• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1274 0

puzzle. Imagine that the ancient scrolls and parchments on which this mysterious passage was found are falling apart. They are written from right to left, the opposite of what most Europeans and Americans are accustomed to reading. Complicating the fact that the vowels have been left out, these scrolls are filled with the names of obscure people about whom there are no other references in history. Anyone reading these scrolls knows the text had been hand-copied after centuries of being orally transmitted from one generation to the next, just as The Iliad and The Odyssey were. And they also know that, over the centuries, older versions of the scrolls have been lost or destroyed. All in all, it is a very confusing puzzle.

With all these difficulties to consider, is it any wonder that people are confused by what the Bible says? Or that a good many people dismiss the Bible as little more than a very elaborate set of myths, like those of the ancient Greeks or King Arthur’s Round Table? Now you have some sense of what we’re up against when we talk about understanding who wrote the Bible. As Winston Churchill said about Russia in 1939: “It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

Many readers of the Bible still possess the “Divine Light Bulb” notion of the Bible’s composition. In this scenario, a man was sitting in his tent in the Sinai desert, when suddenly, in a glorious flash, the entire text of the Scriptures started flowing onto parchment or papyrus. Or perhaps it was whispered into his ear by an unseen spirit—Cosmic Dictation. Or the words were whirled out of some heavenly flames and carved into stone the way it was done for Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments. As the Gershwins put it so succinctly, “It ain’t necessarily so.”

The history of the Holy Scriptures that modern Jews and Christians study is a fantastic story in itself, a tale out of an Indiana Jones movie. It is still unfolding with each new archaeological dig and discovery of an ancient scroll. Once armed with little more than pith helmets, pick and shovel, and a magnifying glass, modern researchers are now aided by satellite photographs, spectroscopes, and infrared readers that can date and analyze old parchments. Astonishing discoveries during the past few decades of great libraries of ancient writing have added immensely to our knowledge of biblical times and languages. And with the help of linguistic computers and instant communications links to vast worldwide libraries, scholars continue to unravel the secrets of the Bible.

Yet, while the depth of our knowledge grows, the answer to a basic and extraordinary question largely remains a mystery: Who wrote the Bible?

In spite of tremendous strides in scholarship and research dedicated to this question, the fact remains: no one really knows. And we will probably never know, short of some archaeological find of earthshaking significance. But it is safe to say that the King James Version familiar to most English-speaking Christians and all the other versions loading down the bookstore shelves are only recent links near the end of a long chain of troubled, sometimes badly garbled, and often conflicting translations.

This is the first blow to the plausibility of The Bible Code, the publishing sensation that claims that the Bible contains a systematic code that, when unscrambled, has predicted world events of the past, present, and future. The authors of that book claimed to use a version of biblical text that is “the original version of the Old Testament, the Bible as it was first written,” and that there is “a universally accepted original Hebrew text.” No such text exists. The Old Testament or Hebrew Bible exists in a variety of forms, all reflecting different translations over the past few centuries.

Questionable Bible codes aside, these various translations over the centuries have shaped perceptions of the Bible and what people believe it says. It still comes as a surprise to some English speakers that the Bible was not written in English—or to German speakers that it was not written in German.