| Question Title | Posted By | Question Date |
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| RE: Did God issue a command to write scripture | mariella | Tuesday, September 14, 2004 |
Question: Dear Brother, I have a question regarding the last statement you made in the last post. Now i am not good in our history but i would like to know when did they first started writing the bible. I think that it all started really in a written anyway when God wrote his comendements in the stones. From there they decided to write it and not just keep it oraly. I am i right in my history? What are the oldest document found and what year are they? Mariella Thank you. |
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| Question Answered by Bro. Ignatius Mary, OLSM+
Dear Mariella: Biblical scholars continue to argue somewhat about which books were written by who. Certainly at the time of Christ Moses was credited with writing the Pentateuch. Biblical research is not quite so certain, however, that Moses wrote the Pentateuch. Nevertheless, to answer your question, the Old Testament writings began with the Pentateuch. Assuming Moses was the author of at least some of the books that would date the writings to the 13th Century B.C. One could say the Ten Commandments written on stone was the first written "Scripture". The New Testament writings began around A.D. 40s-50s and continued perhaps to around A.D. 90s. The subject of extant manuscripts is another matter. We do not have the original autographs, but we do have reliable and verified ancient copies. Of the Old Testament extant manuscripts the oldest I believe is are two fragments on silver foil sheet found in the tomb of Ketef Hinnom circa 600 B.C. These fragments inscribe Numbers 6:24-26: YHWH bless you The next earliest grouping of biblical texts are the 250 B.C. - A.D. 70 Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in 1947 near Khirbet Qumran in Israel. Of approximately 825 extant documents, only one was complete. They contain sections of every Old Testament book except Esther and include more than 600 non-biblical texts. The scrolls reflect both the Masoretic and the Septuagint textual traditions. Probably the two most important texts are the extant to the 10th and 11th Century A.D.: Masoretic Hebrew texts and the Septuagint text. Of New Testament extant manuscripts, the earliest go all the way back to around A.D. 130, though most are probably extant to the 3rd and 4th centuries. In any regard, this is remarkable. There is no other writing of antiquity where the copies are so close to the originals. Even standards that we think nothing about, like Plato, the extant copies of Plato are 1200 years after Plato's death. For the New Testament it is mere decades giving the New Testament an unheard of historical and documentary veracity. God Bless, |
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