I have changed my mind so often over the last decades, on so many topics, but if pressed to focus on just one instance, I would emphasize how I have come to see the formation of the Bible as part of a more complex process. ...That's a thought-provoking idea.Instead, I began to believe that a significant amount of the oldest transmission of literary texts actually happened not by visual or aural copying—the usual focus of text-criticism—but through scribes accessing older texts through their memory of those texts. These scribes were trained by using written texts in the past or perhaps periodically, but not actively as the basis for composition. This meant that some of the indicators upon which I and others depended for source-criticism were not as reliable as we had thought.
For more on the series, see here.
Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.
