lpetrich

Is there any good introduction to that? Especially online. The most I usually find is stuff on the Documentary Hypothesis about the authorship of the Bible's first five books, like Richard Friedman's Who Wrote the Bible? (or via: amazon.co.uk). He mainly focuses on those books, though IIRC he does propose that Deuteronomy had been written by the prophet Jeremiah.

Also, why is it generally thought that Luke and Acts have the same author? And why is it generally thought that some of the letters attributed to Paul were likely not written by him?

The Bishop

In the 2nd Edition of Who Wrote the Bible? Elliott Friedman shifts the authorship off-by-one, not to Jeremiah, but to Baruch. There is a reference to the discovery of the "seal of Baruch", the continued authenticity of which I've been trying to find out about, if anybody can clarify.

Have you never read either of them? They both begin with salutations to a "Theophilus" character. I have not myself got the faintest idea as to whether the most modern critical scholarship still retains a conception of Luke and Acts being two volumes of essentially one book. But "Why is it thought that Luke and Acts have the same author" is obvious - that's what the books themselves say.

EDIT - to extend what I said before - WWTB isn't bad as introductions to Bible criticism goes. But as I've always complained, the title is certainly misleading - important though the Pentateuch is, it in no way represents the whole bible. In point of fact, since Elliot Friedman's ultimate belief that the redactor of the whole of the Pentateuch was Ezra, it's somewhat puzzling that he does not even attempt an explanation as to whom he believes to have been the Chronicler (the author of the Chronicles and Ezra and Nehemiah), since tradition assigns those books to Ezra, impossible though that is.

hatsoff

Nobody "wrote the Bible." Individual portions were written by individual authors, which were collected and canonized into what we now know as the Bible. If you're looking for a quick list of who wrote which books, here goes...

I'm weak on my OT history, but from what I understand every single book of the Old Testament is either anonymous or a forgery. Jewish and Christian traditions ascribe authorship where in reality none is known.

As for the New Testament, here we are...
Matthew - unknown
Mark - possibly but probably not John Mark, disciple of Simon Peter
Luke - unknown except that he also wrote Acts
John - possibly but probably not John son of Zebedee
Acts - unknown except that he also wrote Luke
Romans - Paul
1 Corinthians - Paul and Sosthenes
2 Corinthians - Paul and Timothy
Galatians - Paul
Ephesians - unknown
Philippians - Paul and Timothy
Colossians - possibly Paul and Timothy
1 Thessalonians - Paul, Silvanus (AKA Silas) & Timothy
2 Thessalonians - unknown
1 Timothy - unknown
2 Timothy - unknown
Titus - unknown
Philemon - Paul and Timothy
Hebrews - unknown
James - unknown
1 Peter - possibly but probably not Peter and Silvanus (AKA Silas)
2 Peter - unknown
1 John - possibly but probably not John son of Zebedee
2 John - unknown except that he may also have written 3 John
3 John - unknown except that he may also have written 2 John
Jude - unknown
Revelation - unknown
...keep in mind this list was drawn up in haste and may have an error or two. Also remember that everything above is disputed to some degree. The list reflects popular agreement among scholars, not absolute truth.

For introduction to NT-era materials, see earlychristianwritings.com. For OT materials, I wouldn't know what to suggest other than wikipedia and Google, neither of which are particularly reliable.

As far as canonization goes, Richard Carrier has condensed a Metzger volume into a nice little essay. You can find that on infidels.org.

Amaleq13

Have you visited Peter Kirby's Early Christian Writings?

It is both a good introduction and online.

rob117

Not totally. Most of the prophetic books contain an authentic core, although these were all later expanded by anonymous editors and supplemented with existing anonymous material tha tradition attributed to the prophet in question. The most glaring example is Isaiah which can be divided into three "blocks"- Proto, Deutero, and Trito-Isaiah.

Paraphrasing the Anchor Bible commentary from memory:

Proto-Isaiah (ch 1-39) contains both prophetic and autobiographical material from 8th-century prophet himself, along with biographical material that appears to be by his immediate disciples. To this core collection of material was added, probably in the early post-exilic period by a single editor, various anonymous materials from various time periods that tradition attributed to the prophet, as well as chapters 36-39, lifted almost verbatim from 2 Kings 18-20. The editor of the Proto-Isaiah collection appears to have expanded many of the oracles himself, which can be detected by the intrusion of exilic-style messianic "hope" language into the "doom" oracles, nullifying the original message.

Deutero-Isaiah (40-55) is apparently the work of a single, anonymous prophet living at the end of the exile (c.539). His material was supplemented by Trito-Isaiah (56-66), probably the work of his disciples in the early post-exilic period. The two collections 1-39 and 40-66 were subsequently attached when tradition had come to attribute them both to Isaiah.

Steven Avery

Hi lpretich,

The underlying thought is a presupposition that the Bible authorship simply cannot be as stated as claimed within the text, and that the 'scholar' knows better than the Bible.

The actual reasons given for attacking Pauline authorship are on the weak side. Of course there are various levels of this attack. One is simply to accuse the Pastorals. Another is to accuse them and some other epistles. The mythicists prefer to attack all the epistles en masse. Any of the attacks would deep-six the internal veracity of the Bible if they were true so in a sense the mythicist/infidel view is the most consistent of the three.

Shalom,
Steven Avery

Savagemutt

The Straight Dope did a neat little primer of this subject a couple of years ago.

http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mbible1.html

S.C.Carlson

This paper by Rollston and Parker asserts that the Baruch bullae (as they are known) are modern forgeries: http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/...ic_Forgery.htm

Stephen

lpetrich

Sometimes we do know better than the Bible's authors. We know much more about heredity than the author of Genesis 30, for instance.

And you do have to realize that there was a motive for inverse plagiarism, as it might be called. Plagiarism is falsely claiming others' writings as one's own, while inverse plagiarism is falsely claiming that one's writings were written by someone else.

Before the invention of the printing press, the only way to make copies of a book was to copy it by hand. And for that, one has to motivate would-be copiers to do that. And one way to do that is to claim that one's writings were really written by someone that would-be copiers might admire, like Moses or Solomon or Enoch or Aristotle or Galen. There's a famous case of a medieval alchemist who wrote under the name of another alchemist, Geber. His name is unknown, so he is only known as "the false Geber".

So there would be a motive for some early Xian to write letters and claim that they are really from Paul.

Why don't you explain to us what you think is wrong with the hypothesis of non-Pauline authorship?

hatsoff

That's half true. The underlying thought, as you put it, or "presupposition," is that just because an author claims to be a famous or authoritative person does not mean he isn't lying. Even Christians usually reject the authenticity of 3 Corinthians and Laodiceans, for example, two pseudepigraphical Pauline epistles excluded from the Bible. And of course there are the other apocryphal works, most of which are pure forgery. But what is key is not that "the 'scholar' knows better than the Bible," but that we know better than the ancient church fathers who believed in it.

Most experts in the field would disagree. So would I. On the contrary, rejection of most of the generally-accepted pseudepigraphicals is quite solidly established.

Fortunately for Christians, their faith does not necessarily hinge on the authenticity of the Bible.