The Great Courses Who Wrote the Bible

An audiobook available as part of my Audible subscription (I really like this particular perk; it makes the annual £109 price really good value).

I found this very interesting. The author is an engaging speaker really invested in his material. What comes across to me is that the question in the title cannot ever be definitively answered but is absolutely fascinating to investigate and discuss. As the final chapter has it, the Bible isn’t a “book” as we conventionally think of one – it is a library of different works, written, re-written (indeed reassembled) over a period of 2,000 years, and NONE of that material was ever explicitly written to be part of “the Bible”.

One implication of this is that the text of the Bible (in all its different forms) contains a vast range of sources, meanings and purposes, often contradictory, or at least telling the same story different ways. What this means is that there is endless scope for argument and interpretation. (Isaac Asimov said, “Allow me to pick and choose from the whole bible, ignoring whatever I want, believing whatever I want and I can prove anything you want”. He was right and now I know why.

A well spent 10 hours.