Who Wrote the Bible and Why the Answer Matters

As a general rule, if you want to know who wrote a book, you can refer to the spine with more detail found just inside the cover.

Not so with the Bible, and yet it endures as one of the most widely read, consulted and even memorized resources there has ever been. Even Siri, the virtual wiz, says that the Bible was written by “Various.” While that is technically correct, it seems vague.

The Cornwall Library in Cornwall, Conn., tackled the question by offering a program titled, “Who Wrote the Bible and Why the Answer Matters,” on Sunday, April 10, led by local favorite Franny Taliaferro, retired from the faculty at New York City’s Brearley School, and her former 12th-grade student, Martien Halvorson-Taylor.

Both are part-time Cornwall residents.

Their conversation whisked their Zoom audience through millennia of history and scholarly inquiry. The program attracted 164, including a number of area theologians who kept the chat box flowing with off-stage debate.

Ancient storytellers numbering probably in the millions over generations and their honed stories continue to communicate profoundly with individual modern readers to lessen fears, shape lives and kindle hope, Halvorson-Taylor said.

Her talk focused mainly on what Christians call the Old Testament, although Amenia, N.Y., Rabbi Jon Heddon’s entry into the chat box noted that the Jews do not call it the Old Testament nor do they call G-d by name.

The structure of the Bible has intrigued scholars over the ages, Halverson-Taylor said. A case in point is Genesis, the story of the Creation in two chapters with differing approaches telling the same story, but likely to have been written in different times. A 19th-century scholar, Julius Wellhausen, put forth the argument that the Bible was written over the course of centuries.

The dual narrative approach, she explained, is different from a linear narrative. Ancient storytelling (before writing was thought of) was circular, often repetitive. Those ancient storytellers were pre-literate, with each community of people modifying the stories at will.

“The old stories of the oral tradition were malleable, unrigid, fluid,” Halvorson-Taylor said.

But, along came a new technology, the written word, viewed by many with suspicion about the change it would bring to the world.

Halvorson-Taylor likened the advent of writing to a technology in the way that the modern age viewed computers with alarm at first for the harm they might do to society.

As scribes began to write these stories down on newly developed scrolls, these newly written words were memorialized for future generations, but they were also fixed and frozen in place, Halvorson-Taylor said.

The scribes had no sense of personal ownership of the product; they were merely conduits for the past to be preserved for the future, she added.

“We hear their voices because scribes fed from the old traditions, editing and reframing, trying to make them relevant to their day,” Halvorson-Taylor said.

Offering an analogy, Halvorson-Taylor brought to mind the Zoom listeners’ old family stories that have passed through generations, amusing or instructing younger generations and often repeated to define the experiences of lifetimes. Such family stories give a sense of origins and memories that we claim as our own to form an eternal past.

“We all make choices about which stories we want to retain and carry on, or forget,” she said. “The Bible is a collection of such family stories.”

The question of how those texts became sacred was posed by Taliaferro. “Rabbis actively debated that question well into the Common Era and beyond,” Halverson-Taylor replied.

To contact Halvorson-Taylor directly and to learn more about her Audible course on the subject, go to www.WritingTheBible.org. The link also leads to her website.