The Queue: Lenten Special

The problems with Who Wrote the Bible? are legion. First, the title is misleading, because the book is not about who wrote the Bible, i.e., who wrote the Old Testament & the New Testament, nor even who wrote the Hebrew Bible; Who Wrote the Bible? is concerned solely with who wrote the Torah, also known as the Pentateuch or the "Five Books of Moses." Only is the Samaritan faith are those five books the whole of the "Bible." Who wrote the Torah is a fascinating question, eminently worthy of investigation, but it is not nearly the same as who wrote the Bible.

Second, Who Wrote the Bible? (copyright 1987) champions the "documentary hypothesis" of the Pentateuch's composition. There is nothing inherently wrong with a book just because it was written in the 1980s, but I mention the date of publication because of a paragraph in The Bible Is a Catholic Book critiquing the documentary hypothesis:

A theory known as the Documentary Hypothesis became popular in the nineteenth & twentieth centuries. According to his the theory, the Pentateuch is based on four documents (the Yahwist, Elohist, Priestly, & Deuteronomistic sources) that were written between the tenth & sixth centuries B.C. & later combined & published, perhaps around the fifth century B.C. In the last few decades, the Documentary Hypothesis has come under increasing criticism from both conservative & liberal scholars, & at present there is no consensus.

"The last few decades" as in the thirty-plus years since 1987. So, what Dr. Friedman asserts as the settled scholarly consensus is anything but in the year 2020.

Wikipedia-link Documentary Hypothesis & Wikipedia-link Composition of the Torah

Third, Who Wrote the Bible? is written from an atheistic perspective. It is not the Lord God who designated Saul as the first king of Israel, but the judge Samuel, acting on his own authority. This is in direct contravention of the Biblical texts. Did human authors write the books of the Bible? Of course they did! The Bible was not handed to us on golden plates as the L.D.S. Church claims the Book of Mormon was. Yes, God directly wrote on the first set of tablets containing the Ten Commandments, the tablets that Moses smashed, but it was Moses who carved the words into the second set of tablets. But God's inspiration of the sacred authors plays no part in Who Wrote the Bible?, which presumes a purely human authorship. This is then, at the very best, only an extremely partial answer to the question of who wrote the Bible, since it ignores the principle Author. The kind of scholarship that prima facie excludes the Divine from the question of biblical authorship is inherently biased—narrow-minded at best, if not outright bigoted—& thus not to be trusted.

Recently
Matthew Kelly, Rediscover the Saints: Twenty-five Questions That Will Change Your Life
Pope Francis, Apostolic Exhortation Christus Vivit! (Christ Is Alive!)
Richard Elliott Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? ***abandoned***

Currently
Jimmy Akin, The Bible Is a Catholic Book

Devotionally
Theresa Aletheia Noble, F.S.P., Remember Your Death: Memento Mori Lenten Devotional
Edward Sri, No Greater Love: A Biblical Walk through Christ's Passion

Presently
Flannery O'Connor, Flannery O'Connor Collection (Word on Fire Classics)
Fulton J. Sheen, Life of Christ (Word on Fire Classics)
Dom Jean-Baptiste Chautard, Spiritual Handbook for Catholic Evangelists: How to Win Souls without Losing Your Own