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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781425984526 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | AuthorHouse |
| Publication date: | 01/02/2007 |
| Pages: | 372 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.83(d) |
Read an Excerpt
A Layman's Guide to - Who Wrote the Books of the Bible? When? Why?
By C. Jack Trickler AuthorHouse Copyright © 2006 C. Jack Trickler
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4259-8453-3
Chapter One Conversation 1 - Introduction
On a clear moonless night when the myriad stars and the planets of our solar system are visible, I cannot help thinking there must be a purpose to all this. Each new telescope brings discoveries of more stars with potential as centers of systems of planets. Astronomers tell us there may be a hundred billion galaxies like ours, with countless stars like our sun. Recent discoveries have disclosed planets in solar systems around at least some of those stars. There may be countless other earth-like planets capable of supporting what we call human life.
Some power created all this. We grope for an understanding of the power that created all that we see in that starlit sky, and that created us. In our groping for understanding of that power we are hardly different from our ancestors of thousands of years ago. They too looked at the stars and at themselves and wondered by what power and for what purpose were we created?
Our Judeo-Christian heritage leads us to believe those ancestors were inspired to reason their way to an understanding of the nature of the power that created all that we see, including humans, and to recognize that power as God!
That thinking led me to wondering about the people who shared their thoughts on such matters by writing the books of the Bible. Who wrote those books? When were the books written? Most important: Why did the authors of those books write what became the books of the Bible?
As I set about my quest I thought about sharing what I learned with family and friends and with others who might find the subject interesting. Along the way I met Dr. Dow Chamberlain of Cokesbury, one part of The United Methodist Publishing House. He encouraged me to continue even if only for distribution to my own family. One of Dow's suggestions was that since I tend to write in a conversational style I call the chapters of this book "Conversations" as in conversations with friends. I bounced that idea off some of the people who have been involved in checking this work, and they liked it. I hope you will read this as a series of conversations between people interested in the search for who wrote the books of the Bible and when and why they wrote those books.
The Beginning of this Project
What inspired and caused the people who wrote the books of the Bible to do so? Did they do so under God's direction? Were they inspired by God? Were their motives and inspiration purely human? In short, why did they write as they did?
My search through libraries, book stores, encyclopedias and yes, the Internet, led to the conclusion that while there are bits and pieces scattered through a large number of sources, I found no concise reference to which one may turn to find the answers I sought.
But first, a disclaimer: I am a layman. My education, profession and career are those of an engineer, not of a biblical scholar. Think of this book as a layman's introduction to the subject. When you find a topic into which you would like to dig more thoroughly, turn to the reference books and articles listed in the footnotes.
And that brings us to a very important matter. In gathering material for this book I studied the writings of many authorities in theology, archaeology, biblical history, etc. Where those scholars made statements that I deemed relevant to the subject of this book and that were spoken in layman's language, I often quoted them verbatim: Always with credit and reference to the authors, their book titles and publishers. I hope you find at least some of the material intriguing enough to cause you to seek those authors' books.
It is not the purpose of this book to tell you what to believe regarding your religion. The authors of the books of the Bible dealt with controversial subjects about which scholars often disagree. Where it is appropriate to do so we will look at all sides of such subjects. It will be appropriate to do so when the differences of opinion relate to searching for who were the authors of the books of the Bible, when those authors wrote, and why they wrote.
One of the matters with which we must deal is the great differences between how we observe and interpret all aspects of life, including biblical texts, compared to how people of two or three millennia ago made their observations and interpretations. To understand what the authors of the Bible wrote and why they wrote, we must place ourselves in their pre-modern, prescience world. We must constantly examine what those authors wrote in the perspective of their life experiences and their frames of reference so as to be able to correctly comprehend the meanings of their writings.
How else can we understand why they wrote and what meanings their writings were intended to convey? Without that exercise we are apt to misunderstand the meanings of their writings and think of them as being irrelevant to our lives. That would be a mistake!
The Order of Study and Presentation
The books of the Bible were not written in the order in which they appear in our present-day Bibles. Our Bibles contain the books as assembled by editors and compilers ("redactors" in the language of biblical scholarship) who worked hundreds, even thousands of years after the original documents were written. The editors and compilers arranged the books in an order that seemed logical to them; not in the chronological order in which they were written and not always in the order of the story they tell. The various compilers arranged the source material available to them in accordance with their own various purposes and societal pressures.
That raises an immediate problem: How to organize the conversations of this book?
As the stacks of books acquired in my search grew, I began to look for a way to sort and catalog the gathered information. One possibility would have been to sort by the chronological order in which the biblical texts were written. Who wrote first, who next, etc.? That certainly seems to be a logical approach.
Many of the books of the Bible began as oral traditions that were later written down, then revised, edited, rearranged, and compiled from multiple sources that were then blended together. No one today can be certain of the order in which the texts of those books were conceived, written, compiled, reworked, etc. Add to that the confusion as to whether a bit of text should be categorized by when it was first written (if that can be determined) or when it was revised (if that can be determined) or when it was again revised (if that can be determined) and you see why I chose to sort the material according to the conventional order of the books of the Bible.
However, having made that decision, I recognize the desirability of having a sense of the order of the historical events that played a part in inspiring the authors of the books of the Bible to write. The Time-Line of History presented as an appendix to this book should help that. Use it with recognition that the farther back we go in history the less certain we can be of both absolute dates of events and the sequences of those events.
Which Bible?
Before we study the authorship of the books of the Bible we must ask: Which Bible? "The Bible" means different collections of books to different religions and often implies a different collection of books to the denominations within those religions. The Jewish Bible contains either twenty-four or thirty-nine books, Genesis to 2 Chronicles, depending, for example, on whether 1 Kings and 2 Kings are counted as one book or two. The books of the Jewish Bible are separated into three groups: The Law (Torah or Pentateuch), the Prophets (Nevi'im or Nebi'im), and the Writings (Ketuvim or Ketubim). ('im is the Hebrew masculine plural.) Some Jews refer to their book of sacred writings by the Hebrew word Tanakh, reasoning that "Bible" has taken on an excessively Christian connotation. Tanakh is derived from the first letters of the names of the three groups of books and is sometimes abbreviated as TNK. Kathleen Kaplan (see Acknowledgments) points out that to Jews the term "Jewish Bible" has the same sort of redundancy as saying "The English Shakespeare."
The three groups of books of the Tanakh became recognized as parts of the whole at three different times: Torah before and during the Babylonian exile; Nevi'im after the return from exile; and Ketuvim at the Council of Jamnia in 90 AD. (We will get into these matters in other conversations.)
The common American Protestant Bibles contain those same thirty-nine books in the Old Testament plus twenty-seven in the New Testament for a total of sixty-six books. The Roman Catholic (Catholic) Old Testament contains forty-six books plus the same twenty-seven as in the Protestant New Testament, for a total of seventy-three books. The different count between those of the Protestant and Catholic Bibles is attributable to the Catholic inclusion in the Old Testament of books known to Protestants as the Apocrypha, also referred to as the Intertestamental or Deuterocanonical Books. (Another section of this chapter will deal with the Apocrypha.) Not yet mentioned are the stillmore-inclusive Bibles of the Greek and Eastern Orthodox Churches. Such Bibles will not be included in this study simply because to do so would introduce too many complications. This book will deal with what may be considered the Bible of mainstream English-language Jews, Protestants and Catholics.
Jews do not, of course, refer to their Bible as the Old Testament. They think of their Bible as a covenant between God and believing Jews. "Old" and "New" do not relate to Jewish use of, and understanding of, their Bible. However, that presents a problem: How to refer to the collection of ancient documents known to Jews as "the Bible" and to Christians as "the Old Testament" without a lot of parenthetical statements. With no intention other than to avoid confusion, the references in this book will be to the Old and New Testaments.
To compound the confusion, there are about eighty English-language versions of the Bible in use today. One could write a large book describing the reasons for, and differences between present-day versions of the Bible. One aspect of this is that no matter in what order this book treats the books of the Bible some readers will think it is the wrong order. Please! Be tolerant! (Isn't that supposed to be a quality of religious people?)
Appendix A lists the books of the Jewish and Christian Bibles.
Where biblical texts are quoted they will be from the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV). That is the translation developed by the National Council of Churches in the USA and done in cooperation with British scholars. That partially explains why some editions of the NRSV include the Apocrypha and some do not.
Readers of evangelical and conservative denominations may also desire to read scripture from the New International Version. Catholics may prefer to read from The New American Bible. Jewish readers may prefer the Tanakh. The author hopes readers will understand the awkwardness of presenting several parallel translations for each quoted passage of scripture.
This book will examine the authorship of the books of the Bible in the conventional order of the Protestant Bible including the books of the Apocrypha as they are included in the full version of the NRSV. This makes the order substantially equivalent to that of the conventional Catholic Bible, The New American Bible.
The inclusion of the books of the Apocrypha will probably cause Catholic readers no distress, since those books are a part of their Bible. However, Catholic readers may not be accustomed to the term Apocrypha which had the original meaning of "books hidden away." American Protestant readers from denominations which do not include the books of the Apocrypha in their Bibles may wonder about these books with the strange-sounding names. However, some American Protestant denominations use versions of the Bible that include the books of the Apocrypha. British Protestant readers will wonder what this fuss is all about: They have long had a section in their Bibles called "The Apocrypha."
Recent American Protestant biblical scholarship increasingly recognizes the importance of the Apocrypha, although doctrinal standards exclude it from the official canon. Some recent American scholarly books about the Bible include the Apocrypha with the books of the Old Testament. One such is The New Interpreter's Bible.
The Canon
Canon refers to a set of biblical texts accepted by an authoritative religious body as that body's accepted Bible. There are, of course, many different canons authorized by many different religious authorities. The word canon comes from the same Greek word, kanon, as does cannon. Kanon refers to a straight, hollow reed used as a measuring stick. Canon (singular "n") takes the sense of a standard measure, as a standard piece of sacred literature. Cannon (double "n") takes the sense of shooting with a straight, hollow tube.
Over the centuries significant religious groups, such as the Catholics and various Jewish and Protestant denominations, have defined their canons. A part of the process of defining a canon has been, of course, defining which books to include and which to exclude from that group's official Bible.
The Books of The Apocrypha
The books of the Apocrypha, known to Catholics as the Deuterocanonical Books (meaning Second Canon), have been included, then excluded, and then included. The early Greek-speaking and writing church included them. The first Latin Bible (the Vulgate) excluded them. Later they were sort of unofficially included in the Catholic Bible. Martin Luther moved them to an appendix in his version of the Bible and John Calvin excluded them from his Bible. At the Council of Trent (1545-63) during The Counter-Reformation the Catholic Church made them a formal part of its Bible. And so it has gone.
The Puritans (think Pilgrims of 1620) followed the Calvinistic objection to the Apocrypha and thus found the Authorized Version (as the King James Bible is known in Great Britain) objectionable. Their influence is a factor in the exclusion of the Apocrypha from most American Protestant Bibles, including the King James Bible; whereas the Apocrypha is included in comparable British Bibles.
The dictionary defines "apocrypha" as "writings or statements of dubious authenticity." In addition to books of the Apocrypha there are numerous words, phrases, sentences and sections of text that were included in one compilation of the Bible and omitted or entered differently in other compilations. To illustrate: Mainstream Protestants often experience awkwardness when reciting The Lord's Prayer in a Catholic service when they find themselves including a doxology at the conclusion of the prayer that is not part of Catholic practice. "For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Layman's Guide to - Who Wrote the Books of the Bible? When? Why? by C. Jack Trickler Copyright © 2006 by C. Jack Trickler. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents Acknowledgments....................ixConversations: 1 - Introduction....................1
2 - A Preliminary Look at How the Bible Was Created....................14
3 - Before Getting into the Books of the Old Testament....................26
4 - The Pentateuch: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy....................32
5 - The Other Books of the Deuteronomic History: Joshua, Judges, 1 & 2 Samuel, 1 & 2 Kings....................72
6 - Ruth....................80
7 - 1 & 2 Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah....................83
8 - Introduction to the Other Books of the Old Testament: Poetry, Prophesy, Wisdom and Apocalyptic Writings....................97
9 - Esther....................104
10 - Tobit....................107
11 - Judith....................110
12 - 1 & 2 Maccabees....................112
13 - Job....................116
14 - Psalms....................119
15 - Proverbs....................124
16 - Ecclesiastes....................128
17 - Song of Songs (Song of Solomon; Canticle of Canticles)....................131
18 - Wisdom (Wisdom of Solomon)....................133
19 - Sirach (Ecclesiasticus)....................136
20 - Introduction to the Prophets....................139
21 - Isaiah....................144
22 - Jeremiah....................153
23 - Other Books Attributed to Jeremiah & Baruch: Baruch, Letter of Jeremiah, Lamentations....................159
24 - Ezekiel....................163
25 - Daniel....................167
26 - The Twelve "Minor" Prophets....................172
27 - Introduction to the New Testament....................200
28 -Matthew: The First Synoptic Gospel....................250
29 - Mark: The Second Synoptic Gospel....................256
30 - Luke: The Third Synoptic Gospel....................262
31 - The Fourth Gospel, The Gospel of John....................267
32 - The Acts of the Apostles....................276
33 - The Letters by Paul....................282
34 - Pseudonymous Writings Attributed to Paul....................302
35 - The Letter of James....................309
36 - The Letters by Peter....................314
37 - The Letters of John....................320
38 - The Letter of Jude....................324
39 - Revelation....................326
Epilogue....................331
Appendix A - The Books of the Bible....................333
Appendix B - Time-Line of History....................335
Appendix C - Time-Line of the Creation of the Books of the Bible....................340
Appendix D - Glossary of Terms....................344
Index....................351