The earliest portions of the Old Testament are held to date from the tenth or eleventh century BCE, while the latest (the book of Daniel), comes from the Maccabean period of the second century BCE. The time-span for the New Testament is much shorter. The earliest of Paul’s letters stems frok C.50 CE; the majority of the rest of the texts certainly fall within the first century.
The biblical texts were produced over a period in which the living conditions of the writers — political, cultural, economic, and ecological — varied enormously. There are texts which reflect a nomadic existence, texts from people with an established monarchy and Temple cult, texts from exile, texts born out of fierce oppression by foreign rulers, courtly texts, texts from wandering charismatic preachers, texts from those who give themselves the airs of sophisticated Hellenistic writers. It is a time-span which encompasses the compositions of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Sophocles, Caesar, Cicero, and Catallus. It is a period which sees the rise and fall of the Assyrian empire and of the Persian empire, Alexander’s campaigns, the rise of Rome and its domination of the Mediterranean, the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, and the extension of Roman rule to parts of Scotland.
One thing that these texts, so widely separated in time, do have in common is their location in a culture in which writing was highly valued, even if its practice was still largely in the hands of specialists. The period of the composition of the earliest biblical texts broadly corresponds with the advance from cuneiform writing to the use of an alphabet. In cuneiform writing, words are represented by signs incised into clay tablets by a wedge-shaped instrument. In the earliest alphabets, which originate with the Phoenicians, consonants are inscribed in ink on papyrus or some such suitable material. This was both more flexible and more portable. Above all, it made it possible to produce much longer texts. Texts in the new alphabet could be written on scrolls, which were usually made of leather and could encompass all the 66 chapters of Isaiah. The later development of the codex (roughly corresponding to today’s book format) made for greater ease of reference and portability. A codex would permit the inclusion of all four Gospels within the same covers. Its use as a medium for literary texts, pioneered by the early Christians, dates from the first century CE. It became standard from about the fourth century.
The development of new techniques of recording language was one of the most remarkable technological features of this time, comparable in importance to the development of the printing press in the sixteenth century, which made possible the rapid spread of Reformation ideas. However, for the most part culture during the biblical period remained oral. That is to say, written texts were mostly communicated by being read aloud: the majority of those who received the texts would have heard rather than read them.
Moreover, most of the material we now have in written form, whether legal, prophetic, proverbial, poetic, or narrative, will have started out in oral form and only subsequently been committed to writing. So, for example, prophetic oracles were delivered orally by the prophet, committed to memory by the prophet’s disciples, and then later written down.
Thus throughout the period of the composition of the Bible orality and literacy are clsoely interrelated. This is reflected in the fact that there are different degrees of literateness among the texts: some come from circles where there is a high degree of proficiency in the composing of written texts, while others are much closer to the oral recitation of narratives and discourses. This can be easily illustrated from the Gospels: Mark’s Gospel is generally agreed to be the earliest of the four and is also the least literate, both in the roughness of its Greek style and in the closeness of its contents to the oral tradition of stories and sayings about Jesus. Luke, by contrast, tells us quite clearly that he is writing as a Greek historian who has sifted his sources carefully and is writing a reliable, literary account. His style is noticeably literary, echoing the particular character of the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures.
So what was the actual process of composition of the biblical texts within this overall context of literacy and orality?
One needs to bear in mind that the biblical writers would have approached their task in a very different way from, say, a modern novelist. The novelist is to a large measure in control of her material, creating a literary whole from her imagination and experience, drawing on literary allusions and traditions as she will. By contrast, the ancient writers of religious texts are much more constrained by the deposits of the past, whether oral or literary. They are as much compilers as they are makers of texts.
In the Bible, we have two or more versions of the same story, which use different terminology for no less important character than God, and which contain a considerable measure of inconsistency over the order of creation, over men and women’s relation to it, and indeed over the question of man and woman’s relation to each other. What are we to make of all this? The consensus of scholarship is that the stories are taken from four different written sources and that these were brought together over the course of time to form the first five books of the Bible as a composite work. The sources are known as the Jahwist source, the Elohist source, the Priestly source, and the Deuteronomist source.
It is not only the books of the Old Testament which have their origins in a variety of oral and literary traditions. The same is true of the Gospels. The Gospels represent four tellings of Jesus’s life, death and resurrection, with interesting differences of perspective and detail, though also with considerable agreement. In the case of the first three, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the agreements are remarkable. It is not just that they agree about the order of many events and in much of the detail of what occurred. It is even more that they agree, in the case of individual sections, in the overall literary structure of the narrative, and in sentence structure, choice of words, and grammatical forms. These linguistic agreements are so striking that they almost force one to the conclusion that there is literary dependence of one kind or another. That is to say, someone has been copying someone else.
What one can say with some confidence though is that it is likely that stories and sayings about Jesus circulated in varying oral forms before they were written down. The Gospels, like the Hebrew Bible, have their roots in an oral culture. Nevertheless, while they resemble the Hebrew Bible in that respect, there is also an impressive rush to literacy in the Gospels. Four major literary accounts of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus within a period of around forty years is a remarkable achievement. It is a clear indication of the growing importance of literary production in all levels of society in the first-century Mediterranean world. It is also indicative of the early Christians’ desire to be part of that society, despite their beliefs in an imminent and dramatic end to the world as they knew it.
That is to say, many of the books of the Bible are not the work of one author, written over a period of a few years; rather they are compilations which reflect communal traditions which may go back many centuries. Even in the case of the New Testament, where admittedly there is a much greater preponderance of works written by a single author, the Gospels are still in an important sense communal productions, which preserve the traditions of the earliest Christians.
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The above excerpts are taken from John Riches’s book The Bible: A Very Short Introduction. This series of Very Short Introductions is published by Oxford University Press.
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