Wesley Huff

So there's a comparison with the source material for someone like Jesus, even though we really shouldn't have anything about him.

Because he's kind of a nobody from nowhere in terms of the Roman Empire and the grand scheme of things.

But we have a phenomenal amount of source information for his life.

How do you square the circle here?

So there are a few things going on.

First, we live in a hyper-literate culture.

We are writing everything down.

The ancient world was far less of a literate culture.

They were an oral culture.

These stories would have been passed in large groups at time frames, especially if we're talking about the biographical material of Jesus is actually written in a closer time frame than the majority of anyone else.

What was that gap?

It's about 40 to 60 years.

Yeah.

So the Bible is, though we now have it in one book, is 66 books written over a period of about 1600 years on three different continents by close to 40 different authors in three different languages.

Yeah, so the Old Testament is the Hebrew Scriptures.

So that's the Scriptures of the Jewish people.

So that is, you know, it starts in what's referred to as the Torah, which are the first five books or the five books of Moses.

And then that goes in a timeframe all the way up to the period of the Persians.

So the ancient Jewish people had, and remember, all of these books, they would have circulated as independent writings.

Okay.