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Authorship of the New Testament


Few biblical books are regarded by scholars as the product of a single individual, and all have been edited to produce the works known today. The following article outlines the conclusions of the majority of contemporary scholars, along with the traditional views, both Jewish and Christian.

The early Church Fathers agreed that the scriptures were inspired or dictated by God, but not on just which writings were scriptural: as a result, the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches treat some books (the Apocrypha) as inspired, but the Protestant tradition does not; there was similar debate over the New Testament, and the canon was not settled until the middle of the fourth century CE. The nature of divine authorship has long been the subject of dispute. Martin Luther claimed that the human authors of scripture received it by divine dictation, as did Pope Leo XIII in the 19th century, but in the 20th century the vast majority of theologians, both Catholic and Protestant, moved away from the divine dictation model and emphasised the role of the human authors. As a result, even many conservative scholars now accept, for example, that the Book of Isaiah has multiple authors and that 2 Corinthians is two letters joined together.

The Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, is the collection of scriptures making up the Bible used by Judaism; the same books, in a slightly different order, also make up the Protestant version of the Old Testament. The order used here follows the divisions used in Jewish Bibles.

The first division of the Jewish Bible is the Torah, meaning "Instruction" or "Law"; in scholarly literature it is frequently called by its Greek name, the Pentateuch ("five scrolls"). It is the group of five books made up of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy and stands first in all versions of the Christian Old Testament.


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