The Bible is without doubt the one of the most powerful books in the world. It has the power to control nations and to create war over a simple verse and so it is not uncommon that this book has been studied in the most detailed way. Upon those scholars who have analyzed the bible lies Julius Wallhausen who came up with what is now known as the “Documentary Hypothesis”. The Documentary Hypothesis states that the first five books of the bible were put together from independent different sources, labeled J(Yawhist), E(Elohist), D(Deuteronomic) and the P(Priestly) source (Coogan, pgs 51-55). This paper will provide a short summary of each source, as well as the importance that this hypothesis might have on a bible reader and how it can change …show more content…
As we learned in class the J source was written around 900 BCE and it traced back to the territory of Judah. This source identifies itself by the consistent use of the term Yahweh when it refers to God, a God that is presented as a very anthropomorphic being in the J source when compared to the other sources who present God as more transcendent figure. The E source is believed to be written around the 9th century BCE (Coogan pg.54) and unlike the J source, the E source refers to God as Elohim. By reading the E source you will notice that the title Yahweh was revealed to Moses in the book of Exodus and in the J source we see the name Yahweh being used in the primeval chapters (Gen. Chapters 2-11) thus seeing a discrepancy between the sources. We also notice that in the E sources we see God take on a less anthropomorphic role; he talks to people through dreams, divine messengers and prophets. The geographical location of the narratives found in this source is traced back to the northern kingdom part of Israel. The D source or the Deuteronomic source is found in the Bible by its name. This book was discovered in the temple during the reign of King Josiah around the late 7th century but it is believed that the book was written before that (Coogan pg.54). Coogan
It is the reader and his or her interpretive community who attempts to impose a unified reading on a given text. Such readers may, and probably will, claim that the unity they find is in the text, but this claim is only a mask for the creative process actually going on. Even the most carefully designed text can not be unified; only the reader's attempted taming of it. Therefore, an attempt to use seams and shifts in the biblical text to discover its textual precursors is based on a fundamentally faulty assumption that one might recover a stage of the text that lacked such fractures (Carr 23-4).
The Bible: The Old Testament. The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces. Ed. Sarah Lawall et al. Vol 1. 7th ed. New York: Norton, 1999. 47-97.
Metzger, B. (1997). The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance. New York.
Harris, Stephen. Understanding The Bible. 6 ed. New York City: McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages, 2002. Print.
The Old Testament and the Bible itself has been studied extensively for centuries. Archeologists and Scholars have labored and pondered over texts trying to decipher its clues. It does not matter how many times the Old Testament has been studied there will always be something new to learn about it or the history surrounding it. In the book Reading the Old Testament: an Introduction, the author Lawrence Boadt presents us with a few different authors of the Old Testament that used different names for God and had a unique insight into the texts. These four sources are titled P for priests, E for Elohim, J for Jehovah, and Y for Yahweh (95). These four unique sources help us realize that there is more than one author of the Pentateuch. These authors took the text and adapted for their culture. This independent source is used by scholars to help gain insight into what was behind the texts of the bible so we are not left with an incomplete picture of what went into the creation of the bible. Julius Wellhausen used these four sources to publish a book to able us to better understand the sources and to give it credibility with the Protestant scholars at the time (Boadt 94). These sources that is independent of the bible as in the DVD Who Wrote the Bible? and the Nova website aide in shedding light on the history that surrounded the writers who wrote the text and what inspired them to write it in the first place. The DVD shows the discovery of The Dead Sea Scrolls and the extensive history of the texts and all its sources in an effort to try to find exactly who wrote the bible (Who Wrote). These scrolls have aided scholars immensely by giving us some of the oldest known manuscripts of the bible in the world today. It shows that the bible w...
Writings of historical scholars, Josephus, Aristotle, and Plato, to name a few, are taken as truth and fact, yet the writings of the Scripture are constantly disputed. Why? Perhaps because of the ethical imperatives imposed to which people do not want to adhere. Perhaps because of man’s ego and pride that disallows them to submit to a Higher Authority. Nonetheless, The Bible has been, and still remains, the most widely read and revered book of all
For centuries now Christians have claimed to possess the special revelation of an omnipotent, loving Deity who is sovereign over all of His creation. This special revelation is in written form and is what has come to be known as The Bible which consists of two books. The first book is the Hebrew Scriptures, written by prophets in a time that was before Christ, and the second book is the New Testament, which was written by Apostles and disciples of the risen Lord after His ascension. It is well documented that Christians in the context of the early first century were used to viewing a set of writings as being not only authoritative, but divinely inspired. The fact that there were certain books out in the public that were written by followers of Jesus and recognized as being just as authoritative as the Hebrew Scriptures was never under debate. The disagreement between some groups of Christians and Gnostics centered on which exact group of books were divinely inspired and which were not. The debate also took place over the way we can know for sure what God would have us include in a book of divinely inspired writings. This ultimately led to the formation of the Biblical canon in the next centuries. Some may ask, “Isn’t Jesus really the only thing that we can and should call God’s Word?” and “Isn’t the Bible just a man made collection of writings all centered on the same thing, Jesus Christ?” This paper summarizes some of the evidences for the Old and New Testament canon’s accuracy in choosing God breathed, authoritative writings and then reflects on the wide ranging
Summary From the very beginning of the book, Fee and Stuart seek to explain the importance of proper biblical interpretation. The authors provide hermeneutical approaches for the study of the different types of genres found in the Bible.... ... middle of paper ... ... They continue to explain that the prophecies do not need to be fulfilled in a specific way.
The historical reliability of the Bible is the first matter that needs to be discussed. There are three criteria that the military historian C. Sanders lists as principles for documentary historical proof: the bibliographical test, internal evidence test, and the external evidence test (McDowell 43). The bibliographical test is the examination of text from the documents that have reached us. The reliability of the copies of the New Testament is tested by the number of manuscripts (MSS) and the time intervals between the time in which the piece of literature was written and our earliest copy. There are more than 5,300 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament and 10,000 Latin vulgate manuscripts, not to mention the other various translations.
The study of biblical text is bound to raise questions. Did this actually happen? How did these improbable events provide substance for belief systems that have prospered for thousands of years? What were these people thinking? James George Frazer never writes about the bible in his publication, “The Golden Bough,” but his study of thought provides groundwork for anthropologists for years to come.
In this paper, there will be a discussion about the canonization of the New Testament. Along with an investigation into who was involved in this process. The people and institutions looked at will include the following: Marcion, Irenaeus, Origen, Synod of Hippo, and God. First, let us look at the canonization of the New Testament. The first available list of the New Testament books is called the Muratorian Canon and it dates somewhere around A.D. 150.
—. The Unity of the Bible: Exploring the Beauty and Structure of the Bible. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2003.
Thus, an effort is made to highlight how Bible interpretation – through its publication – has developed in the history of Christianity.
Answering these questions is the purpose of this essay. I begin by arguing that the Bible cannot be adequately understood independent of its historical context. I concede later that historical context alone however is insufficient, for the Bible is a living-breathing document as relevant to us today as it was the day it was scribed. I conclude we need both testimonies of God at work to fully appreciate how the Bible speaks to us.