Pendaric

I've read 'Testament', which was interesting and gives a fair overview of how the bible came to be in it's final form.

RUmike

This is the first extant, yes. Q, had it existed (which most think it did), probably pre-dated Mark. The same goes for the Signs Gospel (the text underlying the fourth gospel).

Actually Mark did not use Q. It is Matthew and Luke who used Q in addition to using Mark's gospel. Mark drew on probably a variety of written and oral traditions/sources.

There was no vote by a committe What I was referring to earlier was merely a list of the same 27 NT books that was written in a letter by a particular bishop (I forget who, though). Ultimately, this list became the canonical list. But the process was never as simple as a single vote. It took many centuries of debate, because there was never any single unified church in the early centuries. Instead, each community had its own gospels and letters that it considered Scripture. Sometimes this included the same books as other churches, sometimes not. But basically by 367 C.E. there was at least one church that used the same 27 books that we have now in the NT as "scripture".

Amaleq13

Probably not Bethlehem but more likely somewhere in Galilee and possibly Nazareth with a range between 4BCE and 6CE.

Earliest Christianity was a fairly minor movement and/or was not easily differentiated from Judaism.

Diogenes the Cynic

Very few scholars would give credence to the possibility that Jesus was born in Bethlehem. The consensus is that he was Galilean- probably, but not necessarily from Nazareth - and that the Bethlehem birth was backwritten into the mythology to fit Messianic expectations.
For the most part, they only conclude that the Jesus movement had such obscure origins that it took a while for non-Christian writers to take any note of it. The Greco-Roman world was stuffed full of all kinds of sects and cults and the Jesus movement in its first several decades would not have been seen as any more significant or noteworthy (if it was noticed at all) than any of a hundred other cults. Indeed, gentile observers probably did not even distinguish them from other Jewish sects at first.

Diogenes the Cynic

wow, great minds and all that. I should have previewed.

Dean Anderson

I thought I'd have a go at answering this - not because I'm an expert (I'm merely an educated layperson) but because that way the real experts can correct any misunderstandings I have.

Tradition has it that the Torah (Genesis - Deuteronomy) was written by Moses. Tradition is talking bollocks (to use the vernacular).

From looking at the texts of the Torah, it is apparent that there are a variety of different writing styles; there are different thematic emphases; there are different phrases used; there are - to an extent - different names used for God (this is not strictly true, but is a simplification for the purposes of this thread); the Hebrew language gets more and less archaic; and there are repeated stories.

Interestingly, if you split the Torah up by each of these factors, you get the same pieces. For example, when a story is repeated it is repeated in different styles emphasising different themes and using different names for God. What is more, when you take each of the main styles and put the parts of the Torah written in that style together, they follow on nicely as if they are supposed to be read as a whole. The correlation between the factors is incredible - and way too much to be chance.

This evidence makes it obvious that what we actually have is not a single piece of work but almost half a dozen different works written by different authors at different times (each of which had their own emphases and their own style) which have been later spliced together.

The theory that they have been spliced like this is called the "Documentary Hypothesis" (or DH) - and for the last hundred or more years this theory has pretty much dominated Biblical Studies unchallenged (except by Literalists who dismiss it out of hand because Moses must have written the books...)

There is much debate about exactly how many authors there were, but in general we have the following list:

1) 'J' - The "Jahwist". This author writes in the oldest Hebrew style. His writings centre very much on the southern kingdom of Judah and on the tribes and people that come to make it up. When he talks about God, he always - from the time of Adam and Eve onwards - has people call him Yahweh (Like the New Testament 'Q' hypothesis, the DH originated in Germany - so we have the German "J", "the Jahwist" and "Jahve" rather thanan English "Y", "the Yahwist" and "Yahweh"). His idea of God is a rather personal one, who likes to appear in person and talk to people directly.

2) 'E' - The "Elohist". This author writes in Hebrew of a similar age to J, but in a recognisably distinct style. His writings centre on the northern kingdom of Israel and the tribes that come to make it up. When he talks about God, he has his characters call him "Elohim" (simply "God") until the time of Moses, and only from that point onwards do people call him Yahweh. His idea of God is much more aloof and remote than J's, and his God never appears in a human form.

These J and E documents seem to have been written first, by rival cults in Israel and Judah since each builds up the national heroes and denominational religious practices of its respective country and denigrates those of the other country. Estimates of their ages range from about the 8th century BCE to the start of the 6th century BCE.

3) 'RJE' - The "Redactor" (editor) of J and E. This person seems to have taken the J and E documents and merged them into a single document, adding the occasional bit of connecting text or comment here and there.
It is often thought that this process happened after Israel was conquered by the Assyrians, and there was a large influx of Israelite refugees into Judah.

4) 'P' - The "Priestly" source. This is similar to E in many respects, although it concentrates much more on priestly duties and on laws (most of Leviticus comes from 'P'). God is seen as even more aloof than in E, and never even talks to non-priests. This source seems to be the most political of the sources so far, and is basically propaganda propping up the priestly class. P seems to have been written after J and E, and is usually dated to around the time of the Babylonian Exile.

5) 'R' - The "Redactor". Again, an editor has taken the combined J and E and further spliced in the P source. It is thought that this may have happened in Babylon, as the Hebrews in exile patched together what they could salvage of their religious works.

6) 'D' - The Deuteronomist. This person wrote the Deuteronomic History, which consists of Deuteronomy (the last book of the Torah) and the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and I and II Chronicles. These form a largely secular history of Judah and Israel from the time of Moses to the time of King Josiah. It is thought to have been written during King Josiah's reign, since the work goes into fawning sycophancy towards him, whilst saying that every king previous to him was not quite up to scratch.

Interestingly, according to Chronicles, a "Scroll of the Law" allegedly written by Moses was "found" by Josiah's high priest and Josiah executed the religious reforms that were needed to keep this law. It is thought that the book of Deuteronomy is this "Scroll of the Law" - and it was written by the same hand as the rest of the Deuteronomic History. In other words, the priests faked a book of Moses' dying instructions, which - when followed by King Josiah - gave them great political power. Then they wrote their history of Judah and Israel, saying how wonderful Josiah was for following these instructions and how terrible all the previous kings were for having not followed them and how Judah was going to go from strength to strength with Josiah in charge.

The Deuteronomic History is often split into D1 and D2 - since unfortunately for the priests, Josiah was killed at the Battle of Megiddo, and his successors were conquered by the Babylonians. D1 is the big lead-up, and D2 is mainly the post-script telling how Josiah's successors were all unfaithful and how the exile was their fault. The later D2 writer also went back and inserted various pieces into earlier parts of the history, with God warning that Judah would be conquered as punishment if the people and their kings were unfaithful - so that they could justify why the "eternal" throne of David was conquered. D2 was obviously written after the exile.

In general, this evidence from the texts fits the archaeological evidence. The main point of debate is exactly how old J and E are. According to the archeaology, there was never a "unified kingdom" ruled by Solomon, and anything earlier than that is almost certainly fiction (no Noah, no Abraham, no Joseph, no Moses, no Exodus) and the northern kingdom of Israel was not much of a kingdom at all. Exactly when the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah were in the right social state for J and E to be written is under much discussion.

That's the majority of the Old Testament (warning: I wrote this from memory, so I may be wrong in some details).

Right... now I wait for the experts to come and pick this apart like a shoal of piranha stripping a nice juicy cow...

Dean Anderson

For a concrete example of what I have described above, this post shows the story of the Flood, as it is in the Bible, and then followed by the two separate versions you get when you tease apart the 'J' and'P' sources that have been merged together.

This is an unusual example, as here the sources have pretty much been intertwined line by line. In most of the Torah, the sources are merely put together passage by passage.

However, it is an excellent example for showing how the sources - when separated:

1) Resolve the duplicated (and sometimes contradictory) elements of the story.
2) Each have an independant narrative flow.
3) Are written in distinctly recognisable styles.

TomboyMom

Pervy:
As someone who was raised as a reform Jew and never really thought about where it all came from, that is absolutely fascinating. Is that for example why the animals go into the ark by twos as well as by sevens?

RUmike

The first writer of the story put animals in "twos". But a later writer came along, and realized that if Noah and company were to sacrifice animals once they got off the boat, they would wipe out all the species that they had to sacrifice. So Guy #2 changed the number to 7 (at least for the clean animals, 2 probably for the unclean, I forget). This makes way more sense than any ridiculous concoction a Christian apologist could come up with to explain the conflicting stories away.

Dean Anderson

Exactly.

It's also why the flood lasts for both 40 and 150 days, and why Noah sends out both a dove and a raven.