[Alawen Everywhere]

No, I'm not particularly mad at all. I'm kind of tired and I have a lot of homework to do this weekend, though; thanks for asking.

If you knew anything about science and logic, you'd realize that it's virtually impossibly to prove a negative. The only way to do something like that is to account for every possible case. You could prove, for example, that none of the mice in a small population are infected with a particular disease by testing all of them. You could not prove, though, that there are no unicorns current living or that flying dragons never existed.

Since you went there, there's absolutely no concrete evidence that a man named Jesus was born in Bethlehem 2100 years ago and was crucified about three decades later. What is known is that the name "Jesus" is completely inconsistent with both the Hebrew and Aramaic languages. If there was an actual Jesus, his name was probably "Yeshua."

I wasn't the one talking about the Bible, but as it happens I'm quite familiar with it. I grew up Catholic, went to Catholic schools and was both an altar boy and a lector at mass. I didn't learn much about the Bible from those things, but I began to question my religion when I realized that God never answered my prayers. I started to wonder if I was doing something wrong. Then I started to wonder why other people seemed to truly and deeply believe in God. This led me on a decades-long search that culminated with my discovery of the proto Indo-European religion theory, which is primarily based on linguistic science.

So here are the answers to your questions, as near as I've discovered:

Who wrote the Bible? This is a complex question. The easy, Christian answer is that the Holy Spirit wrote the Bible. The Old Testament, of course, is borrowed almost completely from Judaism and the most widely accepted expert on those writings was a German named Martin Noth.

Noth hypothesized that the first five books of the Bible, the Books of Law, came from four sources (either individuals scribes or close groups of scribes) whom he designates J, E, D and P. He also attributes some of the books of prophets (Nevi'im in the Tanakh) to source D. The other books of prophets span about five hundred years, beginning around the sixth century BCE.

Toward the end of that time, we have the books which you may or may not be including, depending on your particular faith. Catholics still include the apocrypha, but those books are excluded from King James versions. The Dead Sea Scrolls included some of the books of the old testament. There are also additional books recognized by the Greek, Russian and Eastern Orthodox churches. The Anglican church also includes a few of those books.

It should be noted that Christian Bibles follow the organization of the Septuagint, a Greek translation, rather than the organization of the Hebrew Bible, although most western religions have re-translated from the Hebrew and Aramaic texts.

Now we get to the New Testament, where there are for more recognized scholars. It is generally accepted that the commonality between Matthew, Mark and Luke points to a common source, which has been dubbed document Q. None of them even purport to be eye-witness accounts and they were all likely written some time between 70 and 100. There's a lot of disagreement about whether or not the disciple John wrote the gospel of John but it is also believed to have been written during the same period.

Finally, we hit an actual known writer, Saint Paul, where I happen to live! Paul is credited with most of the letters, though it is speculated that he dictated the letters to a scribe rather than penning them in his own hand.

The final epistles and Revelations are attributed to a variety of sources. I was taught as a child that Revelations was written by John the apostle, but modern theory disagrees. I don't know if that was the common theory at that time or not.

How many years did it take to compile the Bible? I suppose this depends when you want to start counting. The oldest actual evidence available dates to the sixth or seventh century BCE, but multiple scholars theorize aural or lost sources dating back to about the twelfth century BCE. The King James edits were implemented in the early seventeenth century, so I suppose if I were to try to come up with a number, it would be about 2300 years.

Is the Bible the only Historical document to give accounts of the life of Jesus? No. There are the Gnostic texts and many other variations of gospels, acts, epistles and other scrolls in various states of completeness and provenance. However, none of the books of the Bible nor the additional texts are generally accepted by scholars as first person accounts dating to the actual life of Jesus. There are no official records, artifacts, sites or anything else which scientifically document the birth, life, or death of Jesus. The closest items are the Shroud of Turin, which has no record prior to the fourteenth century, and the Volto Santo, which happens to not actually exist.

Do I get extra credit for this paper?