Who wrote the Bible?

It was not written by a single author, it is a collective creation. “The Bible is a set of books written by varied and often unknown authors. Several books are the result of a collective production over time”, says religion scientist João Décio Passos, from PUC-SP. Experts estimate that the production and assembly of all the texts that make up the Bible took place over a period of more than a thousand years, starting probably around the 10th century BC and extending to the 2nd century of the Christian era. The thing complicates once and for all, and generates controversy among historians, when trying to identify precisely who was responsible for certain parts of the sacred work. One of the major problems is that until the 2nd century AD it was quite common to wrongly attribute the authorship of various texts to biblical characters or to Jesus’ apostles.

There is already strong evidence, for example, that a part of Paul’s Letters was not really written by this important follower of Christ, but by writers still completely unknown. Regardless of who the authors of the various books that make up the Bible were, for the Judeo-Christian tradition the work, more than a human work, is mainly the result of divine inspiration. “It is believed that these texts are not only the result of the creative activity of those who wrote them, but also of an action of God, as the Catholic tradition still preaches today. The books of the Bible were written by men, but they are the result of a divine revelation”, says monk Dom João Evangelista Kovas, from the Monastery of São Bento, in São Paulo. It is important to remember that much of the content of the Bible is made up of texts that are considered sacred not only for Catholic and Protestant Christians but also for Jews.