Who wrote the Bible?

Jesus was a woke leftist hippy with a domineering father

Your first reaction to this headline might be who cares who wrote the Bible? It’s ancient fiction and has no relevance in 2024. But this book has heavily influenced the foundations of society and anyone who was raised in a religious house will know that the indoctrination stays with you forever.

I was once a good little catholic boy. Church every Sunday, altar boy, Bible studies and a catholic education. And like many good little catholic boys I rebelled as soon as I could and became an annoying little punk rocker. But the ritual repetition and routines of church are ingrained. I still remember the prayers, the songs, the smells, the constant kneeling, standing and sitting, the body and blood of Christ, and I still occasionally have dreams about St Patricks church in Masterton, New Zealand.

I think I had a good education, St Peter Chanel college was progressive for its time, one of the few Catholic colleges that actually allowed boys and girls to mingle, learn together and play together. We had Marist brothers for teachers, I’m not sure what qualifications they had apart from devout belief in the Almighty. I remember them being friendly, but not too friendly. They had an air of superiority and the long brown robes they wore tied with special rope around the middle gave them an awkward medieval creepiness.

We studied the Bible, but I never thought it was real. It was just too gruesome and fantastic. Bible studies at Chanel was actually quite an interesting class that involved trying to derive some metaphorical meaning from those miraculous stories that could be vaguely relatable to modern life. Trying to read in between the lines of begatting and sacrifice to uncover hidden life lessons. I never found any life lessons in the Bible, unlike millions of people who actually believe exactly what is written, taking every word as literal truth. The Word of the Lord.

From the start of Genesis to the end of Revelation, the pages are filled with meaningless family trees, impossible timelines, unintelligible contradictions and multiple mixed messages. Who actually wrote the Bible? There is much disagreement. Who can be bothered reading it? It’s 773,692 words long, it needs some serious editing.

The Old Testament is the most interesting part of the Bible, and it took a thousand years to write. The book of Proverbs was completed 200 years before Jesus appeared on the scene. The Old Testament was written by about 30 contributors from ancient writer’s groups with wonderfully vague titles like Priestly Sources, Prophetic Circles, Holy Scribes, Babylonian Disciples and even Deuteronomistic layers from the Former Prophets. They were all trying to make sense of those age-old questions. Where did we come from? Why are we here? What happens when we die? What is the point of all this?

The idea of God had already been around for more than a thousand years because someone has to know what’s going on right? And so, trying to interpret Gods intentions and answer those questions, these ancient scholars exercised their creative minds to write stories about Jonah who survived inside a giant fish for three days. Noah apparently lived for 950 years. The seven plagues of Egypt with all those locusts and the waters of the Nile turning to blood. Abraham who was forced to kill his own son as a test of faith, Moses parting the Red Sea, God appearing as a burning bush, poor Job who lost everything after a bored God had a wager with Satan, a talking donkey and the incredibly dodgy story of Lot.

These scribes had some dark thoughts. The Old Testament is rife with incest, murder, violence, vengeance, corruption, beasts from hell, patricide, infanticide, every kind of cide, rape, plagues, decapitations, cannibalism and torture. It’s not as bad as Mel Gibson’s the Passion of Christ, but it’s pretty bad. It should probably be banned.

The ancient scribes had their own agendas going on, passing off their opinions as God’s will. 3000 years ago, Deuteronomy 23:13 didn’t like the fact that the Israelites did poos anywhere they liked: “when you relieve yourself, dig a hole and cover up your excrement. For the Lord your God moves about in your camp to protect you.” Fair enough too, God does not want to step in your poos.

Kings 2:23 tells the story of Elisha who was sensitive about his lack of hair. When some teenagers taunted him about his baldness, he cursed the boys in the name of the Lord. Two bears promptly charged out of the woods and mauled 42 of these cheeky children to death.

Christians would have us believe the New Testament was written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul, taking dictation directly from Jesus. For two thousand years, Christianity has credited the writing of the New Testament to these guys who were close associates of the twelve apostles, recruited to record first-hand memories of Jesus, which they apparently did happily and faithfully, because they were besotted with him.

The first followers of Jesus, his apostles and their recruits were not well educated and did not know how to put pen to paper. Paul was the only one who was literate, but writing was beneath him. Writing and recording were jobs given to slaves. Paul used a scribe named Tertius to write an important letter to the Romans which was 16 chapters long. Tertius included this line, “I, Tertius, wrote this letter” just to make sure everyone knew he was the author. Tertius was a common name for an enslaved person.

As Christianity spread from the Middle East and grew more popular in Rome, there were many Christian preachers who wanted their theories recorded. Only about 10% of Romans were literate, they used slaves who were put to work as writers, recorders and editors. These enslaved ghostwriters were from societies the Romans conquered, traded at slave markets and sold as educated prisoners. These were the people that put the Bible together. They copied the Old Testament and wrote the New Testament. But being enslaved to the Romans, I don’t imagine they would have been very happy in their work.

Slaves were the first interpreters of Christian scripture, enslaved scribes, copiers and editors were used to write the stories and letters that we know as the New Testament. Copying the biblical texts must have been painstakingly long and tedious, there was no way the religious elders or prophets were going to do it. Then the writings were distributed by enslaved couriers around the Mediterranean. This was the only way to spread the word.  

When those texts were read aloud to mostly illiterate gatherings of Christians and potential converts, it was enslaved people doing the readings. They were the faces of the gospel. Christians believed that enslaved people obeyed the will of their masters, mindless mouthpieces, mere vessels with no opinions of their own. But these slaves were educated, stolen from other civilised societies, forced to narrate the terms of their own oppression. Peter 2:18. Slaves, submit yourselves to your masters with all respect, not only to the good and gentle but also to the cruel.”

Slavery was completely normal two thousand years ago and the slaves that wrote the Bible probably made it a better read, and more applicable for the time. The Bible was written and distributed by slaves, and it was mostly for the slaves. Jesus told them to have faith, he gave them hope. Despite all the conflicting messages, Jesus was a champion of the poor, weak and downtrodden. Jesus didn’t like rich people much, he banned them from heaven. “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” Matthew 19:23-24

I guess you get an absurd uneditable mess when you have so many authors, so many agenda’s and so many interpretations of God and his Son, then multiple rewrites for the next two thousand years. Slavery is an integral part of the Bible, and its shadow haunts the Church of England who is currently trying to create a £1 billion fund to address the legacy of its involvement in the Atlantic slave trade.

The fact that the Bible was written by slaves doesn’t really change anything, we all know it’s the most famous work of fiction. But it does undermine the God bothering fundamentalists who insist it’s the word of the Lord. Religions have shaped our society, caused so many wars, death, destruction, persecution, pain and inequality. And the Christian faith has been one of the worst. Modern right-wing politics is closely aligned with Christianity due to their family first doctrine that is anti-women, anti-abortion, anti-homosexual and anti-trans. They think global warming is God’s plan. Republicans love the Old Testament because God is not unlike Donald Trump. Vengeful, arrogant, and demented.

Two thousand years ago, Christianity was for the lowborn, the uneducated, the marginalized and the slaves. The downtrodden were the core of the Christian mission, these were the people that Jesus represented, that was the whole point. If he was real, Jesus would have been a woke leftist hippy with a domineering father. The main message that I remember from all the Bible studies, all the proverbs, scriptures, teachings and sermons, the only message that made sense, basically boiled down to Don’t be an Asshole. It’s a worthy message, and you don’t have to read the Bible to understand it.