Category: Bible: Authorship

Q. Was Jesus’ brother Judas the same Judas who betrayed Jesus for silver? No, the two men are not the same. In New Testament times, people did not have last names, but individuals were identified by their father’s name or by the city or region they came from, and that enables us to identify these as different men. The Judas who betrayed Jesus is called Judas Iscariot, most likely meaning that he was from the village of Kerioth. Hebrew or Aramaic “man of Kerioth” would be ish-Kerioth, and English Bibles present a Latinized version of that name, Iscariot. The Judas who was the brother of Jesus came to believe that Jesus was the Son of God and the Messiah, and he actually wrote one of the books of the New Testament, the epistle of Jude. In that book he identifies himself as “the servant of Jesus Christ and the brother of James.” James, another brother of Jesus, was the leader of the church in Jerusalem, and at the time when Jude sent out his letter, identifying himself as the brother of James was a clear way for Jude to let his recipients know specifically who he was. (Jude and James were actually half-brothers of Jesus. They had the same mother, Mary, but they were sons of Joseph, while Jesus was the Son of God.)

Q. Who was the book of Hebrews written to?

Here is what I say about that in my study guide to Hebrews and Deuteronomy. (You can read the study guide online or download it for free at this link.)

The book of Hebrews was, like Deuteronomy, originally delivered as a
public address. It’s made up of four messages that were originally given in
gatherings of Jesus’ followers. (At the end the author calls the whole work
a “word of exhortation,” the technical term for a sermon or homily in the
Jewish synagogue.) These messages were then collected into a book and sent
out like a letter. The ending of Hebrews follows the form for letters in this
period. (The usual opening of a letter is missing, however, and that’s why the
author is unknown today.) This ending provides details that, together with
other references in the book, help us identify its recipients.

We can tell that they lived in the Roman Empire, most likely somewhere
in Italy (since the author sends them greetings from their friends who have come from Italy), perhaps in the city of Rome itself. We know that they lived
in the middle of the first century, some time before AD 70 when the Romans
destroyed the Jerusalem temple, because the author says that sacrifices are still
being offered there. They were Jews (descendants of the ancient Israelites)
who were facing a particular threat. At this time followers of Jesus were beginning to be distinguished from other Jews and singled out for persecution.
The believers addressed here were tempted to try to escape by going back to
the old covenant and identifying themselves simply as Jews. The author of
Hebrews urges them instead to remain faithful to the new covenant, despite
the risks and dangers, and show their fellow Jews and people of all other
nations how God has brought their rich spiritual heritage to its glorious
culmination through Jesus.

Q. Are you the only one who teaches the 130 proverbs of Solomon compiled by Hezekiah’s men? My focus is on the 130 number. I have found others that teach the 135 proverbs of Solomon in another section of the book, but I cannot seem to find anyone else teaching the 130 number in the Hezekiah section.

I think you are probably referring to this post, in which I say that there are 130 sayings in the section of the book of Proverbs that was compiled by “Hezekiah and his men” because 130 is the value of Hezekiah’s name in Hebrew. And I think you are probably actually referring to the 375, rather than the 135, proverbs by Solomon that are in another section of the book that is entitled “The proverbs of Solomon.”

I’ve looked around a bit online and I do find others who teach that there are 375 proverbs in that other section because that is the value of Solomon’s name in Hebrew. For example, a post on Bible.com says, “There are 375 proverbs in this section, and wouldn’t you know it, the numerical value of the word “Solomon” (שְׁלֹמֹ) in Hebrew is 375! Someone has thoughtfully curated these sayings for us to read and ponder.” Similarly, a post from GCI.org observes, “It would seem that Solomon, or someone else later, deliberately made a collection of 375 of the Solomonic proverbs to correspond to the numerical value of Solomon’s name.”

However, in a quick search at least, I don’t find others who make the same claim about the 130-proverb collection later in the book and the numerical value of Hezekiah’s name. But it seems to me that if the first claim makes sense, then the second one does, too. I must admit that it has been so long since I first learned about this likely reason for the number of proverbs in those two collections that I don’t actually remember where I heard it first. So I will just have to leave it to thoughtful readers and interpreters of the Bible to consider what they think of the idea. Thanks for your question.

Q. How come only five disciples of Jesus Christ wrote books in the New Testament? My theory is that for one thing John and Peter were closer to Jesus. Matthew was a Levite from the priestly tribe of Levi, making his role that of writing on Christ’s priesthood. Christ redeemed the priesthood of Levi back unto himself and redeemed Matthew the tax collector from what was considered a disgraceful and corrupt profession. But I don’t know about the others.

I think your question actually contains a good start on its own answer. But first, let me say that if we accept the traditional understandings of authorship, only three of Jesus’ disciples wrote books in the New Testament. You mention John, who is traditionally credited with the Gospel of John, the three letters of John, and the book of Revelation. Two letters that Peter wrote are in the New Testament. And then there is Matthew.

But the James who wrote a book in the New Testament is not the James who was a disciple of Jesus. Rather, he was one of Jesus’ brothers. So was Jude, who wrote another book. Luke and Paul, the other remaining authors whose identities we know, were similarly not among the original twelve disciples. We don’t know who wrote the book of Hebrews, but many things about it suggest that this was someone from the Jewish community in Alexandria, Egypt (whether or not the book was actually written there), so its author was likely not one of the disciples either.

But let us return to Matthew, who, as you noted, was most likely a Levite. (In fact, in relating the same episode in which he is called Matthew in the gospel by that name, Mark calls him Levi. This might have been a nickname or surname; either way, it identifies him with that tribe.) I would say that Matthew’s gospel does more than speak of Christ’s priesthood; it explains the significance of his whole life and ministry as the Jewish Messiah, and his sacrificial death, against the background of the Hebrew Scriptures. As a result, Matthew’s gospel has far more quotations from and allusions to the Old Testament than the other three gospels. So it is a book written for a Jewish audience by someone who was deeply versed in the Jewish Scriptures.

All the other disciples were Jewish as well. We can imagine that they might well have addressed a similar audience in a similar way. And that would have limited the reach of the New Testament, which is the story of how Jesus brought the work that God had done to that point, as described in the Old Testament, to its culmination for the benefit of the whole world.

And so other types of authors were needed, to write to other audiences in other ways. Luke was a Gentile, and he wrote in excellent Greek to a Greek audience. His two works, Luke and Acts, make up a quarter of the New Testament.

Paul was Jewish, in fact, he was a trained rabbi, but he came from Asia Minor, from a context outside of Palestine that was Greek in language and culture. So was also familiar with Greek philosophical thought, as we can tell from his own writings, and from his speeches that Luke records in Acts. Paul writes largely to Christian communities made up of both Jews and Gentiles. His letters comprise another quarter of the New Testament.

While Mark was Jewish, he wrote his gospel in Rome, and we can tell that he is addressing a Roman audience. (For one thing, he uses many Latin terms, and he also explains customs for his readers that a Jew living in Palestine would have understood implicitly.) John was also Jewish, but he likely wrote his gospel in western Asia Minor, and while he refers extensively to the Jewish background of Jesus’ life and ministry, he speaks in a way that is accessible to the broad population of the empire. And as I have already noted, the book of Hebrews likely comes from the Alexandrian context.

So most of the New Testament actually comes from outside the Palestinian Jewish context in which Jesus and his disciples operated. But this allows the New Testament books to speak to a much broader and wider audience than they would have if most of them had been written within that context instead. So, as I said, your reflections about Matthew pointed in the direction of what I think is the answer to your question. Certainly a gospel like his was needed to interpret the meaning of Jesus for a Jewish audience. But the New Testament needed to speak to many other audiences as well, and that is why the authors of most of its books appropriately come from a range of contexts and backgrounds, not only the original circle of Jesus’ twelve disciples.

Q. When did Paul write Galatians, before or after the Jerusalem Council?

I’ve shared some thoughts in response to a similar question in this post. I think it will help answer your question as well. Thank you.

Q. I have a question that I thought was straightforward but seems to be a point of discussion even among bible scholars. Who was the most prolific writer in the New Testament?  I always thought it was Paul, but I heard a well-respected pastor say it was Luke.  When I researched the answer online, there seemed to be some debate.  How can this be? It seems to me that a person could count the words, chapters, or books written by each and come up with a definitive answer.   Why the confusion?  Who does deserve the credit?

As I understand it, Luke is the writer responsible for the largest part of the New Testament.  This is if we go by word count, i.e. “by volume.”  I think that’s more accurate than by book, chapter, or verse, as these can vary greatly in length.  (This is true even if Paul wrote Hebrews, which I think is doubtful, but which many believe on the basis of tradition.)

In other words, Luke-Acts (originally written as a single work, though divided and separated in most Bibles) is by itself longer than all thirteen of Paul’s letters combined.  You can get a rough idea of this by counting the pages, especially in an edition that has no headings or chapter numbers, like The Books of the Bible (in which Luke-Acts is also restored to unity as a single work).  In that edition, Luke-Acts is 99 pages while Paul’s letters are 97 pages–and that number is inflated by the blank space frequently left on the last pages of his many letters.  Luke-Acts only has one “last page,” and its page count suffers accordingly.  But once again, if we go by words, we discover that Luke actually wrote the largest part of the New Testament.

Q. I was reading in Chronicles today and it references “the records of Samuel the seer,” “the records of Nathan the prophet,” and “the records of Gad the seer.”  Are these books in evidence in the historical record anywhere? And what is a “seer,” from a biblical perspective?

There are no surviving copies of the actual books listed there in Chronicles.  Nor do we have copies of other books mentioned as sources in the Bible, for example, “the book of Jashar” that is referenced in Joshua and Samuel-Kings.  It’s clear, however, that these books once were available to the believing community and that they were among the sources that went into writing the long history of the monarchy in Samuel-Kings as well as the parallel history you’re reading now in Chronicles-Ezra-Nehemiah.

While we don’t have these books, the references to them within the Bible do show that the biblical authors used available written sources as they composed their own works.  (To give another example, Luke explains in the dedication to his gospel that he has examined the “accounts” that others have undertaken to “draw up” about the life of Jesus and the early growth of the community of his followers.)

In other words, the biblical books didn’t just drop fully formed out of heaven.  They are in many cases the product of the same kind of research that goes into scholarly historical works today.  The statement you’re asking about, in fact, is the ancient equivalent of a footnote, acknowledging the sources that were used for a certain part of the history and referring readers to them for further information.

As for the meaning of the term “seer,” it is an older term that, as the narrative in Samuel-Kings explains, means the same thing as “prophet”: “Formerly in Israel, if someone went to inquire of God, they would say, ‘Come, let us go to the seer,’ because the prophet of today used to be called a seer.”  So the titles in Chronicles actually mean, for example, ”the records of Samuel the prophet,” etc. The use of the archaic term “seer,” which has to be explained to later readers, suggests that the source books themselves are significantly older than the final products–more evidence that biblical books like these are the result of careful historical research.  Here we see the human side of the Bible’s composition.

Q.  The authorship of 1st and 2nd Peter has been a long debated question.  Who do you think was the author? More importantly, the bigger question is, why do these conundrums exist? I would like to think I can trust every jot and tittle in God’s Holy Word, but many people, much smarter than me, have debated over inconsistencies in the Bible ad nauseam. My faith rests on Jesus Christ and the Word of God! Why isn’t it crystal clear?

To answer the authorship question first, my personal belief is that the apostle Peter wrote both of the New Testament epistles that bear his name.

Some people dispute that he wrote Second Peter because, in marked contrast with the simpler Greek of First Peter, the Greek language in that epistle is highly refined and complex.  (For that reason, Second Peter is a favorite text for seminary courses in intermediate Greek.)  The argument goes that Peter, whose first language was Aramaic, would have been capable of writing only simpler Greek at best (as First Peter supposedly demonstrates), and so someone else must have written Second Peter.

I believe that the solution to this problem, however, can be found within Peter’s letters themselves.  Near the end of his first letter, he acknowledges that “with the help of Silas, whom I regard as a faithful brother, I have written to you.”  In the ancient world, someone who wanted to “write” a letter would typically speak it out loud and engage someone else to write it down.  (The person who served in this role for Paul’s letter to the Romans actually includes his own greetings at the end of that epistle:  “I, Tertius, who wrote down this letter, greet you in the Lord.”)

We need to appreciate that the services these scribes performed could range from simply writing down the words that were actually spoken aloud to “putting into words” what the sender wanted to say—something like the “ghostwriter” of a speech or article today.  Peter acknowledges that Silas helped him write his first letter, likely by putting his thoughts into words in simple but articulate Greek, which was probably even better Greek than he was capable of composing himself.  While Peter doesn’t similarly name or acknowledge the person who helped him write his second letter (perhaps because this person would not be known to the recipients the way Silas was), we can deduce that this was an accomplished writer with an even stronger command of the language.

We should not see this as “plagiarism” or the use of a “paper mill,” as we might think of it today.  Rather, it was an established and assumed practice in the ancient world where only limited numbers of people were capable of reading and writing, and even fewer had a stylistic command of the language suitable for composing letters with as wide an intended audience as Second Peter.

As for why these conundrums exist in the Bible in the first place, I believe it’s because the biblical books were composed within the flux of human history and culture, not dropped out of heaven inscribed on golden tablets.  Because cultural practices, such as the use of scribes, change over time, people in later cultures like ours can become confused by them—as when we see letters written at two very different levels of a language attributed to the same author.

But this just provides an occasion for us to dig deeper into the background of the Bible.  When we do, not only do we resolve the so-called “inconsistencies,” we get a better window into the biblical world and appreciate more about how the Bible was created for us.  We can even admire, in a way we could not before, the contributions of unnamed people like the scribe behind Second Peter who also used their gifts to help bring us the word of God.

Q. In an article published by the National Center for Science Education, Conrad Hyers argues that the accounts in Genesis of the Days of Creation and the Garden of Eden were written at two different times, with two different purposes in mind. Hyers claims that the former is a “Priestly” account written around the time of the Babylonian captivity, and that the latter is a “Yahwist” account written around the time of Solomon. I’ve always believed that Moses wrote Genesis, around the time of the Exodus.  How do you understand this interpretation of it?

In my first post in response to this question, I showed that at least some parts of the Pentateuch were almost certainly not written by Moses.  In the next post, I explained that many scholars believe the Pentateuch was instead woven together from several different documents that were composed in various places later in Israel’s history.  Last time I discussed the biblical evidence these scholars offer in support of that view.  Now in this final post in the series I’d like to offer some reflections on how the belief that the Pentateuch has been woven together from a variety of different documents can be put in a positive and constructive dialogue with the traditional view that Moses wrote these books instead.

Let me frame the dialogue this way:  What might a proponent of the so-called Documentary Hypothesis have to say positively about the traditional view?  And what might someone who believed that Moses wrote the Pentateuch have to say positively about the other view?

I think someone who held to the Documentary Hypothesis would start by observing that the believing community has had a tendency down through the centuries to attribute anonymous works to known leading figures.  The book of Hebrews, for example, was for a long time attributed to the apostle Paul.  (In the King James Bible it’s actually entitled “The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Hebrews”–just as Genesis is called “The First Book of Moses,” as shown above.)  But most scholars today, including those who hold dearly to the inspiration and authority of the Bible, acknowledge that this letter was almost certainly not written by Paul.  Most scholars also acknowledge that the anonymous biblical book that has come to be known as the Gospel According to Matthew was similarly not written by the figure it has traditionally been attributed to.  And so forth, in several cases.

However, when we recognize these authorship claims for what they really are–authority claims–we can see how they have abiding validity.  The believing community has attributed these works not just to well-known figures, but to leaders who were first-hand participants in the epochal redemptive-historical events they record.  In other words, through these authorship claims, the community is saying, “We recognize and accept these works as trustworthy accounts of God’s key saving interventions in human history and in the life of our ongoing community.”  And in that assessment of the works, someone who held to a Documentary theory of the Pentateuch’s composition could be in full agreement with someone who believed that Moses was its author.

We can take this even further than that.  The Documentary theorist could also acknowledge that these works have such authority precisely because their contents, the building blocks of material that later writers assembled, go back ultimately to a collection that Moses himself created of the earliest Israelite traditions and to records that he kept of God’s communications during his lifetime.  These building blocks would have been transmitted both orally and in written form down through the centuries until they were worked into written documents by later figures.

Of course it cannot be proved that this happened.  But the strong and enduring tradition associating these works with Moses provides a very strong suggestion that he is the ultimate source of the material.  In the same way, we have confidence that the gospels present the authentic deeds and teaching of Jesus, even though the material in them was transmitted orally (and perhaps also in writing) for a generation before the four evangelists collected and arranged it to create their different works.  I think a proponent of the Documentary Hypothesis could affirm all of these things.

For their part, people who believe that Moses wrote the Pentateuch should have no trouble acknowledging that the materials in it had to be adapted so that later generations could understand and appreciate them.  We see this kind of “updating” throughout the Bible, for example, when the current name of a place is added by way of explanation after it is called by its former name, or when an archaic term is explained so that the audience will understand its use, as in this classic case from the life of Saul:  “Formerly in Israel, if someone went to inquire of God, they would say, ‘Come, let us go to the seer,’ because the prophet of today used to be called a seer.”  (Right after this explanation is offered, Saul and his servant ask a passer-by, “Is the seer here?”–and the audience, used to hearing such figures called “prophets,” understands.)

A person who held to the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch might not be prepared to allow that it has been “updated” to the extent that Documentary theorists describe, with separate Judean and Israelite “epics” being composed by the 8th century B.C. to express the national identity and aspirations of those two kingdoms, a “Deuteronomonic history” being added in the time of Josiah, and a rival “Priestly” account composed before the Babylonian exile, with everything woven together upon the return from exile.  But if a person who held the traditional view could agree that the discussion was really about a difference in degree (how much “updating,” to what extent), rather than in kind (one view treating any hand other than Moses’s as negligible, and other other view considering the contributions of other hands to be significant), there might well be room for fruitful and constructive dialogue between these positions.

That, at least, is how I see it.  Thank you again for your question, and I hope I have done some justice to it even in the brief space allowed by the blog format.