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Who Wrote the Bible Anyway?

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  Image: Our Savior Lutheran Church I suppose that most of us who attended Sunday School or Hebrew School as children at some point wondered who actually wrote the books that were compiled into what we refer to as The Bible.  I do not remember much about what we were taught but have a vague recollection that we were taught that Moses wrote the Old Testament, that the disciples, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote the Gospels, and the Apostle Paul wrote the Epistles.  It was pretty simple.   Image:  Amazon There were many Bible-story books and some pretty good stories.  None of the chronology or geography came into the picture, however.  It seems that the adults did not think it was important or more likely that they had no idea about these things. If you start asking too many questions, Sunday School teachers get very nervous.  I suppose I was an adult when I first seriously asked myself who actually wrote these books and how they were put together. The answers were enlightening. For t
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The People I Want to Thank for Making a Reader of Me

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Image:  The Conversation My contribution to Banned Book Week is a thank-you letter to some of the people who are responsible for my book habit. Just this morning we were discussing where I would put any more books.  That was timely since my last book acquisition just arrived in the mail a few minutes ago. I don't know when I first started buying books but I can recall the excitement in elementary school when the Scholastic book sale rolled around.  Who could ask for more? I guess the first person I should thank is my mother who taught me how to read when I was four years old.  Alice and Jerry and Mrs. Tiggy Winkle.  She had been a teacher so it was a natural thing for her to teach me how to read. Image:  Getty Images The next person was surely my maternal grandmother, Ida Mae Murrell Tatum.  She had been an English and Latin teacher and basketball coach and owned the first private library in a dedicated room I had seen.  I ended up with a lot of her books, including the Harvard Cla
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The Single Most Important Document in Western Culture

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Image: Reuters Since I began to study the origins and evolution of Abrahamic religions, I have encountered what are to me, two extreme views of the Bible as it has come down to us. The first of these views is that the Bible, whether the Hebrew Bible or the Christian Bible is the absolute word of the God of creation, emancipation, and salvation for the world and that it is inerrant, unchanged, and cannot be challenged in its historic and theological accuracy.  This view might be best represented by such people as Kenneth Ham, the creator of the Ark Encounter in Williamstown, Kentucky.  The Ark Encounter is a tourist attraction that explains and illustrates one of the flood narratives in the Book of Genesis (there are two).  It features a life-sized ark, built of wood, and inside contains exhibits such as one showing how dinosaurs were included among the passengers of Noah's Ark.  An interesting side note here is that the dinosaurs depicted appear to be the Quetzalcoatlus species whi
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Two Stories: a Christian Bible and a Jewish Magazine that Make for Bad Religion

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"Here I stand: I can do no otherwise: God help me!" -M. Luther image: Wikipedia This post has evolved, over a number of weeks, into a morass of a critique, taking on two venerable and very different foundational literary establishments, the King James Bible and the popular religious press.  It might seem quite unwieldy to make critical judgments about these two things in the same place at the same time but read on, perhaps the focus will sharpen.  We will tiptoe around theology and scholarship, in hopes that we trample neither but that our own footsteps are rightly placed between those two towering hedges. Since my most recent post,  (https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/1797607806021886628/3655238780916104218), regarding the mistranslation of a verse in Isaiah which caused a theological storm of invectives, lies, accusations, and a highly un-Christian (at least in the name) level of violence which would seem to be quite excessive until we consider that the question raised
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This Might Just be the One

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  Everyone who attended Sunday School as a child will recall that the Messiah of the New Testament, known to them as "Jesus" was born of a virgin who was impregnated by the Holy Spirit and not by her husband (or fiancee), Joseph. This story and this assertion are central to the core of Christian belief. It is beneficial to our understanding of this belief to examine it carefully, considering its origins, its reasons, and its subsequent effects. The "virgin birth" narrative is contained in two of the canonical gospels:  Matthew and Luke. In the Book of Matthew (KJV), the narrative is as follows: 20 But while he thought on these things, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost.21 And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name Jesus: for he shall save his people from their sins. 22 Now all this was done,
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A Very Small Essay on Saul the Letter Writer

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  I suspect that if we were to ask most modern Christians whether the writings and teachings of Paul (Saul), the probable author of seven of the letters attributed to him, are the same as or congruent with the teachings of Yeshua of Nazareth, the Christian Messiah (we do not have any writings from Yeshua himself to compare), the answer would be "yes." A close examination of the scriptures, the official record of both Yeshua and Paul, will yield, I believe, some doubt to this question. It is important to look at the historical context in which the reports of both men are placed.  Yeshua was a Jew living in the small town of Nazareth in Roman Judea.  He was born to the wife of a local man named Joseph who is described in the Bible as a craftsman or technician of some kind.  One English translation says he was a carpenter.  The Greek word "tektōn" is used.  It has been translated to mean carpenter, laborer, or craftsman.  We do not know whether Yeshua was literate.  Th
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A Small Essay on the Gospel of Mark

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  We all know that The Gospel of Mark is one of the four Gospels in the Bible which tell the story of Yeshua of Nazareth, the Christian Messiah. What else do we know about the book? Like all of the books of the Bible, we do not have a single source that explains each book in its context. We have to examine all of the evidence we have available in order to make sense of the Bible and even then, there are far too many questions that remain unanswered or whose answers are not congruent with what Christian churches teach. In examining the book, we will start with its authorship and our first controversy. No one knows who wrote the Gospel of Mark. Many of the faithful will insist that the gospel was written by the Apostle Mark. I suppose they will be surprised to learn that there was no one named Mark among Yeshua's Apostles. In early church times, it was assumed that the gospel was written by John Mark, a follower of Peter. In spite of this tradition, scholars believe the gospel
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