The Bible, History, & Software

One of the first discoveries made by scholars employing modern critical techniques to the study of the Bible is that many of the books in the Bible have more than one author even when traditional assigns just one author to them.  A recent Associated Press article by Matti Friedman entitled, "Bible's authors distinguished by language software," reports on the exploratory research of a team of Israeli scholars applying a computer recognition program to identify different authors of the Old Testament.  The purpose of the project was primarily to experiment with the software, but the researchers claim to have duplicated much of the findings of Old Testament scholars concerning the multiple authorship of books of the Old Testament.  Basically, what the paper (here) presented by the research team shows is that the team is developing a method for analyzing biblical authorship that might prove significant in the future, sooner or later.

If, as seems likely, this team's approach or some other yet to be developed does prove successful in analyzing biblical authorship, it will be but one more step in expanding our understanding of the Bible as a set of historical documents.  We may well, for example, gain a still clearer picture of which of the so-called Pauline epistles Paul actually wrote.  Such insights help us to put the books of the Bible into their historical contexts, which contributes to our understanding of the spirituality of the authors and the development of their understanding of God's presence with them.  The better we can understand the development of the Bible the better we can understand how the ancient Hebrews and the first generations of Christians experienced the Presence of God—and the better we can understand God ourselves.

 However we express it in our different ways, we are convinced that God is Present in the development of the Bible just as God is Present in the unfolding of history itself.  It is crucial to our theology of the incarnation that we see the Bible as a historical document that was written by different authors at different times and, therefore, developed over time.   Working on this "stuff," trying to understand it, is a central task of our faith.  It's also a lot of fun to reflect on and try to figure out.  Amen.