From: pharvey@quack.sac.ca.us (Paul Harvey)
Subject: Re: Who wrote the bible?
Organization: The Duck Pond public unix: +1 408 249 9630, log in as 'guest'.
	<BxvqEK.IFL@cantua.canterbury.ac.nz>
Date: 18 Nov 1992 06:11:17 UTC

In article <BxvqEK.IFL@cantua.canterbury.ac.nz> 
jsv@math.canterbury.ac.nz (Julian Visch) writes:
>With Richard Pitts example 
>>Often in the Books of Moses (Gen - Deut) we see where it is recorded that God
>>told Moses to write that down.
>I have to ask if writing was even around at that time. 

Ah, what time? The time of Moses? Well, Moses is probably a mythical
figure.

>If there was then in what language was he writing?  

Ah, Hebrew is one of the Semitic languages, it is the language of the
Hebrew or Jewish tribe. You know of Mesopotamia, right? That's the
valley of the Tigris and Euphrates in Iraq and is one of the three
centers of Neolithic development, a period that began about 12,000 years
ago when humans began to domesticate plants and animals. In the valley
you had agricultural people who were growing wheat and barley under
irrigation. These people were subject to frequent invasion by nomadic
herders from the south and north. A tribe from the north was the
Caucasions from the region of the Caucasus Mountains. This tribe was
mistakenly thought to be Europeans, hence the use of the term for
Europeans today. From the south came the Semites, among them the
Hebrews. So, the Hebrew tribe was there from the beginning of the
Neolithic. The Hebrew religion began as an oral tradition and later a
written language of phonetic type, (phonetic written language is
attributed to the Phoenicians, another Semitic tribe of mariners from
the E. Mediterranean), as opposed to the symbolic written languages of
Mesopotamia (Cuneiform) and Egypt (Hieroglyphics).

>And how many times had it been translated/copied before
>it reached the Bible that we know today?

Ah, what Bible do we know today? The Hebrew Masoretic Text is a
compilation of the best fragments of written Hebrew that we have or had.
Written text may have been lost when the library of Alexandria was
burned and the Christians enjoyed burning books, particulary Hebrew
books, so very little has survived intact. Around 1950 ancient texts
were found in caves at Qumran and these appear to authenticate the
Masora, but info on these texts is still leaking out.

>When was the Bible actually written?

Who knows? Judaism was first an oral tradition and was later written
down by scribes probably to train new priests. The Christian Scriptures?
Well, Jesus and the people of his time spoke Aramaic and used the
Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures. Who wrote
the Christian Greek scriptures? Who knows? Maybe Paul did. Note: We do
not have a record of what Jesus actually said in Aramaic. Jesus was a
flop amongst the Hellenistic Jews. It remained for Paul to sell his
history of Jesus to the Greek Gentiles and it was there that
Christianity took off.

>And who by? How did the person who wrote it collect all the stories? 
>How is it possible that anyone could have wrote the story of Adam & Eve in the 
>first place and in the second place isn't it now fairly certain that we 
>evolved from apes. 

1) We share a common ancestor with the apes. 2) The Bible stories are
myth, like the Persian Epic of Gilgamesh, the Indian Mahabharata, the
Greek Homeric Epic and others. One can learn from dogma, but one should
never become dogmatic. My doG is always barking, but doesn't he remind
you of Toto?

>Thirdly we could not have originated solely from Adam & Eve as there
>would have been too small a gene pool. 
>Forthly if we did then their children must
>have had to copulate with each other to have children which 
>I believe is against the teaching of your god.

Yes, that's because the Bible is a myth. Myth is based on history but is
never constrained by the facts of history. Myth attempts to answer the
questions that cannot be answered, that which is transcendent.
Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc