WHO WROTE THE BIBLE?

Who Wrote The Bible

 Brett A.Todd

WHO WROTE THE BIBLE? That’s a pretty big question, isn’t it? Some will say God wrote the Bible or God inspired people to write the Bible. Easy enough, but who really wrote each book found in the Bible from Genesis to the Book of Revelation. 

The answer is not as easy as some would think and cliché such as, “God wrote the Bible” really doesn’t help. There are 66 books in the Bible, for which most of them we have no idea who wrote them. For example, we don’t know who wrote the first five books of the Old Testament. The classic response would be that Moses wrote them, but we really don’t know. 

Most Bible scholars would say more than likely there were several authors, but we have no idea who they were. 

This is true of the New Testament as well. We have no idea who wrote the four Gospels. But doesn’t it say Matthew wrote Matthew and Mark wrote Mark? No, it doesn’t. Nowhere, for example, in the text of Matthew does it say, “I Matthew, wrote these words.” Someone wrote them, but we don’t know who. The title on the top of these Gospels, “The Gospel According to…” was added later.

There are several reasons why we know they were added, but I will simply point out, whenever Matthew or John talked about the disciples Matthew or John, they never say, “I” or “me”, and curiously, Matthew, and Luke never speak as though they were eyewitnesses to the events of Jesus...never. 

The question, “Who wrote the Bible” gets a little more complicated when we look at such books as the Pastoral Letters, that is, First and Second Timothy, who the author claims to be the Apostle Paul. However, most scholars across the board, except for some conservatives, agree that whoever wrote First and Second Timothy, it certainly wasn’t Paul. More than likely, such letters as First Timothy, Second Timothy, Titus, and “possibly” Colossians, Second Thessalonians, and Ephesians, were written by someone else other than Paul. In other words, they are forgeries. It is possible someone, in order to get their point across or to correct something Paul wrote, thought the book they wrote would hold more weight with Paul’s name on it, than their own. 

Who wrote the Book of Revelation? We don’t know. We know that someone by the name of John wrote it, but we don’t know which John. There were a lot of people named John living at this time, so your guess would be just as good as mine. 

Does this mean we should get rid of those books in the Bible where we are uncertain who the authors are, especially the forged books? No, not at all. They are all still a part of what we call the Bible, and yes, what is contained in the Bible is sufficient for faith, even with its imperfections. We will talk about some of these imperfections later.