Actual Historians Answer Questions About The Bible

Redditor u/hey_its_ralph asked:

Does an original text of the Bible exist, or what's the oldest known religious text in existence?

Redditor u/imayid_291 answered:

The oldest physical copy of any of the Bible are two scrolls which are dated to about 650 BCE. They were found in a burial chamber in the Ketef Hinnom archeological site in the Jerusalem area. They contain the Priestly Blessing found in Numbers 6:22-27.

The next oldest physical texts of the Bible are the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest of which date to 200 BCE. The over 900 documents include fragments of every book in the Hebrew Bible except Esther. The texts include a scroll that contains the complete book of Isaiah (apart from some portions that are too damaged to read).

Redditor u/Isatis_tinctoria asked:

Was the historical text of the Bible really written in Aramaic originally or was it originally written in the Koine Greek?

Redditor u/Philip_Schwartzerdt answered:

Most of the Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew, though parts were written in Aramaic, another Semitic language common across the Ancient Near East at the time. The most notable parts are portions of Daniel and Ezra, with suggestions of Aramaic influence in a few isolated verses elsewhere.

The extant New Testament texts are Koine, and I would judge that the majority scholarly consensus is that this represents the form of original composition. Koine was well established as a common trade language in the eastern Roman Empire by the 1st century [CE], and the Old Testament Septuagint text was a century or two old already.

In Palestine, Aramaic may have been the everyday language, but for the Jewish populations in other cities, Greek would easily be the daily language. There are minority views that some of the NT may have been written in Aramaic, and a few early Patristic suggestions that the gospel of Matthew in particular may have been written in Hebrew or Aramaic; there is certainly a Semitic linguistic feature in New Testament Koine, but in my opinion the manuscript evidence just isn't there to tenably support fully Hebrew/Aramaic originals.

It's more plausible that there may have been early written sources in Aramaic like the hypothesized Q source, or a collection of Jesus's sayings without the kind of narrative structure of the four canonical books.

So basically, some early sources might have been Aramaic, and many of the events narrated in the Gospels occurred in Aramaic, but I don't see much support for the actual NT texts being composed in anything but Koine.

Redditor u/LateNightPhilosopher asked:

In the Bible, Jesus's first miracle was famously to turn water into wine. What kind of wine could typically be found in Roman Judea and, assuming Jesus was a skilled amateur vintner for his era, would the wine be considered "good" by modern standards?

Redditor u/chitoryu12 answered:

Unfortunately it's extremely difficult for modern historians to really figure out what ancient wine was like. While the general process of making Roman wine is very similar to how it's made today (apart from the storage containers not including stuff like stainless steel and concrete tanks), the grape varieties themselves have mutated immensely over the millennia.

Even if you made the wine exactly like the Romans did, it wouldn't necessarily taste the same. And just like today, a lot of writing on wine wasn't very detailed about the taste! Most people were fine with just judging it as "good" or "bad" or making generic descriptions of sweetness or bitterness instead of waxing poetic about the flavor of strawberries, fig jam, soil, walnuts, etc.

What we do know is that the Romans had a lot of different varieties of wine, probably at least as many as there are in former Roman territory now. They differentiated by place rather than grapes, so wine would be labeled as coming from Pompeii or Rhodus and have a particular reputation. Wine was an everyday drink in the Mediterranean rather than a luxury, so it was produced everywhere that grapes could be grown and often consumed locally shortly after production was finished. Red, white, and rose wines were known and produced in much the same way as they are today, but they didn't have the same strict classifications, so we can only guess from descriptions of the color and flavor.

All of these varieties of wine were written about. Gaul produced a sweet, brownish-red wine that was said to give a nasty hangover. Turricuar was described in a way that suggests a dry white wine. The most prized wine was Falernian, an expensive white wine from near modern Naples that could be aged and oxidized until it turned brown. It was a rich, sweet, intensely flavored dessert wine drunk by emperors and the wealthy. As you can probably guess, a lot of unscrupulous people made and sold fake Falernian for much cheaper.

The Romans did a lot to adulterate their wine, both good and bad. At a minimum it was watered down; drinking undiluted wine was considered barbaric. Wine was commonly drunk throughout the day in a 3:1 ratio of water to wine, which creates a drink that looks very much like wine but tastes like water with a faint wine aftertaste.

For the good, wine was often mixed with honey and spices. Conditum paradoxum was made by steeping honey, pepper, mastic, laurel, saffron, dates, and date seeds in wine to create a sweet and elaborately flavored drink. For the bad, wine was preserved or flavored with ingredients that ranged from the unusual (seawater and medicinal herbs like vervain) to the disgusting and potentially dangerous (marble dust, pig's blood, and lead).

Because of the lack of modern preservation techniques like refrigeration and the warm Mediterranean climate, wine tended to go bad relatively quickly, and anything not carefully aged like Falernian would have to be drunk quickly to avoid it turning vinegary...

When wine finally soured into something like vinegar, you could mix it with water to create a drink called posca. This was the extremely cheap beverage of the poor and Roman soldiers; the sour wine given to Jesus on the cross was actually a soldier giving his posca ration to a dying man.

Redditor u/Vladith asked:

When and why was the Gospel of Thomas excluded from the Biblical canon?

Redditor u/grantimatter answered:

The question appears to be based on a slightly mistaken assumption. The creation of the canon wasn't so much a "when" (it happened kind of gradually, and technically, there are a few different canons to this day) and wasn't exactly based on exclusion as much as inclusion.

As in, a bunch of guys getting together and going, "OK, there's this one... can we all agree this book counts?"

Rewind a little. The earliest Christian canon is the (slightly loopy) Marcionite Canon, which dates back to the second century [CE]. Marcion was later denounced as a heretic, and only accepted the Gospel of Luke as truly inspired, along with 10 epistles of Paul (in shorter forms than we know them today, and with slightly different words, or, in a couple cases, epistles that aren't in Bibles today).

He was one of the (small-g) gnostic teachers who thought the God described in the Old Testament was some kind of Demiurge or not-quite-supreme-or-good-God.

At the same time Marcion was around, and in the next couple of centuries, there were other writings that other groups accepted as useful, inspired, and accurate, and those (through a long and convoluted process) were eventually accepted as a Christian canon... for the most part.

I believe [Iranaeus] nailed down four gospels as the proper number based on, essentially, Greek numerology - four elements, four cardinal directions, four winds, [so] it's only proper there be four gospels.

During the reign of Constantine (around 300 CE), [Iranaeus] hammered out the Bible more or less as we know it today. Catholicism didn't really officially declare a canon until the Council of Trent 1,200 years later, and no, that's not a typo. Twelve centuries. 

Anyway, the Gospel of Thomas appears to have not been widely useful to early churches. It's not a story the same way the other gospels are (even the ones that didn't make the 4th century cut, like the similarly named Infancy Gospel of Thomas) - only a bunch of stuff that Jesus actually said in his own words, ostensibly.

It only seemed to really have legs among monastic and mystic communities: it was esteemed by the Manicheans (who were also small-g gnostics from Persia), and used in the Syriac Christian communities and in North Africa.

Mani and his followers turned out not to be the route to international renown - though incredibly popular for a while, that faith eventually dwindled and was stamped out.

For ages, the only copies of Thomas that survived came from a few fragments found in a heap of other writings from Oxyrhynchus, until in 1947 when a Coptic-language text was found in Nag Hammadi. Both of those are Egyptian locations.

The format definitely reads more like a guide for meditation or contemplation than a story about a guy who did some amazing things. There are no miracles, no crucifixion, no resurrection, no nativity. Just ways of looking at the world and other people in it.

A former Redditor asked:

What's the best evidence that Jesus did or did not historically exist?

Redditor u/talondearg answered:

Pliny the Younger, writing in 112 CE, letter 10, discusses the issue of Christians gathering together, illegally. He knows a few facts about early Christian practice, and so by the early second century we know that Christians exist and believe in a Christ figure.

Suetonius, 115 CE, in his Lives of the Caesars, discussing Claudius (41-54), mentions the deportations of Jews after riots “on the instigation of Chrestus.” There is a possibility that he means a Jew named Chrestus, a not uncommon name, but more likely this is a common misspelling for Christus. At best, Suetonius supports that Christians were living in Rome in the 50s CE.

Tacitus, in his Annales (15.44) written in 115, covers history from 14-68 CE. He treats the fire in Rome under Nero in 64 CE, and discusses Nero’s blaming of the Christians. He mentions:

The author of this name, Christ, was put to death by the procurator, Pontius Pilate, while Tiberius was emperor; but the dangerous superstition, though suppressed for the moment, broke out again not only in Judea, the origin of this evil, but even in the city.

Josephus [was] a Jewish aristocrat and military leader. He makes two references to Jesus. One in Antiquities book 20, referring to the death of James, the brother of Jesus (Antiquities 20.9.1). The other passage is known as the Testimonium Flavianum, in Antiquities 18.3.3. This passage refers to Jesus as a miracle worker, a leader of Jews and Greeks, the messiah, condemned by Pilate to the cross, appearing alive on the third day, and his followers continue until the present. 

[And then there are the] Christian sources. So we have Mark, written around 70 CE, then we have Matthew and Luke, based in large degree upon Mark, written probably in the 80-85 period. Plus you have John written in the 90s CE, an independent source from the other canonical gospels.

There are also non-canonical gospels written after John, some of which show independence from the canonical gospels. For example, Thomas, dated to 110-120 CE. Thomas is primarily a collection of sayings, not a narrative text. Similarly, the fragmentary Gospel of Peter. [Historian] Bart Ehrman also likes to highlight Papyrus Egerton 2 as a non-parallel independent account.

So, to conclude, there is a considerable amount of documentary evidence to support the supposition that Jesus existed as a historical human being.

Redditor u/ChoosingANameSucks asked:

Who actually wrote the Bible?

Redditor u/Integralds answered:

The Bible is a collection of 66 separate books (depending on your tradition). Each of those books have their own writer or writers, and these books were written over a period of about a thousand years, from circa 900 BCE to 150 CE.

The first four books of the Bible are amalgamations of at least three prior documents; these documents were written between 900 BCE and 550 BCE. (See, in particular, the Documentary Hypothesis; lecture notes on the subject abound.) The next seven books, Deuteronomy through II Kings, were likely written by a single school of scholars and completed by 450 BCE (the relevant term is the Deuteronomistic History and the citation is typically given to Martin Noth). The books from Genesis through Deuteronomy were perhaps finalized and circulated together in the 400s; later dates are also admissible.

The various prophetic books are too numerous to be given quick summary. To take two examples, the book of Amos is an authentically old document, most of the book dating from the 700s BCE; the book of Daniel was written comparatively late, in the 160s BCE. Each book has its own history and can be placed in its own part of the social context of ancient Israel.

The four New Testament Gospels were likely written between 50 CE and 90 CE. Seven of the letters attributed to Paul are authentic and date from the 50s CE; the rest were written in the second half of the first century. The rest of the letters were probably not written by their supposed authors. However, all of the documents in the New Testament with the possible exception of II Peter were likely written before 120 CE.