The Reliability of the Bible - Part 4 - The Old Testament - Author

I encourage you to research the individual propositions within this entry yourself. In your research, please be aware of the bias of your source material (e.g. religious sites versus sceptic's sites versus material meant for pure scientific/philosophical knowledge).

Before I get started on the analysis of the second question with respect to the Old Testament, let's remind ourselves once again of the 5 key questions to be considered:

1. What period in history are these manuscripts meant to cover? (already covered)
2. Who wrote the original manuscripts on which the books are based? (covered in this entry)
3. When were these manuscripts written?
4. When were the manuscripts assembled into established books?
5. Who assembled the books?

Who wrote the original manuscripts on which the Old Testament is based?

The short answer to this question is:

“Nobody really knows.”

But I'm going to attempt to give you the long answer. Before I do, I just want to argue that while this entry will hit biblical literalists the hardest (any evidence will, actually), it also impacts people who do not take the bible literally. I suppose that most (although, surprisingly, not all) of these non-biblical-literalists still consider the bible “divinely inspired”. If they didn't, then the bible wouldn't necessarily hold any more significance than any other lauded piece of literature. Its merits would not have been considered a fact apriori or simply because it was “the bible”. Its merits, instead, would have been determined only after a critical reading of the bible itself.

Moving on now, and at the risk of repeating what may be obvious from the table, of the 39 books of the bible:

• 3 books were written by a biblical character (or his disciples) with a somewhat established historicity outside of the bible
• Some of 2 books were written by a biblical character with a relatively established historicity outside of the bible, with the rest of the books written by anonymous authors
• 5 books were written by a biblical character with very little evidence of the character's existence outside of the biblical narrative, drawing doubt as to whether the author existed as described or even existed at all (historicity unclear)
• 4 books were written by a biblical character with no evidence of the character's existence outside of the biblical narrative (historicity unknown)
• The remaining 25 books are written by a variety of authors of unknown origins

For the sake of clarity, I want to get into a bit more detail of how unknown “unknown” really is with respect to the last bullet point. Biblical scholars, while unable to identify authors, have been able to “narrow down” their identities sufficiently to come to some agreement about whether the same person or group of persons wrote at least portions of otherwise seemingly unrelated books. How have they been able to do this? They looked at the content of the books, the language in which it was written, the apparent knowledge of the person or group, and the socio-political and religious intent of the author(s). In a couple of cases, they have been able to narrow it down even further to a particular likely profession – i.e. a powerful lord, a group of priests, religious purists, etc.

So, for example, they may be able to say that this book was most likely written by a group of sages around this 50-100 year or so period who were primarily concerned with religious reform and equality among Israelites. Another book in the bible may share these commonalities and therefore can be considered to be written by this same group of people. Of course, I am simplifying the process, which is far more exhaustive, but the main point is that portraits of the authors are drawn from a comprehensive analysis of the text itself due to lack of evidence for external corroboration. Beyond these generalisations however, the identity of the authors remains unknown, nor can any distinct similarly described group be determined from non-biblical sources.

While keeping the above in mind, acknowledge that this does not mean that each book of the bible was written by the same group of people in the same profession or with the same intent. The bible is largely a patchwork document, and so are most of the books. A single book of the bible may be written by, for example, 4 different sets of people:

• Author A – A large yet cohesive group of people with consistent religious, socio-political or cultural goals who existed over a long period, say several decades
• Author B – An individual
• Author C – A community – i.e. a group of people who do not necessarily share common goals, but live in the same small region, who came together at a particular point in time for a specific purpose to record some part of history/events from their religious perspective
• Author D – A small group – i.e. two or three people with a specific purpose

And even further, while Author A would have written most of the book, the actual verses contributed may be in clumps throughout – i.e. chapters 1 through 10, chapter 15 and 16, and the last 3 chapters – 25 to 27. Author B may have written most of the rest, with Authors C and D contributing only a couple chapters and a few verses respectively. Author A and Author D may have contributed to another book or two elsewhere in the bible, but Authors B and C may have made no other contribution to the bible. Although this may be true for most of the books, keep in mind that some of the books were once a single work that was split – i.e. 1 Kings and 2 Kings; 1 Chronicles and 2 Chronices, etc. At the same time however, while they may have been “one work” before they were split in 2, this does not mean that the “work” was composed by a single author, and the same process per above can therefore apply.

In any case, the patchwork nature is the case for several biblical books – with multiple unknown authors, with each author having a different purpose and living in different periods, even where they are of the same group (e.g. Author A which contributed to the book over several decades). Also of note – there are parts of the bible which are plagiarisms of the myths/religions of other cultures. Some of these may be debatable, but the most indisputable one I came across (at least in this research) is the Book of Proverbs, which has borrowed pieces of the Instruction of Amenemopet, a literary work composed in Ancient Egypt.

Now all of this put together poses 3 core problems for the reliability of the Old Testament based on those who wrote it:

1. There is evidence that some of the authors had agendas that were not purely religious or spiritual, but also socio-political or cultural. This is a point that I only barely touched on – I will get into it a bit more in the next entry
2. The vast majority of the old testament are written by unknown persons or groups of persons
3. The Old Testament was not written by 25 or so prophets, all with some measure of a biography within the bible itself, but by hundreds and quite possibly thousands of authors over a vast period of time

While I think that altogether, these 3 problems throw the reliability of the Old Testament as whole into significant doubt, from the point of a fervent believer, I think that the first point, and to a lesser extent, the second point can be dismissed. And I'll explain how.

The first point, I believe, suggests that many of the Old Testament authors had a hidden agenda to impose their cultural and political views upon the wider populace for perhaps selfish reasons. A believer might say that even if this were the case, the impact on the culture and politics of the community would have been temporary if it had any impact at all. On the other hand, the underlaid religious impact, which was spiritually true in any case, had the more lasting and permanent impact. After all, over 2 millennia later, billions of people all over the world take these words for religious guidance. This therefore, was all part of God's complex plan. Sure, it's an unusual plan – to deliberately direct the personal biases of thousands of people for a “greater good”. But God does work in mysterious ways.

The second point now – the anonymity of the authors. So what? So what if we don't know who wrote the bible? Let's say that all of the books of the bible were written by authors who we know as much about as we know about Jeremiah. So what? How much of what we know about this guy goes much further than a benign and general biography framed mainly by historical events?

What if we knew as much about the authors of the bible as we do about prominent people in today's world of twitter, youtube, recording devices on every phone, and phones in every pocket? What if we knew so much about these authors that we were able to vet them like the American people vet presidential candidates? Well then, things start to get interesting. A rational person would be able to root out at least half of our prophets as frauds because the prophets' dirty secrets will suddenly be splashed across the evening news.

“Nah – he ain't no prophet! Five unrelated women accused him of sexual harassment.”

“She ain't divinely inspired! She always makes racist remarks.”

“He ain't chosen by God! He got caught making homosexual advances on an undercover police officer in the stall of an airport mens' room.”

Anonymity, I propose, works in the favour of these allegedly divinely inspired authors. That's because knowledge of a person's character can definitely rule them out of divine inspiration, but it does not necessarily rule them in. Put more plainly, a person can be such a vicious prick, that any rational person will surely dismiss any claims on their part that God was inspiring them. However, another person can appear to be morally good, have no obvious significant faults, and still not necessarily be directly inspired by God.

What positive evidence can there ever really be of divine inspiration? Is there a litmus test that a prophet can take? Obviously not. When people say that they believe that the Old Testament is divinely inspired, they have to believe it largely independent of the authors, a particularly easy task when people don't really know anything about the authors anyway. As a matter of fact, the little we do know about these authors is all written in the bible itself, in books identified with their names – and it is all good. The only image we have of these authors is a positive image, even if we don't have any evidence that this positive image is based in truth. Think about it – you don't and can't have evidence to believe in the divine inspiration of these authors outside of the bible and therefore have to use circular logic – the same type of logic that has no place in rational discourse. All you can say is:

“This book in the bible was written by some anonymous author. But I know this anonymous author was divinely inspired because surely God will not allow an invalid work to have any place within the scriptures (i.e. the bible tells me so).”

There is no way to argue with such a statement because it is not based on evidence or necessarily even logic, but on faith. There isn't much that can give a person of faith pause except perhaps the third point – the sheer number of authors. You would have to believe the above statement is true not just for a couple dozen authors, but quite possibly for thousands. Actually, it is definitely thousands if you count the persons who later edited the original manuscripts even before the canonisation process (more on that later). Thousands of authors contributed to the Old Testament. Thousands of authors were divinely inspired. And the biblical canonisation process overseen by various counsels for various versions of the bible incorporated only the divinely inspired authors' work into their official scripture, and weeded out all of the manuscripts that were not divinely inspired. Perhaps they managed to do this because the various canonisation committees were also divinely inspired. Or maybe just one was. For your sake, I hope you picked the version of the bible that the lone divinely guided canonisation committee reviewed.

So you see how the various faith based assumptions accumulate as you consider more aspects of the Old Testament's origins. Of course, there are people who will still say – well these things happen all the time in the movies – why can't God do it? After all, with God, all things are possible. You can't argue with that. You can't argue against something that is not based on reason – that is largely devoid of reason – with reason. So it is at this point that you give up.

But I will continue, because there is still quite a way to go.