Part 1
Growing up in a Christian home, I believed that the Bible was made up of God's very words, and as such was perfect and sacred in every way. Yet at the same time, I knew the Bible was actually written by humans, not God. Being the inquisitive kid that I was, I often tried to imagine how this transfer of information between God and humanity worked. Did God speak from Heaven with a booming voice, telling the authors what to write down? Or did God speak in the authors' hearts to instruct them on exactly what to say, and the authors, being especially righteous, just had a good ear for hearing God's voice within them (which unfortunately I never had)? Or did the authors merely write these works themselves through their own will, and the Holy Spirit was just working in them to produce inspired scripture without them even knowing it?
In my adult life my religious views changed, but my inquisitive nature never did, and I am still interested in understanding how the Bible came to be written as we have it today. But even setting aside unanswerable questions regarding the inspiration of the Bible, I have realized the simple question "how was the Bible written?" is even more complicated than I could have thought. Not only do we not know who originally wrote most of the Bible, there is also substantial evidence that much of it has been anonymously edited for centuries after its original texts had been written.
This raised new questions for me. Why were many of the authors of the Bible anonymous? Why would people feel the need to change their own scripture? Why would audiences accept these changes to their scripture?
These are questions that I still wrestle with today. That being said, while the idea of editing the Bible raises some difficult questions, it seems that it often occurred in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. This blog series will investigate some of the evidence of this editing in order to provide a clearer understanding of how the Bible as we know it came to be.
It first should be said that we don't have any of the original manuscripts for any of the books in the Bible. This means that we can't show how our modern Bibles have been changed from how they originally were written (because no one knows how any of the books of the Bible were originally written). However, we can certainly see evidence that significant instances of editing have occurred throughout history. This is done by scholars, typically using these two methods:
1. Manuscript Comparison. By comparing different manuscripts of the books of the Bible we have access to, we can see differences in the earlier versions from the older ones.
2. Internal Contradictions. By reading the Bible critically, we can note significant contradictions and differences of details in certain books of the Bible, indicating they were the result of an editor compiling multiple older sources.We will be using both of these methods in this blog series, which will be applied to both the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. The topic of biblical editing and the idea that the Bible has internal contradictions is controversial to some Christians. While I do not see either as a problem within my own religious tradition, I understand that others do. This blog series is not meant as an attack on anyone's faith, but rather as an introduction to the mainstream perspectives in academia on how the Bible came to be, presenting a much more human side of the Bible than is often found in the imagination of Christians.
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