Has anyone else here heard of the theory that many of the characters, events, and themes depicted in the Bible were taken from earlier religious texts? After researching this for some time, I find it very interesting how many things in the Bible also appear in earlier writings. According to this site,
http://exposingchristianity.org/ works preceding Christianity by centuries contain references and themes quite similar to the ones depicted in the Bible. Has anyone else looked into this theory?
If you are constantly looking for flaws in the Bible's narrative, you will find them, based on the way others frame in their questioning.
What most people forget is that the Bible book of Genesis was not written until about 2,500 years after those early events took place. So the early chapters of Genesis, were written well after the pre and post flood events.
It is said that Moses may have taken some of his information from previous accounts that may have been written by Noah, (as God favors this method of information transmission) outlining the pre-flood story as well as what happened at the Tower of Babel and afterwards. (Genesis 11:1-9)
Whatever the method, God's spirit directed the writing of these events for our benefit. Just because the Bible accounts were not written till later, doesn't mean that the scattering of the post-flood rebels in Nimrod's time didn't take all their stories with them. Others in ancient cultures could have written them down and they would have existed in the times before Moses committed his account to writing. Legends have a habit of being embellished, but Moses' account is free from such embellishments because it was written under inspiration from God. Almost every culture has a "flood" story.
So you see, it wasn't that the earlier accounts were copied by Moses, but that those accounts were simply written and embellished a long time before Moses wrote them in what is now our Bible.