“That's one opinion among many,” says Joel Baden, a professor at Yale Divinity School and author of The Composition of the Pentateuch: Renewing the Documentary Hypothesis. Rembrandt van Rijn, painting of Moses Breaking the Tablets of the Law, 1659. READ MORE: Inside the Conversion Tactics of the Early Christian Church A volume of the Talmud, the collection of Jewish laws recorded between the 3rd and 5th centuries A.D., dealt with this inconsistency by explaining that Joshua (Moses’ successor as leader of the Israelites) likely wrote the verses about Moses’ death. Yet nearly from the beginning, readers of the Bible observed that there were things in the so-called Five Books of Moses that Moses himself could not possibly have witnessed: His own death, for example, occurs near the end of Deuteronomy. That single author was believed to be Moses, the Hebrew prophet who led the Israelites out of captivity in Egypt and guided them across the Red Sea toward the Promised Land. For at least 1,000 years, both Jewish and Christian tradition held that a single author wrote the first five books of the Bible-Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy-which together are known as the Torah (Hebrew for “instruction”) and the Pentateuch (Greek for “five scrolls”). The Old Testament, or Hebrew Bible, narrates the history of the people of Israel over about a millennium, beginning with God’s creation of the world and humankind, and contains the stories, laws and moral lessons that form the basis of religious life for both Jews and Christians.

What Other Proof Exists? Old Testament: The Single Author Theory READ MORE: The Bible Says Jesus Was Real. Even after nearly 2,000 years of its existence, and centuries of investigation by biblical scholars, we still don’t know with certainty who wrote its various texts, when they were written or under what circumstances. It has been translated into nearly 700 languages, and while exact sales figures are hard to come by, it’s widely considered to be the world’s best-selling book.īut despite the Bible’s undeniable influence, mysteries continue to linger over its origins. Scholars have spent their lives studying it, while rabbis, ministers and priests have focused on interpreting, teaching and preaching from its pages.Īs the sacred text for two of the world’s leading religions, Judaism and Christianity, as well as other faiths, the Bible has also had an unmatched influence on literature-particularly in the Western world. Over centuries, billions of people have read the Bible.

Timeline of the bible and world history