Assuming the Bible is a fictional creation and there is no God, who really wrote it and why? Any theories?

Question

What I would really like to know is if there are any serious and respectable theories out there, such as books or websites etc that explore this theme?

Answer 1

http://gbgm-umc.org/umw/bible/links2.stm
http://www.bidstrup.com/bible.htm
http://www.bibleorigins.net/


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentary_hypothesis

These all supply some information and are rich in links and search terms.

Answer 2

You make an unproven assumption and then ask a question based on it.
There are many human 'authors': Christians believe that God INSPIRED it. (Muslims and Jews believe the same for what we call the 0ld Testament)

Assuming that there is no such thing as the internet, how do words keep appearing on my computer? Do you have a serious and respecable theory?

Answer 3

Catholic archbishops put it together from a mismatch of sources spanning a few thousand years. It has been suggested that only about 50% of the materiel is in it that was written in those times and so much valuable literature was left out. It is being crucified for thay, no pun intended, but it really should speak the WHOLE truth and it cleary does not.
That makes it completlety fallible and I would question if it was the word of God or the truth if its not a complete historical picture of faith

Answer 4

I'm not sure there are any such sites. Websites tend to be built and maintained in proportion to the enthusiasm of their builders. A site about how "sacred" writings are NOT composed by a god would be problematic.

But there are plenty of theories about how a body of scripture develops. Every social group that develops a sense of identity has emblems and stories that reinforce this identity. The stories explain why they act as they do and often explain how they came to be. The following paragraphs hypothetically assume that there is no god. I mean no offense to believers.

In the case of Judaism, their founding event is the Exodus, when their deity plucked them out of non-existence into pilgrimage to a "promised land". That was their spiritual destiny, the land of the people of Israel, and it was supposed to last forever. Some of the tribes had different stories, about the ancient patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. These stories were folded into the corpus of scripture as further justification of the whole nation's right to the land.

All of this changed with the fall of the two kingdoms. In the case of the northern kingdom, this meant loss of identity, or rather transformation into the identity of Samaritanism, which the southern kingdom did not accept, primarily because it survived its own downfall. In their exile, the Jaduhites were able to develop a portable form of their religion, one that didn't absolutely depend on Temple sacrifice. As a result, more attention was paid to their scriptures and their solidification into a permanent, unalterable narrative.

The biggest issue they had to deal with was their apparent abandonment by their national god. Such things just didn't happen, not if the nation survived. So God was transformed from a local, tribal god into the universal God who controlled all creation and even influenced foreign powers to discipline his own unfaithful people. That was the explanation, God's "abandonment" was actually a punishment for the people's unfaithfulness. And the implication was that, when punishment was complete, they would be restored.

Miraculously, that happened. Cyrus of Persia (Biblically referred to as God's "messiah") released the Jews who wished it, to return to their ancestral homelend. Those who did found the "restoration" difficult and uncertain. To keep their theology consistent, they blamed the lack of divine approval to a defect in their faithfulness, most obvious in their tolerance of the mixed-faith squatters they'd found on thier land and who even married into their clans. During the time of Ezra there was a period of what some might call ethnic cleansing to "purify" Jewish life and worship. Following this, there were only a few opportunities for Jewish self-determination, what with the Greeks and the Romans expanding their empires, and the subsequent general Diaspora. The spirituality was cast. Faithfulness to God and observance of Torah was the determining factor of divine approval.

Then the Christians arose. A renegade Jewish sect began to preach the doctrine of a new messiah who established a spiritual rather than a temporal kingdom, restoring not just Jewish but humanity's lost relationship with God through his own self-sacrifice as an innocent (and divine) victim. This group had no additional scriptures because it expected the end of time at any moment. When this did not occur, they began to collect and compose what came to be known as their own explanation of why they do what they do and how they came to be.

It's a similar pattern in every religion. People examine what they are doing, then develop doctrines to explain it, then establish an authority to sacralize it and enforce punishment for those who deviate from the doctrine.

But the examples I just presented contain supernatural events. If there is no God, what really happened? Unfortunately, the only way to verify history is to look at the physical evidence. There is no record in Egyptian history of a slave revolt matching the Exodus. (Naturally, too embarassing.) The sites identified in the Sinai desert have no physical artifacts that weren't constructed later. (Too long ago, obviously.) There are no ruins of the cities of the foreign nations and tribes encountered dating to the time indicated. Perhaps the most outspoken critic of the Jewish epic is Norman Finkelstein, who believes that the unifying Jewish history was produced much later than the events it narrates and was deliberately crafted to establish a common Israelite identity. (He is naturally hated by the strongest Jewish believers.)

There are also critics of Christianity who accuse it of being a syncretism of the Mystery Religions with Jewish theology. Some even suggest that Gnosticism was the mainstream Christianity until a populist, literalist faction took it over and created the orthodoxy we know today.

History is written by those who prevail. This is no less true with religious faith. Most scriptures are often a combination of several traditions, redacted into a whole but still showing occasional dissident voices. Remember the "ethnic cleansing" in Ezra's time? There was dissent there as well. The books of Ruth and Jonah were composed as protests against the xenophibic attitudes that dominated religious thinking of the time. Christian Bibles put Ruth in "historical" sequence between Judges and Samuel, but history was not its nature. It appears much later in the Jewish Bible.

To reiterate, what I've written here assumes that God does not exist. Sincere arguments can be and are made for the validity of Scripture, either literally or metaphorically. But the secular, anthropological understanding of the nature of holy writ is the establishment of cultural identity and a moral code.

Answer 5

It's an ancient collection of writings, comprised of 66 separate books, written over approximately 1,600 years, by at least 40 distinct authors. The Old Testament contains 39 books written from approximately 1500 to 400 BC, and the New Testament contains 27 books written from approximately 40 to 90 AD. All the books have been edited, annotated, added to and deleted throughout history.

Answer 6

Good question. Sorry I don't have any websites ot theories for you.

My opinion, however is that, if man wrote the Bible of his own accord, then that means about 40 different men from different areas, time periods and backgrounds did a very good job fitting it all together.

It is also documented that people were thrown to the lions for believing in Christ, his resurrection and following the Christian faith. Surely people would have confessed that it was all made up before being executed for it.

I would also be interested to hear what people have to say regarding how the concept of God came about. I can imagine that, had we evolved, some primitive peoples would have believed in a higher power to explain any unknowns, but I can't see this extending into the modern era's, unless there really was a God.

The Bible has taken some amount of flack over the centuries. There was a time when you would be burned at the stake for even possessing a Bible, nevermind reading it. Yet the Bible survived all that, which is what you would expect if it really was the word of God.

If the Bible was written by man without inspiration, I don't understand why those men would want all their mistakes record for all future generations to read. This totallty goes against human nature.

Take the case of King David. He had proved himself to be a man of outstanding faith. But, then, circumstances led to his becoming a victim of wrong desire. David came to feel an attraction for the wife of Uriah the Hittite, a man who loyally supported David’s kingship. He allowed his desire to grow and actually brought Uriah’s wife, Bath-sheba, into his palace. Though he may not have had in mind actually engaging in sex relations, his passions were aroused to the point where he did commit adultery. Learning that Bathsheba had become pregnant as a result, he hurriedly sought to conceal the matter by trying to get Uriah to go home and have relations with his wife. This failing, David became desperate. Only one way seemed open to prevent Bath-sheba’s being exposed as an adulteress with him and that was to get her husband out of the way and then to take her as his own wife. So David arranged to have Uriah put in such a position that he would be almost certain to die in battle. Uriah was slain, and David then took widowed Bath-sheba as his wife (2 Samuel. 11:2-27).

Another example is found at Mark 14:30, 31 were Jesus says to Peter, “Truly I say to you, you today, yes, this night, before a cockrel crows twice, even you will disown me three times.” But he began to say profusely: “If I have to die with you, I will by no means disown you.” Shortly after this Jesus is arrested and the disciples scatter. But Peter goes to the building were Jesus is being held and a crowd has gathered outside.

Mark 14:66-72 says: "Now while Peter was below in the courtyard, one of the servant girls of the high priest came, and, seeing Peter warming himself, she looked straight at him and said: “You, too, were with the Nazarene, this Jesus.” But he denied it, saying: “Neither do I know him nor do I understand what you are saying,” and he went outside to the vestibule. There the servant girl, at the sight of him, started again to say to those standing by: “This is one of them.” Again he was denying it. And once more after a little while those standing by began saying to Peter: “Certainly you are one of them, for, in fact, you are a Galilean.” But he commenced to curse and swear: “I do not know this man of whom you speak.” And immediately a cockrel crowed a second time; and Peter recalled the saying that Jesus spoke to him: “Before a cockrel crows twice, you will disown me three times.” And he broke down and gave way to weeping."

There are other examples; Noah got drunk (Genesis 9:21), Moses was presumpteous and lost his temper with God's people and as a result did not see the Promised Land (Numbers 20:9-12), Jesus disciples frequently argued with each other about who was the greatest (Mark 9:33-35), etc.

Surely, these men would rather that their failings were not immortalised for everyone to read.

These are just some reasons why I would never assume that the Bible is a work of fiction.

Answer 7

Deuteronomy is a fake, written by Priests and scribes under King Josiah, Eighth Century BCE, to change Mosaic Law.

Esther is a reworked Persian Myth of ISIS / Ishtar / Eostre.

The early Genesis stories are modified from Babylonian versions of early Sumarian / Akkadian myths, like the Epic of Gilgamesh. The Jews didn't adopt them until the Babylonian Captivity under Nebuchadnezzar.

Much of what appears in the Gospels are reworked stories from the writings of Josephus Flavius, the Old Testament and various local mythologies, to cast the Christian cult as favorable to Judaism after the destruction of Jerusalem. They are mostly political propaganda.

Answer 8

yeah man people study this as thier career.

they were written by different people, each book, luke, mathew, genesis etc. There are even lost books that were never ratified as part of the official cannon. They held a big meeting once and voted on it in old Rome.

tribes had thier own stories and versions, one side won the wars and ruthlessly enforced it. Today we're more lenient in this country and allow people to branch off as mormons, episcapalians or whatever.

Answer 9

OK, do you REALLY want an answer to this? I do to. I'm still working on the answer and getting closer. I agree with the 3rd answerer.

If you really want to delve deeply into this answer, I suggest you read the book "Secrete Origins of the Bible" by Tim Callahan. It is extremely informative and goes in depth.

I had to read the Bible BEFORE I read that book just to understand what he was talking about. I still do not understand it all, but I'm often amazed at how little Christians know about the origins of that book that they wrote.

Answer 10

People living by themselves in the wilderness in the early times of man would always wonder to the things they see along their ways. Experiencing what every nature can offer them in their daily lives. They always probably have asked themselves who are we? Why are we here? What are what are we suppose to be and where are all this things in us going to be. With so many unanswered questions, inspired by the the wonders of nature he sees around, feared by the storms with thunders and lightning, frightened by the night as the howling of wolves from afar, the chirpings and eerie sounds of animals and insects in the dark makes them wonder why all those things are happening. Then, greeted by the morning sun and other sounds of animals as if they are all saying "good morning" in unison. Why should it not inspire someone to make note of all the his wonderful experiences and attribute it to what he hopes to be responsible for everything?

Answer 11

The bible is a collection of various similar (or at least similarly useful) stories. People who want to control the masses hold it as an authority, and that authority became self perpetuating.

Mine says it came from Rand-McNally. According to some answers here, that means God is a publishing company.