Witness/insight claims of the authors of the Bible

[emjay]

I'm curious about the implicit, base claims of the authors of the Bible. I'm not talking about the content... because anyone can write content... but rather the implicit or explicit claims to knowledge that authorship implies. For instance, most if not all books in the Bible are in the form of a third person narrative rather than a first person eye-witness account; and as such appear to implicitly claim 'such and such happened but I wasn't there to see it directly'... eg the story of the Garden of Eden. In the case of the Gospel authors it may be the case that they claim to be eye-witnesses to some of it, but it can't be all unless they were all with Jesus at every moment, which they clearly were not.

1. So from a reductionistic point of view, for each book of the Bible, I'd like to know:
a) who was the author (if it's possible to know)?
b) what was their implicit, or ideally explicit, claim about the source of the information they are relating? (ie eye-witness, second-hand testimony, or from God; and if so in what form? eg 'inspiration', vision, dream etc)

2. And these questions then extend further up the tree to those who compiled the Bible; considering the Bible a compilation, the 'author/s' is/are the compiler/s of that compilation. So again:
a) Who were the author(s) (if it's possible to know... I think it was the Catholics but I'm not sure)
b) what was their implicit, or ideally explicit, claim about the source of inspiration about which books should be included or not? (ie did they claim divine inspiration or not, and if so in what form did it take? intuition, vision, in the case of Catholics, Papal Infallibility etc)

[brewer]

You're time might be better spent eating shrooms.

[emjay]

You're time might be better spent eating shrooms.

Maybe. Never had one though... but always wanted to try

Seriously though, I think it is better for me to look at it from this reductionistic perspective. That's how I think about everything else so why should it not equally be applied to the Bible? In other words deal with the base assumptions/claims first, before moving on to the content... otherwise it's putting the cart before the horse.

[brewer]

A mind is a terrible thing to waste,.........










unless you do it right.

[emjay]

A mind is a terrible thing to waste,.........










unless you do it right.

Yeah. But basically I'll always have doubts about all of this, and concentrating on the content seems the wrong approach to dealing with them. Instead better to work from the very root upwards... if the root does not hold water (that's quite a nice pun ) then nothing good can grow from it

[The Grand Nudger]

An attribution of genesis is impossible without reference to content.  We can't know the name or names of the people who came up with that gem, the content of the story, however, speaks volumes about them.  The same is true of every book in the bible.  Understanding the content (and I sure as hell don't mean that the way the faithful mean it, lol) is the only way to approach the who and why of the originators.  For another example, the "prophetic" books of the OT are gibberish if we take the content to be an attempt at prophecy in the religious sense.  As social commentary of then-current political realities, or the ideological affiliations of the author, they're immensely informative.

The narratives do hold water, it's just not the water that the religious think they're trucking (nor is it the water that many atheists, responding explicitly to religious claims, are objecting to). /2cents

[robvalue]

We don't know that they were claiming anything. Any part of it could just have been a story, not meant to be taken literally.

The parts which more closely resemble reality may have been very poor/biased attempts to record the outcome of events, such as battles and such. But I expect the authors of the stupid magic shit parts just made it up, or copied it from other religious stories.

[Minimalist]

Read Bart Ehrman's "Jesus Interrupted."  Best source for the bullshit that makes up the fucking NT.

[Drich]

[The Grand Nudger]

They conceptualized the world they inhabited differently than we do.  Magic was very real to them.  Often enough, their explanations of magic sound decidedly like something that we're now much more familiar with - a fact not lost on us, but completely unknown to them.  

My favorite, unrelated to the bible, btw (though not entirely....lol), was the concept of miasma.  We'd call it social unrest.  To them, it was a cloud of tragedy that had a life of it's own, beyond the instigating event and difficult to purge, to hear the tales, attempts to purge it most often made it worse.  A rape happens in a small town (or doesn't, but is thought to have happened).  The residents begin to fear and distrust each other, old grudges are reopened as opportunity presents itself.  Someone gets lynched, the lynching causes the town to break out into rioting, everyone dies.  Someone happens across the remains of the town.....everyone is dead, but they attribute the events to a third party, a war is started to seek vengeance....the cloud moves on to new victims.

It's a cautionary tale, and the backdrop of much divine tragedy (and comedy)...but it's also an early attempt at social science, and it's accurate in important and non-trivial ways, even though it isn't accurate with regards to being a semi-sentient cloud of evil. Bit like accurately describing a whales existence and behaviors, but calling it a fish. Thing is, to the people who came up with miasma, whether it was a semi sentient cloud of evil was beside the point..the stories leave that as a vague "just so" - they were interested in why it happened, to whom, for what...where. They were interested in the behaviors of the whale, not so much whether or not it was a fish.

Today, believers are firmly stuck on whether or not their god really is a fish. That;s all thats left to them,. as it would be all that was left to believers in miasma as they faced modern social sciences.