Authorship of the Bible in the context of "Old Testament"

In Christianity, the term biblical authority refers to two complementary ideas:

• the extent to which one can regard the commandments and doctrines within the Old and New Testament scriptures as authoritative over humans' belief and conduct;
• the extent to which biblical propositions are accurate in matters of history and science.

The case for biblical authority stems from the claim that God has revealed himself in written form through human authors and that the information contained in canonical books is not of human origin.It entails, but is not exhausted by, questions raised by biblical inerrancy, biblical infallibility, biblical interpretation, biblical criticism, and biblical law in Christianity.

Biblical cosmology is the biblical writers' conception of the cosmos as an organised, structured entity, including its origin, order, meaning and destiny. The Bible was formed over many centuries, involving many authors, and reflects shifting patterns of religious belief; consequently, its cosmology is not always consistent. Nor do the biblical texts necessarily represent the beliefs of all Jews or Christians at the time they were put into writing: the majority of the texts making up the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament in particular represent the beliefs of only a small segment of the ancient Israelite community, the members of a late Judean religious tradition centered in Jerusalem and devoted to the exclusive worship of Yahweh.

The ancient Israelites envisaged the universe as a flat disc-shaped Earth floating on water, heaven above, underworld below. Humans inhabited Earth during life and the underworld after death; there was no way that mortals could enter heaven, and the underworld was morally neutral; only in Hellenistic times (after c. 330 BCE) did Jews begin to adopt the Greek idea that it would be a place of punishment for misdeeds, and that the righteous would enjoy an afterlife in heaven. In this period too the older three-level cosmology in large measure gave way to the Greek concept of a spherical Earth suspended in space at the center of a number of concentric heavens.

The Epistle of Barnabas (Ancient Greek: Βαρναβᾶ Ἐπιστολή) is an early Christian Greek epistle written between AD 70 and AD 135. The complete text is preserved in the 4th-century Codex Sinaiticus, where it appears at the end of the New Testament, following the Book of Revelation and before the Shepherd of Hermas. For several centuries, it was one of the "antilegomena" ("disputed") writings that some Christians looked at as sacred scripture, while others excluded them. Eusebius of Caesarea classified it with excluded texts. It is mentioned in a perhaps third-century list in the sixth-century Codex Claromontanus and in the later Stichometry of Nicephorus appended to the ninth-century Chronography of Nikephoros I of Constantinople. Some early Fathers of the Church ascribed it to the Barnabas mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles, but it is now generally attributed to an otherwise unknown early Christian teacher (though some scholars do defend the traditional attribution). It is distinct from the Gospel of Barnabas.

The central message of the Epistle of Barnabas is that the writings comprising the Hebrew Bible—what would become the Old Testament of the Christian Bible—were, from even their times of authorship, written for use by Christians rather than the Israelites and, by extension, the Jews. According to the epistle, the Jews had misinterpreted their own law (i.e., halakha) by applying it literally; the true meaning was to be found in its symbolic prophecies foreshadowing the coming of Jesus of Nazareth, whom Christians believe to be the messiah. Furthermore, the author posits that the Jews broke their covenant from the very beginning and were misled by an evil angel. After explaining its Christian interpretations of the Jewish scriptures, the epistle concludes by discussing the "Two Ways", also seen in the Didache: a "Way of Light" and a "Way of Darkness".