Rather than arguing for particular authors for each book of the Bible, I think it’s interesting to present three contrasting views: 1.)What the Bible says about itself, 2.) the so-called “traditional” view and 3.)the contemporary critical view. While it is literally impossible to obtain unanimity in either of the second two categories, I’m going to do my best to present a chart showing each biblical book with the author proposed by each of the 3 views.

The Bible doesn’t talk about itself a whole lot, but I’ll assume that if a book is named after somebody or explicitly says it was written by a certain person, then that’s the Bible’s own take on the issue. I’ll be updating the list over the next few weeks, but I think it will make for a fascinating comparison. (I’ll keep the updates in this post.) If I make any mistakes, please comment to let me know and I’ll be happy to correct the oversight.

It is important to remember that when I list any of the three views as calling a certain person an “author” that doesn’t mean that their hand was the last to shape the book. Especially in the case of the Wisdom and Prophetic literature, many editors and compilers were included in the process of codification of the texts. But that does not make the editors the authors of the books. The editors did not write the books, but organized them or inserted headings or collected works together.

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td>Johannine School