Who wrote the Bible? Short answer: roughly 40 different people, writing across about 1,500 years, in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. Some of those authors are named directly in the text. Many books, especially in the Old Testament, never name their author, and serious scholarship still argues over who wrote them and when.
That is not evasion. It is what happens when a library gets copied, edited, and assembled over a longer stretch of time than the United States has existed as a country. Tradition assigns specific names to specific books. Modern historical scholarship, working from language, style, and internal clues, often tells a more complicated story. Both are worth knowing.
Who wrote the Old Testament
Jewish and Christian tradition credits Moses with writing the first five books, Genesis through Deuteronomy, often called the Torah or the Pentateuch. That has been the standard teaching for most of the last two thousand years.
Most modern Bible scholars see it differently. The leading academic theory, usually called the documentary hypothesis, holds that these five books were woven together from several older sources, written by different hands over centuries, and edited into their current form sometime around or after the Babylonian exile in the 500s BC. Not every scholar accepts every detail of that theory, and plenty of readers still hold the traditional view. Both positions are live in serious study of the text today.
The rest of the Old Testament follows a similar pattern. Prophetic books like Isaiah and Jeremiah carry a named prophet’s voice, though scholars debate whether all 66 chapters attributed to Isaiah came from one eighth-century-BC prophet or were added to by later writers working in his name and tradition. The Psalms are credited in places to David, Asaph, and the sons of Korah, among others, with many left anonymous. Depending on which tradition’s Bible you are reading, the Old Testament runs 39 to 46 books. Catholic and Orthodox Bibles include several the Protestant canon leaves out, all written in roughly the same centuries.
Who wrote the New Testament
The New Testament is shorter and contested in a different way. Thirteen letters carry Paul’s name. Most scholars agree Paul personally wrote seven of them: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon. The other six, including Ephesians and the letters to Timothy and Titus, are genuinely disputed. Some scholars think Paul wrote them too, maybe with a scribe’s help. Others think students wrote them after his death, in his name and under his authority, a practice that was not unusual at the time. Tradition holds that Paul wrote all thirteen.
The four Gospels are anonymous in the actual text. None of them opens by naming its author. The names Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were attached by church tradition in the second century, decades after the books were written. Most historians place Mark first, written around AD 65 to 70, with Matthew and Luke following in the 80s or 90s, both apparently drawing on Mark and other material. John is usually dated last, sometime in the 90s. These are estimated ranges, not fixed dates, and the case for each rests on internal clues rather than a signature line.
What is actually agreed on
Strip away the disputes and a few things hold steady across nearly every camp of scholarship, secular and religious. The Bible was written by roughly 40 different authors. It was written across about 1,500 years, from some of the oldest material in the Old Testament to the last books of the New Testament. Most of the Old Testament is in Hebrew, with a few passages, mostly in Daniel and Ezra, written in Aramaic. The entire New Testament was written in Greek, the common language of the eastern Roman Empire at the time.
The oldest material likely reaches back to around 1200 to 1000 BC, the era of the judges and Israel’s early kings. The last Old Testament books took their final form somewhere in the 400s to 200s BC. Most New Testament letters and Gospels were written between about AD 50 and 100, though a few scholars date a couple of books, like 2 Peter, as late as the mid-100s.
None of these authors wrote in English. Every Bible on the shelf today is a translation, and translators make real choices about wording. If you want to see how those choices differ, we have written about how the NIV, ESV, and KJV compare, and which one works best as an easiest starting point for a new reader.
Frequently asked
Did one person write the Bible? No. It is a collection of separate books, written by different authors across many centuries, later gathered into one volume.
Is the Bible the oldest book in the world? No. Older written works survive, including the Epic of Gilgamesh and several Egyptian texts. Parts of the Old Testament are old, but the Bible is not the oldest surviving writing.
What is the difference between the Old and New Testament? The Old Testament covers Israel’s history and law before Jesus. The New Testament covers Jesus and the early church that followed him. We have laid out the full difference between the two elsewhere.
Where that leaves you
Knowing who wrote a book does not settle what it means, but it changes how you read it. A letter from Paul to a specific church wrestling with a specific problem reads differently once you know that is what it is. A psalm attributed to David reads differently than an anonymous one written centuries later for temple worship.
You do not need a settled answer on every disputed author to read the Bible seriously. You need to know the question is real, that careful people land in different places on it, and that the honest answer is usually “most scholars think” rather than a name carved in stone. A Bible handbook can walk through the case book by book, further than we can go here.