IB World Religions 3.3.2. Composition: from Prophecy to Revelation Notes

3.3.2. Composition: From Prophecy to Revelation

How the books were composed

1. The books of the Bible were composed over a very long span. The Hebrew scriptures took shape across roughly a thousand years, while the New Testament was written within about seventy years of the death of Jesus.
2. Most of the material began as speech. Laws, prophetic oracles, hymns and stories about Jesus circulated by word of mouth before anyone wrote them down.
3. Writing did not end the process. Editors gathered, arranged and sometimes combined earlier material, so a single book can carry the work of several hands separated by centuries.
4. Scholars call the study of this source criticism. Its best known result is the documentary hypothesis, which proposes four strands behind the Pentateuch, labelled J, E, D and P.
5. Christians differ over what such findings mean. Many hold that God worked through the whole human process of composition, while more conservative churches hold that the traditional authors wrote the books largely as they now stand.
6. The order in a printed Bible is not the order of writing. Paul's earliest letter was finished before any Gospel, and the book placed last was not the last to be composed.

Law and the Ten Commandments

1. The Torah, also called the Pentateuch, carries the foundational laws in its five books. It presents them as given through Moses at Sinai after the escape from Egypt.
2. The Ten Commandments appear twice, in Exodus 20 and again in Deuteronomy 5. The wording differs slightly, and the two give different reasons for keeping the sabbath.
3. Jewish tradition counts 613 commandments in the Torah, so the ten function as a summary rather than the whole. They cover worship, sabbath, family, killing, theft, honesty and desire.
4. Christians number the ten in two ways. Catholics and Lutherans fold the ban on images into the first commandment and split coveting in two, while Orthodox, Reformed and Anglican churches keep images as a separate commandment.
5. The Torah holds longer law codes as well, among them the Covenant Code in Exodus and the Holiness Code in Leviticus. Scholars generally place these in different periods and settings.
6. Christians hold that the laws were composed for the covenant with Israel, and read them through the teaching of Jesus, who summarised the whole law as loving God and loving one's neighbour.

The prophets and Isaiah

1. A prophet in the Hebrew scriptures speaks for God, usually to a king or a nation in crisis. The Hebrew nabi means a spokesman rather than a forecaster.
2. The prophets spoke long before they were books. Disciples remembered the oracles, collected them and later arranged them, which is why the books do not run in chronological order.
3. Isaiah is the clearest case of a book with a long composition. Most scholars find three settings in it: chapters 1 to 39 in eighth century Jerusalem, chapters 40 to 55 among exiles in Babylon, and chapters 56 to 66 after the return.
4. Many Christians hold instead that the eighth century prophet wrote the whole book. They point out that the New Testament quotes from every part of it under the single name Isaiah.
5. Christians read particular passages as pointing to Jesus. Chapter 7 speaks of a child called Immanuel, chapter 9 of a son given and named, and chapter 53 of a suffering servant wounded for the sins of others.
6. Other books supply further texts read the same way, including Micah 5:2 on Bethlehem and Psalm 22, which describes a sufferer surrounded by enemies.

The four Gospels

1. Mark is generally held to be the earliest Gospel, written around the year 70. It is the shortest of the four and the most compressed in its telling.
2. Matthew and Luke each use most of Mark, share a further body of sayings that scholars call Q, and each add material found nowhere else.
3. Because those three tell much the same story in much the same order, they are called the Synoptic Gospels, from the Greek for seeing together.
4. Luke opens by explaining his method. He states that many have written accounts, that he has investigated everything carefully, and that he is writing an orderly account for a reader named Theophilus.
5. John stands apart, written probably in the 90s. It replaces parables with long discourses, follows a different chronology, and opens by identifying Jesus as the Word.
6. The differences show in the details. Only Matthew and Luke tell of the birth of Jesus, and they tell it differently, while the oldest manuscripts of Mark end without any appearance of the risen Christ.

Acts and the letters

1. Acts is the second volume of Luke's work and is addressed to the same reader. It carries the story from Pentecost through the spread of the church to Paul's arrival in Rome.
2. Parts of Acts switch into the first person. Many take these we passages as marking an eyewitness source, while others read them as a convention of ancient travel writing.
3. Paul's letters are the oldest Christian writings that survive. 1 Thessalonians is usually dated to about the year 50, some twenty years before the first Gospel.
4. Seven letters are almost universally accepted as Paul's own: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians and Philemon. Ephesians, Colossians and the letters to Timothy and Titus are disputed.
5. The letters are occasional writings, meaning each answers a real situation. 1 Corinthians replies to a letter and to reports of quarrels, and Philemon deals with a single runaway slave.
6. Other letters were gathered alongside them. Hebrews is anonymous, and the letters of James, Peter, John and Jude are called the general epistles because they address no single congregation.

Revelation and apocalyptic writing

1. Revelation takes its name from its opening word, apokalypsis, meaning unveiling. It presents itself as a vision given to John on the island of Patmos.
2. It is usually dated to the 90s, in the reign of Domitian, and it opens by addressing seven named churches in what is now western Turkey.
3. It belongs to a known kind of writing. Apocalyptic literature works through visions, beasts, cosmic upheaval and heavenly guides, and Daniel and parts of Ezekiel are its Jewish forerunners.
4. Its numbers are symbolic within that convention. Seven stands for completeness and twelve for the people of God, and the number of the beast is set out as a riddle for readers who knew the answer.
5. The setting explains much of its tone. It was written for congregations under pressure to honour the emperor, and it works to strengthen them by declaring who really rules.
6. It closes with a vision of a new heaven and a new earth, and a city where God dwells with people. Christians have read that ending in strikingly different ways ever since.