Bible 101: What Is The Bible, and Who Wrote It?

Big Questions About the Big Book

The Bible is an important book. This is not a controversial statement. It’s sold an estimated 5 Billion copies as of 1995 according to the Guinness Book of World Records, and has been translated into thousands of languages over the last 2,000 years. In fact, many languages gained their first written form so that the Bible could be read in those languages. A majority of Americans have a Bible in their house, and those who don’t are never more than a couple of clicks away from it using a computer or phone. Sections of the Bible are read aloud at worship services, printed on cards, and quoted in conversation. It’s an important book, but most people don’t actually know very much about it.

This is strange when you think about it. Most people have no real concept of what the Bible is, other than maybe saying that it’s “The Word of God,” and a lot of people know even less about who wrote it. There are good reasons for this, the primary one being that for a lot of people, it’s the content of the Bible that matters, and other content surrounding it is, at best, just trivia. Other times, a framework about authorship might go hand-in-hand with a framework about interpretation. By arguing for specific kinds of authorship, you might be able to protect your own interpretation of the Bible. One…