Who wrote the Bible?

God…right?  While that may be a profound and direct answer, it’s also overly simplistic. The Bible is God’s special revelation to mankind, delivered through the divine inspiration of human authors. So who were the human authors?

There’s a lot riding on the answer. Not so much in terms of their actual identities, but because many attacks against Christianity are targeted at disproving the reliability of human authorship. What kind of defense can those of us who believe that the Bible is the inspired, inerrant, and infallible word of God offer regarding the trustworthiness of the authors of the Bible?

It’s not essential that we know the names of the human authors (otherwise they would have laid out their identities in the text with certainty), but it is essential that we know that the Scripture is trustworthy. So with this post we begin a series to help readers appreciate the Bible as an accurate, historical, and trustworthy document. In a companion series we will explore how we got the “Holy Bible,” but for now we’ll begin with the authors.

Let’s lay out one precept: we’re about discovering the truth, not defending traditional notions. For example, it is widely believed that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible. But that cannot be completely true. Why not? Because the fifth book (Deuteronomy) contains the accounts of his death and post-mortem reflections on his life—so at the very least someone else put the ending on his five books. Likewise, some people who haven’t really read the Bible have notions that God’s inspiration constituted divine dictation. But it is obvious in many passages that the Bible is not dictation from the Creator of the universe. How do we know that? Because the human authors state so—point blank in many verses (see this post for one clear example).

Back to the authors. Ezra was a priest, who mourned over his people’s disobedience to God after they were delivered from the Babylonian captivity. He was also a painstaking historian whose detailed historical records are downright anal-retentive (who counts plates, really?!). Jeremiah was called the weeping prophet—and why not?  You’d weep too if you went through what he endured (by the way, there have been some stunning archaeological finds involving Jeremiah in recent months). Gad was the bag man for David’s bad news. Obadiah is said to have been a descendant of Eliphaz, the friend of Job. And on and on…you get the point.  There are a lot of fascinating biographical details to appreciate about these authors.  Our aim in writing this post is to make them readily accessible.

We created the following Bible infographic depicting the grouping of the Old Testament books, the authors, the approximate dates of writing, and how many chapters each book contains. It’s a snapshot of the construction of the Old Testament.

So…sticking with just the Old Testament for now, here is a new color-coded table keyed to our original infographic with hyperlinks to articles about the inspired authors of the Bible.  As you’ll read in the linked material (click on the author’s name in the right-hand column), some books have considerable contention about authorship.  But the point here is not to resolve that contention—we simply want to expose you to the biographies of the plausible authors.

Resources

The spring 2012 issue of the Areopagus Journal is an excellent resource for further study, and we will make use of several articles in our upcoming posts.

HT: Yvonne Brendley, Faith Smagalski