Writing in the Bible: Part 1 Who Wrote the Bible?

This series looks at where writing is mentioned in the Bible.

What is the Bible?

The Bible is not a book, but a collection of books.  It comes from a Greek word meaning, ‘the books’, which probably derived from the Phoenician town called Byblos. This was were the Egyptians bought the papyrus they used to write on.

How Many Books?

The number of books in the Bible depends upon the tradition of each denomination.  The Protestant church tends to have the Bible with the least number of books.  While the Catholics have more, and the Orthodox churches have an even greater number of books.  The Ethiopian Church has an open canon, which means they accept all almost all the books as Scripture, including the extra-Biblical books as well.

The oldest copy of the Scriptures was found at Quram, dated to 3rd Century BC. And the oldest New Testament copy discovered was from John 18 and dates to around 125AD.

Who wrote the Bible?

The Scriptures, which are contained within the Bible, are considered to be inspired by the Holy Spirit. He is the author.

2 Timothy 3 v 16

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness

When Paul wrote this, he was most likely referring to the Old Testament, as the New Testament was not written at this point.

But early in the Church, certain writings began to be treated as Scripture. Especially the Gospels and all of Paul’s writings. Eventually, the current canon of the New Testament was considered Scripture. Which means it came under the meaning of Scripture in the verse from 2 Timothy. And therefore was considered to be authored by the Holy Spirit.

Having said that, all the books of the Bible were written by humans. They didn’t use automatic writing (closing their eyes and asking God to guide them as to what to write), but used the ancient traditional method.

Scribes and Writers

Writing was an expensive business in the ancient World. Academics have suggested that to simply copy the text of the Epistle to the Romans, using the techniques in the early Church, would have cost £1,875 (US$2,275) in today’s money.

If we extrapolate this to the whole Bible, I estimate it would cost £135,000 (US$163,000), just to make a single copy.

The way ancient texts were written involved the author, the heads-scribe and then several more scribes. The author would speak and the scribes would all right down what they understood what was said. The head-scribe would then organise all the rough notes and start a dialogue with the author. Asking him to clarify points, expand on ideas and tighten up the language.

For me, this adds to the argument that no word is wasted in Scripture. Every word is carefully considered, thought through and there to help the Christian.

We see a head-scribe mentioned in Romans.

Romans 16 v 22

I, Tertius, who wrote down this letter, greet you in the Lord.

So really, Tertius wrote the Book of Romans, and Paul was the author.

We see this again in the Old Testament, where Jeremiah’s scribe was Baruch.

Conclusion

So the Bible was authored by the Holy Spirit, and the individual books were authored and written by 100s of people. Many of them unnamed in history.