According to Biblical scholars, even the authorship of the Old Testament books and the Gospels themselves is in doubt.
Torah
The first five books of the Bible (the Pentateuch) are traditionally attributed to Prophet Moses. However, there are many verses within these books which indicate that Prophet Moses could not possibly have written everything in them. For example, Deuteronomy 34.5-8 states:
“(5) So Moses the servant of the Lord died there in the land of Moab, according to the word of the Lord, (6) and he buried him in the valley of the land of Moab opposite Beth-peor; but no man knows the place of his burial to this day. (7) Moses was a hundred and twenty years old when he died; his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated. (8) And the people of Israel wept for Moses in the plains of Moab thirty days; then the days of weeping and mourning for Moses ended.”
Deuteronomy 34.5-8
It is quite obvious that someone else wrote these verses about Prophet Moses’ death.
Orthodox Jews claim that the Torah, the Jewish name for the first five books, was created 974 generations before the creation of the world. According to them, God dictated the Torah during the 40 days Moses was on Mount Sinai, in such a final and irrevocable form that it is sinful to claim that Moses wrote even one letter of it by himself.
In the appendix of the Revised Standard Version entitled “Books of the Bible”, the following is written concerning the authorship of over one third of the remaining books of the Old Testament:
| Books | Authors |
|---|---|
| Judges | Possibly Samuel |
| Ruth | Perhaps Samuel |
| First Samuel | Unknown |
| Second Samuel | Unknown |
| First Kings | Unknown |
| Second Kings | Unknown |
| First Chronicles | Unknown |
| Esther | Unknown |
| Job | Unknown |
| Ecclesiastes | Doubtful |
| Jonah | Unknown |
| Malachi | Nothing known |
Apocrypha
More than half of the world’s Christians are Roman Catholics. Their version of the Bible was published in 1582 from Jerome’s Latin Vulgate, and reproduced at Douay in 1609. The Old Testament of the RCV (Roman Catholic Version) contains seven more books than the King James Version recognized by the Protestant world. The extra books are referred to as the apocrypha (i.e., of doubtful authority) and were removed from the Bible in 1611 by Protestant Bible scholars.
