When and how were the Old and New Testaments written?

Answer 1

A:The belief common to a large number of Christians is that The Bible was written by divine inspiration. That is clearly not the case, if only because of the extent of debate that was necessary before some books were chosen for inclusion and some were excluded. We could not say that if the vote had been to include a book, then it must have been written by divine inspiration, but because it was excluded, it was merely the writing of a man.

Most who do not study the Bible have been taught that the Pentateuch (The Books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy) was written by Moses during the Exodus from Egypt, around 1400 BCE. Biblical scholars say that they were actually written centuries later and by several authors. The history of the Book of Genesis is the most complex, because there were two separate early traditions, one from Judah and one from Israel, written down by anonymous sources now known as the Yahwist and the Elohist. The two early sources were combined into one document around the seventh century BCE and added to extensively during and after the Babylonian Exile.

The last of the Old Testament books to be written was the Book of Daniel, approximately 167 BCE This and the Book of Esther are considered to have been written originally as novels, before they began to be regarded as genuine history.

Paul wrote his epistles as letters to Christian communities, probably in the forties and fifties of the first century. But not all the epistles attributed to Paul were actually written by him. Scholars are reasonably confident that he wrote seven New Testament letters, while the rest are called pseudo-Pauline epistles, meaning that they were written in his name after his death.

All the New Testament gospels were written anonymously and only attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John later in the second century. Mark's Gospel is believed to have been written approximately 70 CE by an unknown author and may be based, in part, on Paul's epistles. Matthew followed in the 80s and Luke around the turn of the century. A parallel reading of Matthew, Mark and Luke shows that there is a literary dependency among the 'synoptic' gospels, and it has been established that Matthew and Luke were actually copied from Mark, with further sayings material taken from the hypothetical 'Q' document. John is loosely based on Luke, but with some material taken direct from Mark.

Answer 2

Actually no. The Old Testament was written over roughly 1,000 years while the New Testament was written in less than 100. Most probably, the New Testament was written in less than 60 Years, given that the format was mainly letters, and that the Revelation was written by John the Beloved who died when he was 90.