Review of "The Bible for Grown-Ups: A new look at the good book" by Simon Loveday

This arrived, un-ordered and without any note, in a delivery. Of course it was a present from my brother Leon, but I didn't realise that at first, so the mystery contributed to the appeal of the book.

It's not unfamiliar territory, for anyone who has read "Who Wrote The Bible" by Richard Elliott Friedman, but it's an easy read - and unlike that it goes into some of the textual history and background context of the New Testament, with which I was much less familiar. 

As I read it, though, I started to wonder...I'd often heard that we know such-and-such a book was written after another one, and I began to wonder how we know that. Loveday takes the known facts here for granted, and I'm still not entirely sure what the methodology for dating texts is. It's not like carbon dating, because we are not seeking to find how a particular example of a book is - we want to know how old the text itself is. Oddly, there are no Hebrew versions of the Torah older than the 10th century CE, though we know that the text is much older - the Septuagint is a Greek translation that was around in the second century BCE. The Wikipedia article on how texts are dated says "Dating the composition of the texts relies primarily on internal evidence, including direct references to historical events", which is not very enlightening.