Investigative Biblical Study

For thousands of years, the Bible was considered the infallible word of God. Even among certain modern, fundamentalist churches, this attitude is still extant. However, thinking people might be able to accept the existence of God on a leap of faith, but not the infallible nature of any book. People write books, and people are fallible. The early investigators found themselves censured or worse for their efforts to point out obvious contradictions in the Bible. The resistance to any critical analysis of the Bible persisted until the seventeenth century.

By the mid-twentieth century, the infallibility of the Bible is abandoned by all major Jewish and Christian religions. Obvious contradictions, even within a single story, indicate that more than one person had written the Bible. This has never been a big question regarding the New Testament, only the Old Testament. In the New Testament, the multiple writers...