Hey, are you a critical and biblical scholar? Well, lets take it to a different level as below. The following are 10 interesting Theories, but not FACTS, about who really wrote the Bible. They are seemingly educative and informative, so take a look and please enjoy: 10. Moses Did Not Write The Pentateuch; -Jews and Christians widely believe that Moses wrote the first five books in the Bible but Moses could not have written Deuteronomy 34:5–10, which speaks about his death. Therefore, it is a glaring inconsistency...... -The books contain anachronisms that Moses could not have written. Genesis 36, for example, lists Edomite kings who lived long after Moses died. -The Philistines are mentioned in Genesis, yet they did not arrive in Canaan until 1200 B.C., after the time of Moses. -Genesis 12:6 implies that the author was writing after the Canaanites had been driven out of the region, something that didnt happen until the time of Moses’s successor Joshua. -Similarly, a clue in Genesis 36:31 suggests that the text was written when Israel was already a monarchy. -Genesis 24 mentions domesticated camels, but camels were not domesticated until much later. The caravan trade in Genesis 37:25 only flourished in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. *An early explanation for these textual anomalies was that Moses wrote the core of the Pentateuch, but later editors, such as Ezra, made additions. 9. The Documentary Hypothesis; -In 1886, the German historian Julius Wellhausen proposed that the Hexateuch (the Pentateuch plus Joshua) was a composite of four distinct documents by different authors. -These documents were labeled J (Jahwist), E (Elohist), D (Deuteronomist), and P (Priestly), and each has its own theology and agenda. *This theory explains overlapping or repetitive stories (“doublets”) such as the two accounts of Creation and the two accounts of the Flood—Genesis 7:17 describes a 40-day flood, while Genesis 8:3 describes one lasting 150 days. It is believed that later editors stitched together the multiple sources into one narrative, sometimes intertwining two versions of a single story and neglecting to iron out the seams, as can be seen in the Flood narrative. 8. Deuteronomy Originated As Royal Propaganda; -Deuteronomy means “Second Law,” so it is theorized that the book was produced during the time of King Josiah in the seventh century to promulgate new laws strengthening the priesthood and creating a more exclusive religion for Judah. *The legislation for a central sanctuary supersedes the earlier law in Exodus 20:24, suggesting that Deuteronomy was written long after Israel’s sojourn in the wilderness. *There is also evidence that Deuteronomy is a composite work, written in different time periods. The book found in the Temple was the main part. Individual passages, however, suggest that the Babylonian Exile of the sixth century B.C. had already happened. These passages may have been added at a later date. 7. Daniel Is ‘Prophecy-After-The-Fact’; -Daniel might actually be a Jew from the Hellenistic period, not a person from the Babylonian court. -His so-called prophecies were made ex eventu, or after the fact, so that he could pass himself off as a genuine seer. -Daniel makes many historical errors when talking about the Babylonian period, the time in which he supposedly lived. For example, he claims that Belshazzar was the son of Nebuchadnezzar, but the Nabonidus Cylinder found in Ur names Nabonidus as Belshazzar’s actual father. -Also, Belshazzar was a crown prince but never a king, contrary to Daniel’s claim. -In Daniel 5:30, Daniel writes that a certain Darius the Mede conquered Babylon. It was actually Cyrus the Great, a Persian and not a Mede, who overthrew Babylon. -Daniel writes about events of the Hellenistic era with extreme accuracy. Chapter 11, presented as prophecy, is on the mark in every detail; therefore, this leads to the conclusion that Daniel was witness to these events but not to those of the Babylonian period, on which he is vague and unfamiliar. *The book itself betrays more than one author, so Scholars place the writings of Daniel at around 167–164 B.C., during the persecution of the Jews by Syrian tyrant Antiochus Epiphanes. *The book was meant as inspirational fiction to encourage the Jews in their time of trial. 6. The Gospels Are Not Eyewitness Accounts; -The four canonical gospels in the New Testament are anonymous. -The names of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were not attached to them until the second century. -Whoever the original evangelists were, they never claimed they were reporting actual events they themselves saw. *Some scholars have proposed that the Gospels were written as midrash, a Jewish interpretative technique that reworks old scriptural narratives into new forms. 5. Matthew And Luke Plagiarized Mark; -The majority of New Testament scholars agree that Mark’s gospel was written first out of all four gospels. -The gospels of Matthew and Luke can be shown to have borrowed heavily from Mark, in some instances even copying him almost verbatim. -Matthew uses about 607 of Mark’s 661 verses; Luke incorporates 360. *To their credit, Matthew and Luke improved on Mark’s original text. They corrected grammar, style, accuracy, and theology. 4. The Lost Gospel Q; -Matthew and Luke share common material not found in Mark. -Scholars suspect they had a document, now lost, as their source for these sayings, which they call “Q” (from the German Quelle, or source). -Q must have included such biblical gems as the Beatitudes and the Lord’s Prayer. -Verbal agreements between Matthew and Luke suggest the non-Markan material must have been taken from a written, not oral, source. -Matthew and Luke could not have copied from each other because each has stories that contradict the other (e.g., the Birth Narrative and the Resurrection). *The recovery of Q led researchers to a strange conclusion. Since Q does not contain any Passion story, whoever first wrote the document must have regarded Jesus as a teacher of wisdom and nothing more. Jesus’s death held no salvific significance for that writer. 3. Simon Magus And St. Paul Were The Same Person; -Church fathers condemned Simon Magus as the originator of Gnostic heresy, with its hostility to the God of the Jews and the Torah. -So it may come as a shock that Paul, the foremost Christian apostle and author of much of our New Testament, might actually be the same person as Simon. *If the identification of Paul with Simon is correct, a large part of the New Testament was founded on the works of an arch-heretic. 2. The Pastoral Epistles Are Forgeries; -The letters to Timothy and Titus differ from the writing style and theological focus of the genuine epistles of Paul. -This suggests that the Pastorals were actually the work of a forger trying to ride on the coattails of Paul’s authority. -Most scholars, not wanting to call the Pastorals “forgeries,” label them “pseudepigrapha” instead, which amounts to the same thing. *Professor David Trobisch has a suspect in mind for the forgery: Bishop Polycarp of Smyrna. Trobisch says that Polycarp virtually signs his name in II Timothy 4: “The cloak that I left at Troas, with Carpus, when thou comest, bring with thee, and the books, especially the parchments. The name Carpus, unlike the others in this chapter, never appears in Acts or the earlier letters of Paul. Here, Carpus is said to have Paul’s “cloak”; that is, he had taken on Paul’s mantle. He also had Paul’s writing materials. A later verse mentions a fellow named Crescens, and though he never appears anywhere else in the canonical epistles, a Crescens is mentioned in the Epistle of Polycarp. 1. John Did Not Write Revelation; -The traditional view that Jesus’s disciple John wrote the Book of Revelation was questioned as early as the third century. -Christian writer Dionysus of Alexandria, using the critical methods still employed by modern scholars, spotted the difference between the elegant Greek of John’s gospel and the crudely ungrammatical prose of Revelation. The works could not have been written by the same person. -Dionysus noted that the John of Revelation identifies himself in the work, while the John of the gospel does not. He argued that the two men simply shared the same name. -It is now theorized that the real author was a Jew who opposed the Pauline version of Christianity, with its Gentile elements and Torah-free salvation. The author calls a Pauline church in Smyrna a “synagogue of Satan” and a female leader of another in Thyatira “Jezebel.” In short, he was not someone we would call Christian today. *In fact, Revelation might have been originally written even before Christianity. References to Jesus Christ would then have been inserted only later to Christianize the document. These are mostly clustered around chapters 1 and 22, with just a scattering elsewhere. Surprisingly, these verses can be removed without disturbing the structure and flow of the surrounding verses, keeping the meaning and sense of the text intact. This suggests that the original Book of Revelation had nothing at all to do with Jesus. Source/Link: listverse/2014/09/08/10-theories-about-who-really-wrote-the-bible/
Posted on: Mon, 08 Sep 2014 17:01:11 +0000
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