Who Wrote The Gospels
My brother was born prematurely during a blizzard. Mom made it to the hospital in time to deliver, but Dad was stuck in a snow bank, the tires of our Chevy spinning as he shoveled cinders furiously. My sisters and I were bundled in snowsuits in the backseat, going nowhere as the cold crept into the car.
That night looms in my memory like it happened last week. Yet depending on who tells the story-Mom, Dad, my sisters, or me-the details change, sometimes dramatically. Our personal experience of these events-what was most important to us-and the passage of time both affect how we tell the story. As does who we are telling it to and why.
The four gospel writers tell the story of Jesus differently for similar reasons. They were probably not eyewitnesses to the events they describe. They wrote a generation beyond the time of Jesus. Writing for different communities, they underscored themes significant for their audience. What prompted each to commit his story to the record?
Literacy was rare. People relied on oral tradition to carry wisdom forward. No one wrote down the words of Jesus as he spoke them. But later, as the gospel eyewitnesses were martyred, it became clear that someone ought to write down the story for future believers. Mark made the first attempt, between 64 and 70 A.D. Mark may have been Peters interpreter and son in faith, mentioned in 1 Peter.
This article appeared in the June 2001 issue of U.S. Catholic .
All 66 Books Of The Bible Agree
But here is the wonder of it all: When the 66 books of the Bible with their 1,189 chapters made up of 31,173 verses are brought together , we find perfect harmony in the message they convey. As the great scholar F. F. Bruce noted: The Bible is not simply an anthology there is a unity which binds the whole together.
The Bible writers gave Gods messages by voice and pen while they lived, and when they died, their writings lived after them. These prophetic messages were then gathered together, under Gods leading, in the book we call the Bible.
Old Testament: The Single Author Theory
The Old Testament, or Hebrew Bible, narrates the history of the people of Israel over about a millennium, beginning with Gods creation of the world and humankind, and contains the stories, laws and moral lessons that form the basis of religious life for both Jews and Christians. For at least 1,000 years, both Jewish and Christian tradition held that a single author wrote the first five books of the BibleGenesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomywhich together are known as the Torah and the Pentateuch . That single author was believed to be Moses, the Hebrew prophet who led the Israelites out of captivity in Egypt and guided them across the Red Sea toward the Promised Land.
Yet nearly from the beginning, readers of the Bible observed that there were things in the so-called Five Books of Moses that Moses himself could not possibly have witnessed: His own death, for example, occurs near the end of Deuteronomy. A volume of the Talmud, the collection of Jewish laws recorded between the 3rd and 5th centuries A.D., dealt with this inconsistency by explaining that Joshua likely wrote the verses about Moses death.
Rembrandt van Rijn, painting of Moses Breaking the Tablets of the Law, 1659.
That’s one opinion among many, says Joel Baden, a professor at Yale Divinity School and author of The Composition of the Pentateuch: Renewing the Documentary Hypothesis. But they’re already asking the questionwas it possible or not possible for to have written them?
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What Bible Was Used Before The Kjv
There is so much information regarding the history of the Bible down through the ages which can literally take up volumes. To keep it simple, here is a very brief outline of the Bible used before the King James Version. .
1382 The Wycliffe Bible translated by John Wycliffe from the Latin Vulgate into English.
1455 The Gutenberg Bible. This was not an English translation but was done in Latin.
1526 The Tyndale Bible. We mentioned this one earlier.
1535 The Coverdale Bible. Completed by Myles Coverdale, it was considered to be the first Modern English translation .
1560 The Geneva Bible. The first mass-produced Bible available to the general public and the primary Bible of 16th Century English Protestants.
1568 The Bishops Bible. An English Bible written under the authority of the Church of England.
1611 The King James Bible.
How Did Christianity Spread Around The World
The Epistles, or letters, written by Paul the Apostle to churches dotted across the Mediterranean world which are our best source for the initial spread of Christianity confirm that Christianity started in Jerusalem, but spread rapidly to Syria and then to the rest of the Mediterranean world, and was mostly accepted by non-Jews, says John Barton, former professor of the interpretation of holy scriptures at the University of Oxford.
The epistles are our earliest evidence for Christianity, says Barton. The first date from the AD 50s, just two decades after the death of Jesus.
As Pauls letters to churches such as the one in the Greek city of Thessalonica reveal, the first Christian communities were often persecuted for their beliefs.
And its such persecution, particularly at the hands of the Romans, that may have inspired the last book of the New Testament, Revelations. With its dark descriptions of a seven-headed beast and allusions to an imminent apocalypse, Revelations is now widely believed to be a foretelling of the grisly fate that the author believed awaited the Roman oppressors of Christianity.
Versions of the Bible
Different editions of the Bible have appeared over the centuries, aiming to further popularise the stories and teachings within. Here are three of the most notable versions
King James Bible
The Gutenberg Bible
Dead Sea Scrolls
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Differences From Other Christian Bibles
Bibles used by Catholics differ in the number and order of books from those typically found in bibles used by Protestants, as Catholic bibles retain in their canon seven books that are regarded as non-canonical in Protestanism . As such, its canon of Old Testament texts is somewhat larger than that in translations used by Protestants, which are typically based exclusively on the shorter Hebrew and AramaicMasoretic Text. On the other hand, its canon, which does not accept all the books that are included in the Septuagint, is shorter than that of some churches of Eastern and Oriental Orthodoxy, which recognize other books as sacred scripture. According to the Greek Orthodox Church, “The translation of the Seventy was for the Church the Apostolic Bible, to which both the Lord and His disciples refer. It enjoys divine authority and prestige as the Bible of the indivisible Church of the first eight centuries. It constitutes the Old Testament, the official text of our Orthodox Church and remains the authentic text by which the official translations of the Old Testament of the other sister Orthodox Churches were made it was the divine instrument of pre-Christ evangelism and was the basis of Orthodox Theology.”
Why Are Protestant And Catholic Bibles Different
Why are Protestant and Catholic Bibles different?
The Protestant Bible, of which the NIV is one version, is seven books shorter than the Bible used by Roman Catholics. But Protestants didn’t just take out books they used a different standard of what should be in the Bible.
The Hebrew Bible has 24 books. This list, or “canon,” was affirmed at the Councils of Jamnia in A.D. 90 and 118. The Protestant Old Testament includes exactly the same information, but organized into 39 books. For example, the Hebrew Bible has one book of Samuel, while the Protestant Bible has I and II Samuelsame book, but divided into two parts.
In addition to these 39 books, the Catholic Old Testament includes Tobit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus , Baruch , I and II Maccabees, and additions to Daniel and Esther. These books were included in the Septuagint, a Greek translation of a different Hebrew canon. Early church fathers, who relied on the Septuagint , sometimes quoted these books as Scripture. The status of the books continued to be debated throughout the Middle Ages.
At the time of the Reformation, Protestants decided that, because the additional books weren’t in the Hebrew Bible, they shouldn’t be in the Christian Bible, either . Catholics, at the Council of Trent , decided to keep the “deutero-canonical” books.
Incidentally, Protestants and Catholics use the same New Testament, the content of which was defined by Athanasius in 367.
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Did The Bible Come From The Catholics
Question from a Site ViewerDid the Bible come from the Catholics?
Tims AnswerThe quick answer is no. The idea that the Bible was written or decreed by the Roman Catholic Church seems strange to anyone who has read the Bible or understands the history of the church.
The church began at Pentecost, when Peter preached a sermon at Jerusalem that is recorded in part for us in Acts 2. Jesus had commanded his disciples to go and proclaim the good news of forgiven sins, reconciliation with God, and the hope of eternal life that comes through the death and resurrection of Jesus. As the disciples went, they established churches, each with their own elders or overseers. None of the churches were subject to other churches, nor were they in some denominational relationship. Rather, as with the Jewish synagogues that predated them, the local churches were a gathering of the new followers of Jesus with local elders and/or bishops overseeing their spiritual condition. Of course, in their new faith these churches naturally looked to the apostles and early leaders of the church for guidance on spiritual matters. Thus, we have Paul, Peter, John, James, and Jude writing letters to various churches, some of which are preserved in our New Testament.
With this backdrop, I return to address the claim that the Roman Catholic Church gave us the Bible.
Where Was Ludwig Krapf Buried
Via Zanzibar, Krapf arrived in Mombasa in 1844. The same year Rosine Krapf gave birth to their second daughter who also died a few days later. His wife sadly passed away in July that same year and was buried according to her wish in Mombasa mainland.
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Set Aside What Religious Tradition Says And Discover Who Wrote The Bible According To The Scholars Who Have Examined The Actual Evidence
Wikimedia CommonsA depiction of Paul the Apostle writing his epistles.
HOLY BOOKS HAVE A REACH that goes far beyond what virtually all works of literature can ever accomplish. Unlike, say, The Great Gatsby, the Bible is a text upon which millions and millions of people have based their entire lives.
That fact can be good or bad, and its often been both over the many centuries throughout which Christians have been reading the Bible and Jews have been reading the Torah. But given its immense reach and cultural influence, its a bit surprising how little we really know about the Bibles origins. In other words, who wrote the Bible? Of all the mysteries surrounding the Bible, that one may be the most fascinating.
Were not completely ignorant, of course. Some books of the Bible were written in the clear light of history, and their authorship isnt terribly controversial. Other books can be reliably dated to a given period by either internal clues sort of the way no books written in the 1700s mention airplanes, for instance and by their literary style, which develops over time.
Religious doctrine, of course, holds that God himself is the author of or at least the inspiration for the entirety of the Bible, which was transcribed by a series of humble vessels. About the best that can be said for that notion is that if God really did write the Bible through a millennium-long sequence of various authors, he was certainly doing it the hard way.
What Belongs In The Bible
There was no Bible as we know it for the first 350 years of Christianity. Jesus did not give his Apostles a list of the books of the Bible before he ascended into heaven. Rather, the early leaders of the Church, guided by the Holy Spirit, discerned which books belonged in the Bible. This process took centuries.
Some criteria for determining the canon of Scripture were as follows:
- Special relation to God, i.e., inspiration
- This means that, guided by the Holy Spirit, the leaders of the early Church discerned that these books were inspired by God
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Who Wrote The New Testament
To continue with this lesson about who wrote the Catholic Bible, we must talk about the different authors of the second part of this book, the so-called New Testament. In this second part we can find the stories about the life of Jesus Christ and the first years of existence of the Christianity.
As we have done in the previous section to talk about the different authors of the New Testament we must comment on its different subdivisions.
Who Wrote The First Bible
Traditionally these books were considered to have been written almost entirely by Moses himself. In the 19th century, Julius Wellhausen and other scholars proposed that the Torah had been compiled from earlier written documents dating from the 9th to the 5th century BCE, the documentary hypothesis.
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Who Wrote The Bible: The First Five Books
Wikimedia CommonsMoses, as painted by Rembrandt.
According to both Jewish and Christian Dogma, the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy were all written by Moses in about 1,300 B.C. There are a few issues with this, however, such as the lack of evidence that Moses ever existed and the fact that the end of Deuteronomy describes the author dying and being buried.
Scholars have developed their own take on who wrote the Bibles first five books, mainly by using internal clues and writing style. Just as English speakers can roughly date a book that uses a lot of thees and thous, Bible scholars can contrast the styles of these early books to create profiles of the different authors.
In each case, these writers are talked about as if they were a single person, but each author could just as easily be an entire school of people writing in a single style. These biblical authors include:
Wikimedia CommonsA depiction of the destruction of Jerusalem under Babylonian rule.
Wikimedia CommonsKing Josiah
Who Wrote The Bible
Who wrote the Bible? Was it God? Or was it human beings? The answer for Catholics is a resounding Yes! The Bible is the word of God in the words of human beings. God is the primary author of the Bible, so we know that whatever Scripture asserts to be true is in fact true. When we understand it correctly, the Bible will never lead us astray.
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Find Out Who Wrote The Catholic Bible
The Bible It is the book with the highest number of sales in the history of mankind, thus being considered the most influential book in all of history. There are many things about the Bible that we tend not to ask ourselves, although most of us know many of the stories that lie within it. To know one of the most important facts of the Bible, in this lesson from a TEACHER we are going to talk about who wrote the catholic bible.
Index
The Original Testament: A Catholic Approach To The Hebrew Bible
For the topic of the October Synod of Bishops in Rome, Pope Benedict XVI has chosen The Word of God in the Life and Mission of the Church. The agenda committee, after polling bishops and others, published a working document known as the instrumentum laboris. High on its list of topics was the Old Testament, which, the committee frankly acknowledged, seems to be a real problem among Catholics, particularly as it relates to the mystery of Christ and the Church .
As a professor of Old Testament for many years at Weston Jesuit School of Theology , I would like to contribute to the synod by posing and answering four frequently asked questions: How does the Old Testament fit in the Christian Bible? How should we understand its depictions of violence and hatred for the enemies of Israel? Did all its miraculous events actually occur, or are they literary inventions? What should we call the Hebrew books in the Christian Bible: the Old Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures, the First Testament?
How does the Old Testament fit in the Christian Bible?
The question should be reversed: How does the New Testament fit in the Christian Bible? The short answer is that the Old Testament reaches its climax there . Modes of divine activity and communication depicted in the Old Testamentword, wisdom, spirit, glory, Davidic kingshipare expressed in the New Testament in a full and personal way in Jesus.
What to call the Hebrew books in the Christian Bible?
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