Who told men what to write in the Bible?

Answer 1

Conservative Christians believe that The Bible was written by men, but that they were told exactly what to say by God, and therefore the Bible is absolutely and literally true in every respect. A variation on this is that the Holy Spirit told the authors of the New Testament exactly what to write. A motif of medieval art is an apostle writing carefully, with a white dove whispering in his ear. The white dove is meant to be the Holy Spirit.

Other Christians accept that the Bible does contain errors and contradictions, and believe that it was written by the men who are represented as the authors; these men did their best to represent God's wishes but could make mistakes.

Scholars say that very little of the Bible was really written by the men traditionally considered to have written the various books. They say that each book went through a long process of addition, editing and redaction before it was in the form we know today.

It should also be noted that the Bible was not written as a single book - rather it is a collection of many different texts which were accepted by some church leaders as being inspired. Many of the decisions on which books to include and which to exclude were based on politics and whether the most powerful church leaders of the time agreed with the doctrines taught in the book - they included texts that supported their opinions and excluded books that did not. You may notice that not all bibles include all the same books; some editions include the books known as the Apocrypha, while others do not.

Ideally we would wish that what we have in the Bible was an accurate translation of the original texts and that the original texts were written down as a result of revelations to the writers, or at least under the influence of the Holy Ghost. Unfortunately, as the first poster alluded to, what we have now is a collection of texts that have undergone multiple translations, transcriptions, edits, redactions and additions - NOT the original.

It is also possible that the poster of the original question meant to ask more along the lines of "Who told men which texts to include in the Bible". That is slightly more complex, but has two answers - choose which one you prefer:

1) the church leaders during the dark ages were given revelations on which books were inspired

2) the church leaders during the dark ages selected their best guesses on which books were inspired, subject to their own biases, agendas, and political expediency.

To be honest, the latter scenario is overwhelmingly easier to support.