Watch: Who Wrote the Bible?

Who Wrote the Bible? (video link)

Why should you watch this?

This video presents a good basic introduction to the Biblical "Documentary Hypothesis".

For centuries, scholars from many backgrounds have worked on discovering how the Bible came to be. Their task was not to prove whether the Bible's words were divinely revealed to the authors. That is a question of faith, not scholarship. Rather, they were trying to learn the history of those authors: what they wrote, when they wrote, and why they wrote. The solution that has been the most persuasive for over a century is known as the Documentary Hypothesis. The idea of this hypothesis is that the Bible's first books were formed through a long process. Ancient writers produced documents of poetry, prose, and law over many hundreds of years. And then editors used these documents as sources. Those editors fashioned from these sources the Bible that people have read for some two thousand years.--Dr. Richard Elliot Friedman