GUJARATI CHRISTIAN E MAGAZINE ZARNU SEPTEMBER 2020.

GUJARATI CHRISTIAN E MAGAZINE ZARNU SEPTEMBER 2020.

HOLY BOOKS A REACH that goes far beyond what virtually all works of literature can ever accomplish. Unlike, say, The Great Gatsby, the Bible is a text upon which millions and millions of people have based their entire lives. That fact can be good or bad, and it’s often been both over the many centuries throughout which Christians have been reading the Bible and Jews have been reading the Torah. But given its immense reach and cultural influence, it’s a bit surprising how little we really know about the Bible’s origins. In other words, who wrote the Bible? Of all the mysteries surrounding the Bible, that one may be the most fascinating. We’re not completely ignorant, of course. Some books of the Bible were written in the clear light of history, and their authorship isn’t terribly controversial. Other books can be reliably dated to a given period by either internal clues — sort of the way no books written in the 1700s mention airplanes, for instance — and by their literary style, which develops over time. Religious doctrine, of course, holds that God himself is the author of or at least the inspiration for the entirety of the Bible, which was transcribed by a series of humble vessels. About the best that can be said for that notion is that if God really did “write” the Bible through a millennium-long sequence of various authors, he was certainly doing it the hard way.