contain passages from the Hebrew canon and from apocryphal (non-canonical) works, transcribed in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. The Dead Sea Scrolls are important because they can help us understand the variations the Old Testament has gone through.

Today there are two main variations of the Hebrew bible: the Septuagint and the Masoretic text. The Septuagint is the Greek translation composed between the 3rd and 1st century BC. According to the Jewish Talmud, King Ptolemy summoned 72 Hebrew translators, assigned each one to a separate chamber and commissioned them to produce a Greek translation of the Torah [4]. The word 'Septuagint' means seventy in Latin, and the text is sometimes abbreviated as "LXX", commemorating the 72 translators who produced it. The Septuagint is especially significant because most quotations of the Hebrew bible included in the New Testament correspond to it, indicating that the Septuagint was probably the version of the scriptures that the New Testament authors were most familiar with.

The Masoretic text was compiled between the 7th and 10th centuries AD, and distributed by a group of Jews known as the Masoretes. Working out of schools in Palestine, the Masoretes achieved a reputation of accuracy, error-correction, and skillful care in their copying techniques that set the standard for the Jewish world for a time [5]. The Masoretic text is what will be found in most Hebrew bibles today, in contrast to the preference of the Septuagint shown by Christian bibles. Although the differences between the two translations are typically minor, some verses of important theological content are interpreted very differently between the variant texts, and according to The Oxford Companion to Archeology:

What this means is that the majority of the biblical manuscripts among the Dead Sea Scrolls are at odds with both the Masoretic and Septuagint texts. Put simply, the Old Testament was certainly not a static and unchanging document. Further evidence of this is also found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, which contains non-canonical writings, as mentioned before. Some of these texts, like the book of Tobit and the book of Sirach, have been dated to the 2nd century BC, and are included in the Greek Septuagint, but omitted from Protestant bibles. There are also many extended, shortened, edited, and revised versions of canonical books and stories found in both the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint. A longer version of Daniel includes a story referred to as "Bel and the Dragon", and an additional six chapters exist in the LXX version of Esther. The Dead Sea Scrolls document known as the Genesis Apocryphon gives a reimagined tale of the birth of Lamech's son, as the father expresses concern that the child is the offspring of one of the Nephilim (see Genesis 6:1-4).

Thus, the earliest copies of Old Testament books have been accompanied by non-canonical works and revisions that show it went through a process of editing and addition, as with any text in history. Even the earliest complete canon known to us, the Greek Septuagint, contains material that illustrates this same fact. As historians and archaeologists uncover more and more of our distant past, it becomes increasingly clear that much of the bible is legendized, including the authorship attributed to its numerous books. Some scholars like Israel Finkelstein have even argued that much of the entire Old Testament is anachronism - stories written at a later date that reflect past events [read a review of Finkelstein's book, The Bible Unearthed].

The Hebrew bible is an overwhelmingly anonymous text, with many tales having been handed down, and altered, for generations. If so much of the tradition on the Old Testament is uncertain and undemonstrated assumption, what of the New Testament?

1. Wenham, G. (1996) Pentateuchal Studies Today. Biblicalstudies.org.uk. Retrieved Nov. 10, 2009.
2. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. (2002) Introduction to the Book of Isaiah. Retrieved Nov. 10, 2009.
3. Russell, D.S. Between the Testaments. p.60. Retrieved Nov. 10, 2009.
4. Babylonian Talmud. Tractate Megillah. p.9a-9b.
5. Cohen, M. The Idea of the Sanctity of the Biblical Text.... Retrieved Nov. 10, 2009.
6. Fagan, B. & C. Beck. (1996) The Oxford Companion to Archeology. "Dead Sea scrolls". Oxford University Press.