Wisdom-Trek / Creating a Legacy
Welcome to Day 1246 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.
I am Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom
Mastering the Bible - Inspiration Timeline - Worldview Wednesday


Wisdom - the final frontier to true knowledge. Welcome to Wisdom-Trek where our mission is to create a legacy of wisdom, to seek out discernment and insights, and to boldly grow where few have chosen to grow before.

Hello, my friend, I am Guthrie Chamberlain, your captain on our journey to increase wisdom and create a living legacy. Thank you for joining us today as we explore wisdom on our 2nd millennium of podcasts. This is Day 1246 of our trek, and it is Worldview Wednesday. Creating a Biblical worldview is important to have a proper perspective on today’s current events.

To establish a Biblical Worldview, you must also have a proper understanding of God and His Word. Our focus for the next several months on Worldview Wednesday is Mastering the Bible, through a series of brief insights. These insights are extracted from a book of the same title from one of today’s most prominent Hebrew Scholars, Dr. Micheal S. Heiser. This book is a collection of insights designed to help you understand the Bible better. When we let the Bible be what it is, we can understand it as the original readers did and as its writers intended. Each week we will explore two insights.
Mastering The Bible – Inspiration Timeline
Insight Nine: The Setting of a Biblical Story Wasn’t Necessarily the Time Which It Was Written


Most of us who read the Bible with regularity consider its contents factually true. Because that’s the case, many readers are prone to assume that what they're reading was written at the same time as the events described, or at least, very close to the time of those events. Sometimes that assumption isn’t far from reality, but in many instances, that isn’t the case.

For example, most scholars would place the earliest of the four Gospels within a few decades of Jesus’s life. The reason for that gap in time is clear from a close reading of the New Testament. The apostles thought that the Lord's bodily return to rule and reign was imminent (Romans 13:11; 1 Peter 4:7; James 5:8; Hebrews 10:25-27). When it became apparent that Jesus might not return in their lifetimes, there was a sense of urgency to put what they had experienced and heard during their time with Jesus into writing for posterity.

As it turned out, the entirety of the New Testament was written by roughly AD 100, just over a half-century after the death and resurrection of Jesus. In comparison to other historical works of the ancient world, that’s a short span of time. According to the chronology that can be gleaned from the book of Acts, the epistles were written within a few months or years of Paul’s ministry in the congregations to which they were written.

When it comes to the Old Testament, things are different. Even if we presume Moses recorded the lives of the patriarchs in Genesis, he would have been writing several centuries after the fact. Many Old Testament books have unknown authors, which makes it difficult to align their events and their authorship. As we’ll see in later insights, the books that detail Israel’s story from the exodus to the monarchy (e.g., Exodus, Deuteronomy, and Joshua through 2 Kings) contain evidence that they were written several centuries after the events they describe.



The gaps between the event and its recording are no reason to assume inaccuracy. External sources and disciplines such as archaeology show that the contents of these books are coherent and in concert with the times they portray. Ancient societies had strong oral historical traditions. Present-day historians who study oral cultures tell us that the people of these cultures can memor...