The Bible is the most published book in the history of the world. The 1995 World Annual Report of the United Bible Societies tells us that they printed the whole Bible in 2,123 different languages and dialects. The total quantity distributed that one year alone was 17,751,000 complete Bibles and another 11,255,000 New Testaments making a total of 29,006,000 New Testaments.

Most of the Old Testament was written over 2,000 years ago. It occupies approximately three quarters of the Christian Bible. There are thirty nine books of various lengths by different authors in the Old Testament- They record a large part of the Jewish sacred texts which set out the religious and ceremonial laws and observances demanded by their prophets. It contains a great deal of the history, traditions and myths of the Jewish people who are also called Hebrews and Israelites. The books were written over some hundreds of years. We do not know the names of most of the authors. The first five books of the Bible were not generally considered by the Jewish nation as divine commandments until 444 B.C. (see Nehemiah chapters 8-9). Many Biblical scholars believe that the books of the Old Testament were first written or collated during the second exile of the Jews in Babylon in 586 to 538 B.C.

My Encyclopaedia Britannica states, "It is certain that before the second century A.D. the various manuscripts of the Old Testament differed very materially from one another and that the official Hebrew text was probably fixed in the second century A.D. Thereafter it was scrupulously preserved."

Most of the larger books and some of the shorter were not completed by a single author but by several. They were gradually expanded through additions and alterations by a succession of persons. Most of the Old Testament was compiled in its present form and finally given authority by a council of Jewish Rabbis in the year 90 A.D. None of the Bible writings in their present form is older than the eighth century B.C. There are no original manuscripts of Abraham, Moses, King David or the early Hebrew prophets. Professor Thompson from Copenhagen University in his book "The Early History of the Israelite People" assures us that the first ten books of the Old Testament are based on fiction and were written 500 to 1,500 years after the events they purport to describe- He based his statement on 15 years study of archaeological evidence. This sounds very reasonable to me.

Writing was invented about 3,000 B.C. It developed painfully slowly from pictograms to phraseograms to syllabagrams and finally to an alphabet by the Greeks. It would be many years before writing was used for the recording of history. Herodotus 480-424 B.C. is regarded as the father of historians.

It is evident that when the Jews were held captive in Babylon, 586 to 538 B.C., the cultural centre of the world at that time, they gathered together and recorded their own traditions and myths and borrowed some local ones.

The main difference between the Israelites and other nations was that about the tenth century B.C. they had accepted monotheism as a tenet of the national religion. That also was not an original idea. Monotheism was promoted, by the Egyptian Pharaoh Amenhotep around 1360 B.C. The nation of Israel took up the idea many years later. It would have been surprising if the Jews had not been influenced by the surrounding religions or incorporated some of the myths and beliefs into their own written traditions. What better way to prevent their nation being absorbed into other races than to record their traditional history, myths and legends. Thereby they would emphasise their national uniqueness and religious beliefs by reaffirming faith in Yahweh their own special tribal god. The Hebrew religion did not grow out of a vacuum. The Jewish religion and their nationhood have always been inseparably linked.

All the first believers in Jesus were devout orthodox Jews who continued to worship in the temple and synagogues. The early Christian group could be considered to be a separate sect of the Jews as indeed the Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes were. They all believed their scriptures which promised a Messiah who was to come to rescue the nation from their enemies. Those promises and the expectation of the people was for a political leader who would, with the help of their God, bring about deliverance from their