After a year of reading and looking, I arrived at the place of conceding that scholarly consensus about the authorship of the Bible gives a pretty low score to the traditional ascriptions. The best information today indicates that many books were not written by who we thought or when.
The ironic and painful part of this is realizing that the answer could have been found very quickly and easily – by simply reading the Wikipedia entry on authorship of the Bible. Heavily annotated, the basic viewpoint there comports with the net information that I’ve seen. That’s sort of sad. If I wanted to know the skinny on the Book of Mormon or the Koran, the first place I would go would be Wikipedia. It was one of the last places I went on Biblical texts. We are very accustomed to learning about our religion from inside our religion.
Authorship: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorship_of_the_Bible
The Exodus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_exodus
The Flood: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_geology
Jericho Brisance 
I would even add that not only do we learn about our religion from our religion. But we also learn about our religion (or non-religion) from our religion.
Meaning that those who belong to christianity have a tendency to view all other religions only from what they have been taught by those in christianity. That generally christains really don’t have any idea about other religions, because every thing they know about other religions, from their christian friends.
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Absolutely right. The insularity is one of the things that I really object to. As a recently deconverted Christian, I realize that I never knew anything about any other religions. We parrot, and that’s about it far too much of the time.
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me too, for me, it wasn’t just the fact I knew little of other religions, but I also knew very little of science, because once I became a christian, all the information I knew about science then from that moment came from the church…so I was told things like: there are no transitional fossils, evolution is just a theory, stem cell research is evil, big bang is evidence of god;
little did I know that theses things all were just half truth, retold from one christian to another.
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Just so, couldn’t agree more. I managed to get two degrees in the sciences, yet remained insulated. My bachelors was from an evangelical university, however, which helps explain the insularity. My masters was from a secular school, but by that point all the courses are specialized your sub-discipline. I continued, like you it sounds, to read Christian books on science, on intelligent design, etc. Read some secular books on cosmology and became convinced of the big bang, but all human origins stuff remained very neatly compartmentalized.
Not to mention textual or historical criticism, LOL.
Its been a big piece of humble pie this year. If I’m honest – the whole pie.
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