The sources of the Bible

Thus, my new adventure that I begin at the age of 83 is to figure out what are the sources of the Bible, what you might call a bibliography of the Bible or the unwritten footnotes to the Bible.  Obviously, humans wrote it.  Where did they get their information?  What are the main sources of this “Word of God”.  Obviously, God would be the number one source.  “God says this” or “Jesus said” indicates a source.  But there is a lot of information in the Bible that may not have come directly from God.  In fact, the New Testament used a lot of quotations from the Old Testament.  Thus, one of the sources for the New Testament were various phrases, verses, and chapters from the Old Testament.  There are many ways to study the Bible, since it is a great book of literature, one of the most studied books of all time.  What I am going to do now for the next few years is study the Bible in what is called “source criticism”, an attempt to trace the oral and written traditions before they were written down in the various biblical books.  That is why I call this a bibliography of the Bible.  Other than God, where else did they get their stories, ideas, and explanations from?  The Bible is a divine-human experience, a joint effort.  Where are the human traces more evident than the divine elements.  In fact, the biblical books sometimes cite an oral or written work and say where it is from.  They had their own way of footnoting the Bible.  I will try to trace the human or divine roots of many of the biblical comments.  Do you think that I will live long enough to complete this project?

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