[Miracle Day]

Here's just two wild examples so you can understand the question better.

1. one man had a vivid imagination, wrote it, buried it and then the book was found a year later..

2. It's strange. But yet I can't comprehend a group of men deciding to write it to control the lower class, or any other simular theory. I just can't see how they could have pulled off such a mammoth task in those days.

What do you think?

Personally I can't comprehend the idea that it was just a random novel, created by fiction as the task in itself is huge, especially in those times.


Edit: alot of people on this thread have been posting saying something along the lines of "the same as every book, one man sat down and wrote a fiction novel, which became revered" etc..

But my personal thoughts on this..

Could one man, or even a group, in those days create such a masterpiece. Having crafted each sentence, having stories intertwine and more importantly.. why would one spend so long (and it must have taken years to create the bible) to create it, with no certainty that it would become what it did.

There's also some documents in History to show that Jesus did exists, which in itself shows the Bible isn't complete randomness.

[Skarm]

Same way every other religious book was written. And there are a lot of them.

[sexbo]

With a pen.

[v2p]

(Original post by sexbo)
With a pen.

Don't think they had pens back in those days

[f1mad]

(Original post by sexbo)
With a pen.

. They didn't exist back then .

[v-zero]

Same way all works of fiction are produced.

[Bellissima]

i think the stories were passed on by mouth... like chinese whispers and folk tales.. and these all kind of amalgamated for the OT.. then people started writing down the gospels of the NT (and those that were excluded) and paul his letters etc.
then the church collected different stories.. the OT was already there.. then they chose the gospels they liked that fitted in with their ideals

that's just a guess, i don't know.. i'm not an atheist, per say, but im not religious, i don't like the bible or religion in general really... i don't need it and although i can see a lot of good that has come from it i can also see a lot of bad...

[Alpharius]

Look up the documentary hypothesis.

At least 6 authors wrote the Old Testament. Moses wasn't one of them (if he existed at all).

[DorianGrayism]

(Original post by Miracle Day)
For example, one man had a vivid imagination, wrote it, buried it and then the book was found a year later..

It's strange. But yet I can't comprehend a group of men deciding to write it to control the lower class, or any other simular theory. I just can't see how they could have pulled off such a mammoth task in those days.

So yes, answer the title.

No one says that a group of men decided to control society and then wrote the Bible.

The Bible was compiled over a very long period of time by various people with differing intentions.

To be honest, the entire post is a bit stupid.

[Dalek1099]

A group wrote their ideas down in a book and buried ti so that hopefully some people would find it and understand their beliefs unlike people at the time it was written,who would regard them as heretics.Then the bible is found and thought to be an amazing discovery that must have been created with gods help.

[Stevo112]

I wrote the bible at 3am after a a particularly long session on the ale

[Mad Cat Lady]

The old testament was compiled by umm.. I think it was emperor constantine who took a bunch of stories written by roman scholars and took out the ones he liked the most and made them into a book.

The new testament was written a long time after Jesus' apparent death so its unlikely the accounts of his life were written by people alive during his lifetime, but thats all i really know. I don't know how or why the old and new testament were put together into one book either, but my guess is that its all written as a fictional story by many different people, its at least known that the old testament was.

[JordanR]

Have you ever tried to piece together a drunken night with your friends the next day? Then you understand how the Gospels were written.



In all seriousness though, they were written by numerous people over the course of hundreds and hundreds of years suffering many many revisions to the point where we don't really know what the original intention was. The genesis creation myth was also stolen from the babylonians essentially: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En%C3%BBma_Eli%C5%A1

[sexbo]

(Original post by v2p)
Don't think they had pens back in those days

(Original post by f1mad)
. They didn't exist back then .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pen#History

[f1mad]

(Original post by sexbo)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pen#History

I thought you were referring to a conventional pen lol.

You learn new things everyday I guess .

[Bellissima]

(Original post by DorianGrayism)
No one says that a group of men decided to control society and then wrote the Bible.

The Bible was compiled over a very long period of time by various people with differing intentions.

To be honest, the entire post is a bit stupid.

why is it stupid... it is quite an interesting question... the origins of the bible and how it came together and how it came to be so important for so many people.

[karateworm]

Uniformed opinions are pointless - there's a massive body of work on the creation of the bible. It's not some unknown mystery.

This video is very interesting.





^Especially this one, got to around 4:00.

[DorianGrayism]

(Original post by Bellissima)
why is it stupid... it is quite an interesting question... the origins of the bible and how it came together and how it came to be so important for so many people.

I don't have a problem with that question.

I just think it is stupid that he has written things like "For example, one man had a vivid imagination, wrote it, buried it and then the book was found a year later.." or "I can't comprehend a group of men deciding to write it to control the lower class" when obviously that is not the case or no Atheist uses that as an explanation for the Bible's origins.

[Darth Stewie]

generally the consensus for the old testament is that it was wrote by a number of different authors. The Pentateuch is thought to have been by at least 5 anonymous authors.

Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings have an almost identical style to Deuteronomy which has lead to the assumption they all had the same author(s). Chronicles was written by an unknown author. Psalms, Ecclesiastes and Daniel are thought to be wrote by again unknown authors who each lived a few hundred years after Solomon and David and Daniel.

Isiah is a tricky one, for the first part it seems Isaiah himself was involved but for the second part it is widely considered to be an anonymous author who lived about a century after Isaiah.

Proverbs is by a number of authors, all anonymous.

A constant theme seems to be each book being wrote a long period of time after the alleged events for each transpired which is not that uncommon in mythology as stories passed by word of mouth tend to get exaggerated over periods of time until someone finally decides to write it all down but by that point the story is usually very different to the reality.

[sexbo]

(Original post by f1mad)
I thought you were referring to a conventional pen lol.

You learn new things everyday I guess .

No, no I was really referring to one of these



You see they had already developed the synthetic organic chemistry skills to create the plastic casing and the fine tolerance machine tooling to construct the tungsten carbide ball back when the bible was written. The book wasn't even the first method of spreading the word. Way before they wrote the book they had a website detailing God's word for all to download.