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Who wrote the Bible

Anyone who thinks God wrote the Bible should read Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, by Bart D. Ehrman. A biblical scholar, he has studied the texts of the Bible in their original languages. “As I realized already in graduate school, even if God had inspired the original words, we don’t have the original words. So the doctrine of inspiration was in a sense irrelevant to the Bible as we have it, since the words God reputedly inspired had been changed and, in some cases, lost. Moreover, I came to think that my earlier views of inspiration were not only irrelevant, they were probably wrong. For the only reason (I came to think) for God to inspire the Bible would be so that his people would have his actual words; but if he really wanted people to have his actual words, surely he would have miraculously preserved those words, just as he had miraculously inspired them in the first place, Given the circumstance that he didn’t preserve the words, the conclusion seemed inescapable to me that he hadn’t gone to the trouble of inspiring them.” (p 211)

Anyone wishing to better understand who wrote the Bible (the New Testament at least) should read Ehrman’s book.

Comments 1

  1. admin wrote:

    This reminds me of the story that Shakespeare was involved in the translation of the King James Bible. One of the more obvious clues that he was at least one of the translators is Psalm 46. The King James Bible was being prepared for printing in 1610, when Shakespeare was 46 years old. The 46th word in the psalm is “shake.” Not counting Selah (the equivalent of Amen), the 46th word from the end is “spear.”

    Although some scholars maintain that Shakespeare himself probably didn’t do it, some one else likely did, as this variant appears in no other Biblical translation.

    So, just the fact that humans could slip in such an Easter egg seems to be proof that God was not inspiring the translations of his work, at least. Unless he has a mischievous sense of humor, like Satan.

    Posted 15 Jan 2010 at 4:41 pm

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