Nehemiah

I've finished my paper on the book of Nehemiah. It was an immense relief to submit it and be done! Now, of course, I have to start on the next one.

The Nehemiah paper looked at issues of authorship, date, canonicity, etc. I was talking to a couple of friends when I was finishing it up and mentioned that I had a point in the essay that I hadn't backed up and I was trying to find the reference. It wasn't a major point but it did involve the question of authorship. One of them asked a very logical question: "Does it matter if we know who wrote Nehemiah?"

No, not really. Nehemiah is not ususally a "make it or break it" point for a person's faith. You don't hear salvation stories that include "Well, I was reading Nehemiah...."

But...if I was going to undermine Christianity, to convince people that there is no God and that the Bible isn't true, I wouldn't start with the big stuff; I wouldn't ask them to prove that God exists. Nope, I would start off small, maybe with a book like Nehemiah, one that seems less important.

It goes like this: well, we really don't know who wrote Nehemiah; it was probably written long after Nehemiah died; historical sources (i.e. non-biblical) show that whoever wrote it got history wrong (side note: when you hear this, check the sources yourself and see how old they are; more recent archeological findings actually prove the truth of biblical stories, etc, that were once deemed hisorically inaccurate or impossible); therefore you can't really trust this part of the Bible......and it slips doubt into the reliability of this part of the Bible which eventually leads to doubting the Bible as a whole....and the job is done.

And so Nehemiah may become a "make it or break it" point after all.