A Level: Did God write the Bible?

The question of Biblical Authorship is a massive topic and it's very important to for understanding why we give it such authority, and also for being able to assess the legitimacy of that authority.

Firstly, we need to understand that the Bible as we have it today (one continuous book) took a long time to evolve. Sections of the Bible come from very different time periods. The Old Testament is a collection of Hebrew stories from as early as the 10th century BCE. We can split this up into three sections: the law, the histories and the wisdom literature.

The Law is the first five books, also known as the Torah (Jewish), the Pentateuch (Christian) or the books of Moses. These books tell the creation story, Adam & Eve, Noah and the Flood, Abraham, Isaac, Moses and the Exodus, Establishment of Covenant and God's people, time in the wilderness, through to Moses' death at the entrance to the promised land. These books are said to have been written by Moses, and Moses spoke to God directly many times. If Moses wrote what happened when he spoke to God then we could say God authored the first five books but sadly it is not so.

There are many problems with Moses as an author. Firstly, if we believe the Earth appeared 4.5 billion years ago then how did Moses, writing around the 14th century BCE know these things? Secondly, the last book talks about Moses' death so how did Moses write it? We now think there were multiple people who wrote these stories before Moses was alive through til after his death. So does it matter who we believe wrote the book when we decide to have faith in it? Is authorship pertinent to authority? If people in the future found a recording of a political speech, it would be important for them to know whether it was coming from a Conservative or a Labour MP. Similarly, we must question who the human authors of these stories were if we're going to put faith in them. What were their motivations for writing? People may have actually encountered God but through the process of writing it, the first stage of human -not divine- authorship is introduced.

The first five books follow a smallish tribe of Hebrews and they're reasonably chronological. After this, however, it gets a bit messy. The nation grows, some of the men have children with women from other tribes, the nation splits into north and south, one is then defeated and the other is exhiled so the story becomes much more complicated. If it is written by individuals who lived it we only get one perspective or another so it becomes harder to make sense of it. Most of the books are chronilogical and tell a continuous story but then we have books like Ester or Ruth thrown in which seem totally random. The fact is there were thousands of stories and accounts flying around so we now have to question why the ones we have made it into the Bible and why others didn't. This means we have to accept another layer of human authorship; the matter of canon.

Canon means...

Whilst students aren't required to know this much background information, I want them to know it to improve their overall perspective on topics. At A Level, I would hope the students would be more confident working independently and would be relying on me more for depth of knowledge and comprehension of the arguments than spoon feeding the basics