Outline byDon
- Lets talk about
- why I am here and
- What is the Purpose of this session on the History of the Bible and
- purpose of a Bible .
- Purpose of what we do today
- Talk about who wrote the Bibles - plural, When I say History of the Bible I really am searching for who wrote it and how it was shared
- talk about the beginning of the Bible and some of the basic issues in such a review, later we might examine these issues in more detail if there is enough interest
- We could approach it as an attempt to worry about whether inspired or not or if there are too many errors or whether it is the truth
- or approach it that , as Ben Witherington says, it is accurate PERIOD
- Of course I am not capable of answering either way but I can help us understand the tremendous efforts of many people and translators and why there were so many objections to translating the Bible into the vulgar - meaning language of the people - especially in English
- James does ETopcs on many subjects including the writers of the Bible.
- While his comments are interesting, he is not very specifice not even with the Moses issue.
- I will add more from his work here later but the link is as follows:
- eBible Questions
- Originally I was looking into the history of the English Bible
- I knew the KJV was used often and now there are other versions in English people use
- So first I was interested in the History of the King James version but that led to examining the History of the English Bible which is even broader
- and onto examining the translations from the original language
- What Language was the Bible in
- Old Testament
- Hebrew mainly
- Some Aramaic
- New Testament
- Greek mainly
- Apocrypha
- ???
- Jesus spoke Aramaic, read a Hebrew Bible translated to Greek
- What have we heard is the purpose of a Bible, not necessarily what you think it is, what you heard
- Word of God,
- Guidance in living,
- Make sure the Chosen Race behaves
- learning how to get to Heaven,
- How to be better people
- to set up punishment if did not worship God
- I am not here to address a much more important point - how the Bible can help us get to Heaven, or salvation as it usually is called
- The main thing I hope you will leave here with is
- understand the tremendous efforts of many people and translators in bringing the Bible to us
- Appreciate the wide variety of input into the Bible
- Back on date) the Library at MPUMC sponsored a display included Bibles from mebers.
- It can be seen on line at the following link
- Interesting Bible facts
- Jesus spoke Aramaic, read a Greek Bible that had been translated from Hebrew; He never read the KJV
- The Catholic Church did not want people to be able to read the Bible (why? Some say job security) so they forced the churches to have it read in Latin - which most worshipers did not understand
- Many people were killed at the direction of the Catholic Church for trying to bring a vulgar bible to the masses.
- The first printed Bible in the American colonies was in an Indian language
- What did Moses write
- Who wrote Bible,
- Lot of oral history of course
- who knows if Moses was able to write down the story of Creation etc
- The Dead Sea Scrolls perhaps are the oldest examples of early Bible writing and they confirm later writings
- When were they written if Moses did not do it
- Much of it came from when the Jews living in a foreign land
- How did the Bible stories begin
- Oral for many years until some folks speculate was written in Heirogritherics
- God wrote the 10 commandments with his finger so the Bible says
- Moses is attributed with writing the first five books of the Bible . . some even say he wrote about his own death at the end of which book
- I am not so sure he wrote all that as we can address another time
- We mentioned the first 5 books of the Bible, what are they and what called
- Genesis Exodus Leviticus Numbers Duetorominy and called
- Torah in Hebrew
- in Greek called Pentateuch
- Some of the early Bibles had had 80 books , how is that
- There are how many books in Bible
- Old Testament 39 now
- New Testament 27
- Apocrypha 14 +/-
- =80
- What is Apocrypha
- Jewish books from period between 150 BCE and 100 Ce
- Some were parts of the other 39
- Similar to other books but not felt of enough importance to be included in the CANON
- What is Canon?
-
- Dates that are important:
- 1492
Writers of the Early Bible(s)
- Biblical scholars since the 17th century have pointed to evidence that
human writers, and in fact a number of different writers, composed the
Bible. Mainstream Jewish and Christian organizations, including
seminaries and rabbinical schools, generally embrace such
scholarship—seeing the voice of God in a text compiled by human hands.
In the following interview, Michael Coogan, Professor of Religious
Studies at Stonehill College and Director of Publications for the
Harvard Semitic Museum, offers insights into how scholars today
understand how the first five books of the Bible were written.
-
Mainstream scholars like Coogan point to strong evidence that humans had a hand in the writing and editing of biblical texts.
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Photo credit: © WGBH Educational Foundation
An anthology of sacred texts
NOVA: Most people may see the Bible as a single text, but is it?
- Michael Coogan: One way of thinking about
the Bible is that it's like an anthology of literature made over the
course of many centuries by different people. Think of an analogy: The Norton Anthology of English Literature, which covers over a thousand years, from Beowulf
into the 20th century. The Bible covers a similar span. The earliest
texts in the Bible likely date to before 1000 B.C., and the latest texts
go at least to the 2nd century B.C., and for Christians, into the 2nd
century A.D. So it is an anthology of the literature of ancient Israel
and early Judaism, and for Christians, of earliest Christianity, as
well.
- Like any anthology, it's selective. There were many other texts that
the ancient Israelites and early Christians produced that we no longer
have. We have reference in the Book of Numbers, for instance, to the
Book of the Wars of Yahweh. Yahweh was the name of the God of Israel.
And it must have been a wonderful book, but all we have is a kind of
learned footnote.
If it's an anthology, what ties the Bible together?
- More than anything else, the Bible is an account of the actions of God
in the world from creation, and especially his dealings with humans, and
especially with a certain subset of humans, the ancient Israelites.
- So
it's really the story of God acting in history.
Do you think it has a central theme?
- That's a difficult question to answer. I think the central message is
that there is a God who is deeply and passionately involved in human
history, from the scope of empires to the details of an individual's
life.
- Within that larger framework, one of the major themes of the Bible
is that of covenant. In Christian tradition, the two parts of the Bible
are the Old and New Testaments, and "testament" is just an archaic word
for covenant.
Was the Israelites' idea of a having a covenant with God unusual?
- Well, the word "covenant" in Hebrew, berit, really means
contract. It's used in the Bible to describe all sorts of secular
agreements. It's used for treaties between one king and another. It's
used for marriage. It's used in debt slavery, in which someone would pay
off a debt by agreeing to work for someone. Contracts like that are
known throughout the ancient world.
- The biblical writers used this legal metaphor to describe the
relationship between God and Israel, and God and various individuals
within the ancient Israelite community. And that seems unique. No other
ancient people used that metaphor to describe their relationship with
their god or gods.
-
For nearly 2,000 years, Jewish and Christian tradition held that
Moses, directed by God, composed the first five books of the Bible.
The Five Books of Moses -The first five books of the Bible, which Jews know as the Torah, are
also called The Five Books of Moses. Where did the idea that Moses wrote
these books come from?
- In the Hebrew Bible, Moses is the single most important human
character, and more space is devoted to the account of Moses' life and
speeches by Moses than to anyone else in the Bible. Moses is also
considered closer to God than anyone else in the Bible.
- And certainly by
the 5th century B.C., the idea developed that Moses had written down
words that God himself had spoken on Mt. Sinai. Eventually—and this
didn't happen until several centuries later—it came to be understood
that Moses wrote all of the first five books of the Bible.
What were some clues that led biblical scholars to question this belief?
- The view that Moses had personally written down the first five books of
the Bible was virtually unchallenged until the 17th century. There were
a few questions raised before that. For example, the very end of the
last book of the Torah, the Book of Deuteronomy, describes the death and
burial of Moses.
- So some rabbis said Moses couldn't have written those
words himself because he was dead—perhaps Joshua, his divinely
designated successor, wrote those words.
- But other rabbis said, no,
Moses was a prophet, and God revealed to him exactly what would happen
at the end of his life.
- "Underlying the Bible are several different ancient documents or
sources, which biblical writers and editors combined at various stages
into the Torah."
- So scholars began to think not just that Moses was not the author, but
that ordinary men and women (mostly men) had written these pages.
What are some obvious inconsistencies, for instance in the Noah story?
- In the story of the flood, in Genesis chapters 6 to 9, there seem to be
two accounts that have been combined, and they have a number of
inconsistencies. For example, how many of each species of animals is
Noah supposed to bring into the ark? One text says two, a pair of every
kind of animal. Another text says seven pairs of the clean animals and
only two of the unclean animals.
- [For more analysis of the flood story, see Who Wrote the Flood Story?.]
-
The Book of Genesis offers what appear to be two disparate accounts of Noah and the flood interwoven together. Were there 2x2 or 7x7?
- Was it a passover meal or something else
- Did Jesus cleanse the Temple at beginning or ending of his ministry
Why would the biblical writers compiling the various accounts include such clear discrepancies?
- Even before the Bible became the Bible, even before these texts became
official canonical scriptures, there was an idea of preserving ancient
traditions.
- Preserving ancient traditions was more important than a kind
of superficial consistency of plot or detail.
The Documentary Hypothesis -What is the Documentary Hypothesis?
- The Documentary Hypothesis is a theory to explain the many repetitions,
inconsistencies, and anachronisms in the first five books of the Bible.
- In its classic form, it says that underlying the Bible are several
different ancient documents or sources, which biblical writers and
editors combined at various stages into the Torah as we have it today.
What's the earliest source? It might be "J"
- The earliest of these sources is the one known as J, which many
scholars initially dated to the 10th century B.C., the time of David and
Solomon, or perhaps a bit later, to the 9th century, after the split of
the United Kingdom into the Kingdom of Israel in the north and the
Kingdom of Judah in the south.
- Some scholars today, however, question
that dating, placing J as late as the 4th century B.C.
How did it get the name "J"?
- The J source gets its name because it uses the divine name "Yahweh." In
the stories about Abraham, for instance, God is called Yahweh.
- The
German word for Yahweh is spelled with a J instead of a Y. And the
German scholars who initially worked on the Documentary Hypothesis
called the source "J."
-
Separate biblical writers in Genesis seem to have used different
names for God. One of these names is YHWH, generally pronounced
"Yahweh."
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Photo credit: © WGBH Educational Foundation
People reading the Bible today in English don't come across the name Yahweh. Why is that? Tell us more about the name.
- It's a very mysterious name. In Jewish tradition it came to be
considered so sacred that it was never to be pronounced. When you ran
across this name in the Bible, written with its four consonants, which
in English would be YHWH, you never read what that name was, you read
some other word, usually a word that means "Lord." The Hebrew word is Adonai.
This pious substitution became standard in Jewish tradition and also in
Christian tradition. Almost all translations of the Bible say "The
Lord."
- It's also a mysterious name because we don't know exactly what it
means. It seems to have been the personal name of the god of Israel. His
title, in a sense, was God, and his name was these four letters, which
we think were probably pronounced something like Yahweh.
How does the Bible, in the sections that are attributed to this oldest source, J, depict Yahweh when he first appears?
- The earliest poems we have in the Bible depict the God of Israel,
Yahweh, as a god who comes from the south, surrounded by an entourage of
heavenly warriors who fight with him.
- He appears on mountains with all
the accoutrements of a storm—the mountains quake, and the Earth shakes,
and the clouds drop down water.
- He is, in effect, a storm god, like many
other storm gods of the ancient Mediterranean world. J uses some of
this language,
- and also, J describes Yahweh as a god personally involved
with humans, like deities in myths of other cultures.
-
In Jewish tradition, when reading from the Torah, the Hebrew word Adonai ("The Lord") is substituted for the sacred name "Yahweh." Enlarge
Photo credit: © WGBH Educational Foundation
The E and D sources - So the J source used the name Yahweh, but other
sources used a different name for God. Tell us about the so-called E
source.
- In Genesis, in many passages, God is called not Yahweh but Elohim. And
some of these passages were identified in the Documentary Hypothesis as
coming from a source called E, for Elohim. The E source is very
difficult to characterize. The J source has a fairly coherent narrative,
but the E source is extremely fragmentary. Some scholars even wonder if
there is an E source.
- In the classic understanding, the E source seems to have a northern
origin, because the stories in the book of Genesis are frequently set in
the northern part of Israel, in what became the northern Kingdom of
Israel.
- "In the Book of Deuteronomy there seems to be a new understanding of
God's relationship with Israel and Israel's relationship with its God."
Does E depict God differently than J does?
- Yes. In the J source, God appears directly to people. For example, he
speaks directly to Abraham—he even comes to visit him and has dinner
with him in his tent. I
- n the E source, however, God is more remote. God
doesn't appear in person to human beings, but God appears to them in
dreams or sends messengers, later to be called angels, or sends
prophets, but doesn't deal with human beings directly.
-
To portray the writers of the biblical texts, NOVA turned to actual scribes living in Jerusalem today.
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Photo credit: © WGBH Educational Foundation
What's the next source, according to the chronology of the Documentary Hypothesis? The third source is called D
- The third source is called D, and it takes its name from the Book of
Deuteronomy. It is found almost exclusively in the Book of Deuteronomy.
Deuteronomy has a very distinctive style, which is very different from
that found in the earlier books of the Torah.
- t also has important
themes that, although found earlier in the Torah, are given special
emphasis in Deuteronomy, especially the insistence on the exclusive
worship of the God of Israel.
Is it known when this source was written?
- Many scholars think that it was written in the late 8th century B.C. It
was subsequently used by King Josiah, in the late 7th century B.C., in
support of his effort to unify the kingdom and to enforce religious
observance.
What does the Bible itself—the later books of the Bible—tell us about Josiah and his link to Deuteronomy?
- We are told in the Book of Kings that King Josiah learned that a scroll
had been discovered in the temple archives.
- The scroll was brought to
him and read out loud before him. And the narrative goes on to say that,
as the scroll was being read,
- Josiah began to weep, because he realized
that it was a sacred text containing divine commands that the people
had been breaking.
- After he heard the scroll read, King Josiah ordered a sweeping
religious reform throughout his kingdom.
- And the details of that reform,
as described in the Book of Kings, correspond in many details to the
divine requirements in the Book of Deuteronomy.
What were some of the requirements?
- Josiah required, for example, that all of the shrines to other gods and
goddesses throughout the land be destroyed. He also forbade the worship
of Yahweh, the God of Israel, at any place other than Jerusalem.
- The
Book of Deuteronomy says, "You shall worship the Lord, your God, only at
one place, at the place he will choose."
- Scholars have wondered about Josiah's motivation. Was it simply his
piety? Or was there a political motivation as well? By requiring that
all Israelites worship Yahweh only in Jerusalem, Josiah brought under
his direct control the enormous religious establishment of ancient
Israel, which up until that time had been scattered in various centers
of worship throughout the land.
How does Deuteronomy describe Israel's relationship with God?
- In the Book of Deuteronomy there seems to be a new understanding of
God's relationship with Israel and Israel's relationship with its God.
One of the terms that Deuteronomy uses repeatedly is the term "love."
"You should love the Lord, your God, because he has loved you.
- He has
loved you more than any other nation." So the divine love for Israel
requires a corresponding loyalty to God, an exclusive loyalty to God.
And Deuteronomy, more than any other part of the Bible, is insistent
that only the God of Israel is to be worshipped.
The final synthesis
-
These last writers, the priestly writers, are known as P, right?
What events led to the last major phase of the writing of the Torah?
- In the 6th century B.C. the Babylonians invaded the Kingdom of Judah
twice. In the second invasion, which began in 587 B.C. and ended in 586
B.C., they destroyed the city of Jerusalem. It was the end of a way of
life. It was the end of control of the Promised Land by the descendants
of Abraham for many, many centuries. It was the end of the dynasty
founded by David. The Temple, which was supposed to be the only place
where Yahweh was worshipped, was destroyed, and a significant part of
the population was taken to exile in Babylon. It was a crisis of
enormous proportion.
-
- The great Israeli biblical scholar Yehezkel Kaufmann said it is a
watershed, it is when ancient Israel ends and Judaism begins. Amongst
the exiles from Jerusalem to Babylon were priests from the temple. And
they seem to have brought with them their sacred documents, their sacred
traditions. According to the Documentary Hypothesis, they consolidated
these traditions—they edited them, and they constructed what became the
first version of the Torah.
"The priests collected the ancient traditions and shaped them into the Torah."
These last writers, the priestly writers, are known as P, right?
- Yes. So it was P who took all these earlier traditions—the J source,
the E source, the D source, and other sources as well—and combined them
into what we know as the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. The P
source, in fact, frames the Torah with its own material: The first
chapter of the first book of the Bible, Genesis, is from the P source,
and most of the last chapter of the last book of the Torah, the Book of
Deuteronomy, is also from the P source.
- 588 "P' mentioned as looked back to past and found a reason for hope. (Armstrong 25) Built on PE adding Numbers and Leviticuse
-
Coogan and other scholars think that a group they call the Priestly
Writers compiled the work of previous authors during the Babylonian
Exile.
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Photo credit: © WGBH Educational Foundation
After the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple, the Israelites retained their faith. That seems remarkable.
- Yes. In the ancient world, if your country was destroyed by another
country, it meant their gods were more powerful than yours. And the
natural thing to do was to worship the more powerful god. But the
survivors of the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B.C. did not give up
the worship of Yahweh. They continued to worship Yahweh and struggled to
understand how this could have happened.
- One explanation was that they were being punished deservedly for their
failure to live up to the covenant obligations. Probably one of the
reasons why the priests collected the ancient traditions and shaped them
into the Torah was so that these covenant obligations would not be
forgotten again.
So they kept the faith that, as long as they were loyal to God, God
would protect them and return them one day to the Promised Land.
- Yes. One of the pervasive themes in the Torah is the theme of exile and
return. Over and over again, individuals and groups leave their land
only to return. Abraham goes down to Egypt and comes out of Egypt. Jacob
goes to a foreign land and returns. The Israelites go to Egypt and get
out. And for the exiles in Babylon in the 6th century B.C., that theme
must have resonated very powerfully. God, who had acted on their behalf
in the past, will presumably do so again.
- To assure that divine protection, the priestly writers stress aspects
of religious observance that were not tied down to the land of Israel
itself, that were not attached to any particular institution such as the
temple, that did not require a monarchy—all of those had ceased to
exist. So the P tradition emphasizes observances such as the Sabbath
observance, such as dietary observance, such as circumcision. You don't
need to be in the land of Israel to keep the Sabbath. You don't need a
temple or a king or a priesthood to observe the dietary laws. Any Jew
anywhere in the world can do that. So the priestly tradition, writing
for these exiles, was teaching them how to be faithful to the covenant.
- [For more on the The Rise of Judaism, read this interview with Shaye Cohen.]
- This feature originally appeared on the site for the NOVA program "The Bible's Buried Secrets". See the original site for more related features.
- Interview conducted in September 2007
by Gary Glassman, producer, writer, and director of "The Bible's Buried
Secrets," and edited by Susan K. Lewis, senior editor of NOVA Online
It wasn't until the 17th century, that people
began to look at the Bible not just as a sacred text but as they would
look at any other book
- with the rise of critical thinking in
many disciplines—in science, in philosophy, and others—that people
began to look at the Bible not just as a sacred text but as they would
look at any other book.
- And they began to notice in the pages of the
first five books of the Bible a lot of issues that didn't seem
consistent with the idea that Moses was their author. For example, Moses
never speaks in the first person; Moses doesn't say, "I went up on Mt.
Sinai."
- There are also a lot of repetitions—the same stories told from
different perspectives. And there are also many, many inconsistencies;
as the same stories are retold, many of the details change.
Temporary holding for J D E P:
Need to put J D E JE and P in some years (see where some might go at 588BC in chart below)
good link: Writers of the Bible http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/writers-bible.html
The J source
- The J source
- gets its name because it uses the divine name "Yahweh." In
the stories about Abraham, for instance, God is called Yahweh. The
German word for Yahweh is spelled with a J instead of a Y. And the
German scholars who initially worked on the Documentary Hypothesis
called the source "J.
- How does the Bible, in the sections that are attributed to this oldest source, J, depict Yahweh when he first appears?
- The earliest poems we have in the Bible depict the God of Israel,
Yahweh, as a god who comes from the south, surrounded by an entourage of
heavenly warriors who fight with him.
- He appears on mountains with all
the accoutrements of a storm—the mountains quake, and the Earth shakes,
and the clouds drop down water.
- He is, in effect, a storm god, like many
other storm gods of the ancient Mediterranean world. J uses some of
this language,
- and also, J describes Yahweh as a god personally involved
with humans, like deities in myths of other cultures.
The E and D sources
- So the J source used the name Yahweh, but other sources used a different name for God. Tell us about the so-called E source.
- In Genesis, in many passages, God is called not Yahweh but Elohim. And
some of these passages were identified in the Documentary Hypothesis as
coming from a source called E, for Elohim. The E source is very
difficult to characterize.
- The J source has a fairly coherent narrative,
but the E source is extremely fragmentary. Some scholars even wonder if
there is an E source.
- In the classic understanding, the E source seems to have a northern
origin, because the stories in the book of Genesis are frequently set in
the northern part of Israel, in what became the northern Kingdom of
Israel.
- "In the Book of Deuteronomy there seems to be a new understanding of
God's relationship with Israel and Israel's relationship with its God."
- Does E depict God differently than J does?Yes.
- In the J source, God appears directly to people. For example, he
speaks directly to Abraham—he even comes to visit him and has dinner
with him in his tent. In the E source, however, God is more remote. God
doesn't appear in person to human beings, but God appears to them in
dreams or sends messengers, later to be called angels, or sends
prophets, but doesn't deal with human beings directly.
000000Tthird source is called D What's the next source, according to the chronology of the Documentary Hypothesis?
-
The third source is called D, and it takes its name from the Book of
Deuteronomy. It is found almost exclusively in the Book of Deuteronomy.
Deuteronomy has a very distinctive style, which is very different from
that found in the earlier books of the Torah. It also has important
themes that, although found earlier in the Torah, are given special
emphasis in Deuteronomy, especially the insistence on the exclusive
worship of the God of Israel.
- Is it known when this source was written?
- Many scholars think that it was written in the late 8th century B.C. It
was subsequently used by King Josiah, in the late 7th century B.C., in
support of his effort to unify the kingdom and to enforce religious
observance.
Part 3
- xxxx contends that the New Testament of the Bible is mainly a myth and he defines a myth as
- He goes into great detail to make his point including
- Q now comes into play as a source of writings for the new testament to go along with P E D R.