Which Biblical Author Wrote Most
Heres a breakdown of the five human authors with the biggest contributions to the Bible. And just so you know, Im pulling these word counts from the original languages, not our English Bibles. I used The Lexham Hebrew Bible for the Old Testament authors and the NA27 .
Obviously, I couldnt have done this without Logos Bible Software.
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Does It Matter If Jesus Really Did And Said What Is In The Gospels
Yes. For faith to really be of any value, it must be based on facts, on reality. Here is why. If you were taking a flight to London, you would probably have faith that the jet is fueled and mechanically reliable, the pilot trained, and no terrorists on board. Your faith, however, is not what gets you to London. Your faith is useful in that it got you on the plane. But what actually gets you to London is the integrity of the plane, pilot, etc. You could rely on your positive experience of past flights. But your positive experience would not be enough to get that plane to London. What matters is the object of your faith is it reliable?
Is the New Testament an accurate, reliable presentation of Jesus? Yes. We can trust the New Testament because there is enormous factual support for it. This article touched on the following points: historians concur, archaeology concurs, the four Gospel biographies are in agreement, the preservation of document copies is remarkable, there is superior accuracy in the translations. All of this gives a solid foundation for believing that what we read today is what the original writers wrote and experienced in real life, in real places.
John, one of the writers sums it up well, Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.12
Letter Of Paul To Philemon
The Letter of Paul to Philemon was probably composed by St. Paul in a Roman prison about 61 CE, though some sources date it earlier. The brief epistle was written to Philemon, a wealthy Christian of Colossae, on behalf of Onesimus, Philemons former slave. While passing no judgment on slavery itself, Paul exhorts Philemon to manifest true Christian love that removes barriers between slaves and free people.
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Moses Gave The Book Of The Law To The Priests:
NASB, Deuteronomy 31:9 So Moses wrote this law and gave it to the priests, the sons of Levi who carried the ark of the covenant of the Lord, and to all the elders of Israel.
Deuteronomy 31:26-27 Take this book of the law, and place it beside the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God, that it may remain there as a witness against you. 27 For I know your rebellion and your stubbornness behold, while I am still alive with you today, you have been rebellious against the Lord
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Letter Of Paul To The Romans
The sixth book of the New Testament, the Letter of Paul to the Romans, was written by St. Paul while he was in Corinth about 57 CE. It was addressed to the Christian church at Rome, whose congregation he hoped to visit for the first time on his way to Spain. The epistle is the longest and doctrinally most significant of St. Pauls writings and is more of a theological treatise than a letter. In it he acknowledges the unique religious heritage of the Jews but asserts that righteousness no longer comes through the Mosaic Law but through Christ.
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Languages Used In Ancient Judea
After the Babylonian captivity, Aramaic replaced Biblical Hebrew as the everyday language in Judea. The two languages were as similar as two Romance languages or two Germanic languages today. Thus Biblical Hebrew, which was still used for religious purposes, was not totally unfamiliar, but still, a somewhat strange norm that demanded a certain degree of training to be understood properly.
After Alexander, Judea was ruled by the Ptolemies and the Seleucids for almost two hundred years. Jewish culture was heavily influenced by Hellenistic culture, and Koine Greek was used not only for international communication but also as the first language of many Jews. This development was furthered by the fact that the largest Jewish community in the world lived in Ptolemaic Alexandria. Many of these diaspora Jews would have Greek as their first language, and first, the Torah and then other Jewish scriptures were therefore translated into standard Koine Greek, i.e. the .
Currently, 1,600 Jewish epitaphs are extant from ancient Judea dating from 300 BC to 500 AD. Approximately 70 percent are in Greek, about 12 percent are in Latin, and only 18 percent are in Hebrew or Aramaic. “In Jerusalem itself, about 40 percent of the Jewish inscriptions from the first century period are in Greek. We may assume that most Jewish Jerusalemites who saw the inscriptions in situ were able to read them”.
An Introduction To The Gospels
A period of forty years separates the death of Jesus from the writing of thefirst gospel. History offers us little direct evidence about the events ofthis period, but it does suggest that the early Christians were engaged in oneof the most basic of human activities: story-telling. In the words of MikeWhite, “It appears that between the death of Jesus and the writing of the firstgospel, , that they clearly are telling stories. They’re passing on thetradition of what happened to Jesus, what he stood for and what he did, orally,by telling it and retelling it. And in the process they are defining Jesus forthemselves.”
These shared memories, passed along by word of mouth, are known as “oraltradition.” They included stories of Jesus’ miracles and healings, his parablesand teachings, and his death. Eventually some stories were written down. Thefirst written documents probably included an account of the death of Jesus anda collection of sayings attributed to him.
Then, in about the year 70, the evangelist known as wrote the first”gospel” — the words mean “good news” about Jesus. We will never know thewriter’s real identity, or even if his name was Mark, since it was commonpractice in the ancient world to attribute written works to famous people. Butwe do know that it was Mark’s genius to first to commit the story of Jesus towriting, and thereby inaugurated the gospel tradition.
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The Department Of Redundancy Department
If the divine names are not a sure guide to what source is being used, what about the apparent duplications of events, such as Abraham passing Sarah off as his sister to foreign rulers or Isaac doing the same thing with Rebecca ?
Does this indicate different sources containing the same basic story that got stitched together, creating the duplications?
Not necessarily. It can also that the author means us to understand this as a family tactica kind of scamthat the Patriarchs used to get out of tough situations.
There is evidence for this in the Hebrew text of Genesis 20:2, which is normally translated And Abraham said of Sarah his wife, She is my sister.
Contemporary Jewish scholar Gary Rendsburg points out, however, that what it says in Hebrew is not that he said this of Sarah his wife but to Sarah his wife .
Abraham and Sarah have already done this once before, and now the text asks us to envision Abraham turning to Sarah and saying to her, She is my sistercueing her to what his plan is. We can see her thinking, Oh, were going to do that one again.
Since the ruse worked twice for Abraham, its not surprising to find his son, Isaac, using it in a similar situation.
And there is another reason why the duplications do not indicate multiple sources.
Diversity Of Bible Writers
Those who wrote the Bible lived at different times, some separated by hundreds of years. In many cases they were complete strangers to one another. Some Bible writers were businessmen or traders others were shepherds, fishermen, soldiers, physicians, preachers, kingshuman beings from all walks of life. They served under different governments and lived within contrasting cultures and systems of philosophy.
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The Wide Variety Of Titles That Isnt That Wide After All
Why, then, do skeptical scholars continue to claim that the New Testament Gospels were originally anonymous?
According to Ehrman, its due to the wide variety of titles for the Gospels. From his perspective, the variety of different titles in Gospel manuscripts demonstrates that the titles were added in different locations long after the books originally began to circulate.
But what type of wide variety of titles is actually present in Gospel manuscripts from the first few centuries of Christian faith?
In almost every instance, the variety is limited to whether the title is According to the author or whether the title is Gospel According to the author.
In some manuscripts, the title is Gospel According to the ascribed author in others, the title is simply According to the author. The difference is the difference between a full title and an abbreviated titlenothing more. That abbreviation accounts for nearly every instance of Ehrmans supposed wide variety in Gospel titles.
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Development Of The New Testament Canon
The process of canonization of the New Testament was complex and lengthy. In the initial centuries of early Christianity, there were many books widely considered by the church to be inspired, but there was no single formally recognized New Testament canon. The process was characterized by a compilation of books that apostolic tradition considered authoritative in worship and teaching, relevant to the historical situations in which they lived, and consonant with the Old Testament. Writings attributed to the apostles circulated among the earliest Christian communities and the Pauline epistles were circulating, perhaps in collected forms, by the end of the 1st century AD.
One of the earliest attempts at solidifying a canon was made by , c.140 AD, who accepted only a modified version of Luke and ten of Paul’s letters, while rejecting the Old Testament entirely. His canon was largely rejected by other groups of Christians, notably the proto-orthodox Christians, as was his theology, . Adolf von Harnack, John Knox, and David Trobisch, among other scholars, have argued that the church formulated its New Testament canon partially in response to the challenge posed by Marcion.
The Muratorian fragment, dated at between 170 and as late as the end of the 4th century , may be the earliest known New Testament canon attributed to mainstream Christianity. It is similar, but not identical, to the modern New Testament canon.
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Who Were The Old Testament Authors
There are 39 books or collected documents in the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, written mostly by Moses, and then, prophets, Kings David and Solomon, priests, and scriveners or scribes. The Tanakh (an acronym based upon the division of the ancient Hebrew Scriptures by genre: Torah , Nevim , and the Ketuuvin .
Old Testament Authors Listed:
- other psalmists and proverb writers
- unknown authors
- possible authors: Samuel, Nehemiah, Mordecai
Who Wrote The Bible And Why It Matters
Apart from the most rabid fundamentalists among us, nearly everyone admits that the Bible might contain errors — a faulty creation story here, a historical mistake there, a contradiction or two in some other place. But is it possible that the problem is worse than that — that the Bible actually contains lies?
Most people wouldn’t put it that way, since the Bible is, after all, sacred Scripture for millions on our planet. But good Christian scholars of the Bible, including the top Protestant and Catholic scholars of America, will tell you that the Bible is full of lies, even if they refuse to use the term. And here is the truth: Many of the books of the New Testament were written by people who lied about their identity, claiming to be a famous apostle — Peter, Paul or James — knowing full well they were someone else. In modern parlance, that is a lie, and a book written by someone who lies about his identity is a forgery.
Most modern scholars of the Bible shy away from these terms, and for understandable reasons, some having to do with their clientele. Teaching in Christian seminaries, or to largely Christian undergraduate populations, who wants to denigrate the cherished texts of Scripture by calling them forgeries built on lies? And so scholars use a different term for this phenomenon and call such books “pseudepigrapha.”
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Letter Of Paul To The Galatians
The Letter of Paul to the Galatians, the ninth book of the New Testament, was authored by St. Paul. The letter was likely written between 5354 CE and addresses division within the Christian community about whether new converts needed to be circumcised and follow the prescriptions of the Mosaic Law. He reaffirms his teaching that Jewish law is no longer the exclusive path to righteousness and argues that Christians have a new freedom in Christ. The letter is very forceful and specific in dealing with the problems concerned and is the only epistle without kindly ingression, thanksgiving, or personal greetings appended to the final blessings.
Theological Interpretation In Christian Churches
Though all Christian churches accept the New Testament as scripture, they differ in their understanding of the nature, extent, and relevance of its authority. Views of the authoritativeness of the New Testament often depend on the concept of inspiration, which relates to the role of God in the formation of the New Testament. Generally, the greater the role of God in one’s doctrine of inspiration, the more one accepts the doctrine of biblical inerrancy or authoritativeness of the Bible. One possible source of confusion is that these terms are difficult to define, because many people use them interchangeably or with very different meanings. This article will use the terms in the following manner:
- Infallibility relates to the absolute correctness of the Bible in matters of doctrine.
- Inerrancy relates to the absolute correctness of the Bible in factual assertions .
- relates to the correctness of the Bible in questions of practice in morality.
According to Gary T. Meadors:
The self-witness of the Bible to its inspiration demands a commitment to its unity. The ultimate basis for unity is contained in the claim of divine inspiration in 2 Timothy 3:16 that “all Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness” . The term “inspiration” renders the Greek word theopneustos. This term only occurs here in the New Testament and literally means “God-breathed” .
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Who Wrote The Bible: God Or Man
The Scripture says in 2 Peter 1:20-21, Knowing this first, that no prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpretation, for prophecy never came by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit revealed to the prophets the messages of Scripture. The writers of the Bible wrote not according to their own will or whim, but only as they were moved, or controlled, by the Spirit of God. The Bible is Gods own book!
2 Timothy 3:16-17 says, All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. The Holy Bible affects human beings so profoundly, because all the Bible is God-breathed. Its more than a nice collection of moral principles its more than a great book its an inspired document, Gods book. The prophets who wrote the Bible related what they saw and heard in human language, but their message came directly from God.
The Old Testament: Various Schools Of Authors
To explain the Bibles contradictions, repetitions and general idiosyncrasies, most scholars today agree that the stories and laws it contains were communicated orally, through prose and poetry, over centuries. Starting around the 7th century B.C., different groups, or schools, of authors wrote them down at different times, before they were at some point combined into the single, multi-layered work we know today.
Of the three major blocks of source material that scholars agree comprise the Bibles first five books, the first was believed to have been written by a group of priests, or priestly authors, whose work scholars designate as P. A second block of source material is known as Dfor Deuteronomist, meaning the author of the vast majority of the book of Deuteronomy. The two of them are not really related to each other in any significant way, Baden explains, except that they’re both giving laws and telling a story of Israel’s early history.
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First And Second Epistle Of Peter
The First Epistle of Peter claims to be written by âPeter, an apostle of Jesusâ , who would most likely be Simon Peter. This was accepted without question until true scholarship on the Bible became commonplace, in the late 1700âs and forward. Like Mark, the Greek used in the Epistle suggests someone highly familiar and skilled with formal cultured Greek, not a Jew speaking Aramaic. Further, references to the Old Testament come not from the Hebrew bible , but from the Greek translations of the day. The majority of scholars working on 1 Peter date it between 70-120 CE. There is quite serious debate when trying to pin it down more precisely.
The Second Epistle of Peter has really never been considered an authentic work of Simon Peter. The spelling of the name âSimonâ suggests it is not even the same author as the First Epistle. The accounts of what should otherwise be intimate moments between Jesus and Peter are formulaic and expedient, again suggesting there is no real knowledge of the actual events here. Ironically, after true biblical exegesis began, a small exception of scholars have challenged the long-held notion that this was not an authentic work of Peterâs by looking at the less educated Greek that is used and by noting that details which are common in pseudoepigraphical works are lacking here.
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